Hanna Reitsch - Aviation Pioneer

[old man emu]

Hanna Reitsch was a world famous aviation pioneer for a period of 45 years in the mid-20th Century.

 

She should be remembered as a member of the same group as Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, Elsie MacGill, world's first female aircraft designer, known as "Queen of the Hurricanes", Melitta Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, aeronautical engineer who became a Luftwaffe test pilot during WWII, and many more. Hanna's contribution to aviation is often overlooked because her early days and exploits were under the Swastika.

 

Initially she was involved in the development of gliders, being employed at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (German for '"German Research Institute for Sailplane Flight" or "German Institute for Glider Research"'). The DFS was involved in producing training sailplanes for the Hitler Youth and Luftwaffe, as well as conducting research into advanced technologies such as flying wings and rocket propulsion. DFS-produced aircraft include the DFS 230 transport glider (1600+ produced), the German counterpart to the British Airspeed Horsa glider, and the DFS 194, similar to the famous Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter. 

 

Her role was that of test pilot. She was a well-educated woman who had been studying medicine before being asked to join the DFS due to her prowess as a glider pilot. An important contribution that she made to gliding was the testing of  Hans Jacobs' dive brakes for gliders. That brought her to the attention of Ernst Udet who, in 1937, gave Reitsch the honorary title of Flugkapitän, the name given to the captain of an airliner.

 

From 1937 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, she was involved in the testing of a wide variety of powered and unpowered aircraft of a military nature. In the context of the times, that is not unusual. The Allied countries simply didn't let woman get involved in test flying of prototypes. Reitsch was a test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber and Dornier Do 17 light/fast bomber projects, for which she received the Iron Cross, Second Class, from Hitler on 28 March 1941. 

 

The award coming in the glory days of the Third Reich lead to an acquantainship with Hitler who was happy to have her in his social circle. Although accepting the Nazi philosophy, she was never engaged in the criminal side of the Nazi world. Her flying skill, desire for publicity, and photogenic qualities made her a star of Nazi propaganda. Physically she was petite in stature, very slender with blonde hair, blue eyes and a "ready smile". She appeared in Nazi propaganda throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, as many celebrity women on the Allied side did for their countries.

 

During the last days of the war, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as head of the Luftwaffe and appointed Reitsch's lover, von Greim, to replace him. Von Greim and Reitsch flew from Gatow Airport into embattled Berlin to meet Hitler in the Führerbunker, landing a Fi 156 Storch on an improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate.

Hitler gave Reitsch two capsules of poison for herself and von Greim. Having received his order from Hitler. during the evening of 28 April, Reitsch flew von Greim out of Berlin in an Arado Ar 96 from the same improvised airstrip. This was the last plane out of Berlin.

 

From the late 1940s, Reitsch once again was involved in gliding throughout the world. During this time she racked up an impressive list of awards and records. From 1962 to 64 she lived in Ghana at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, setting up the first black African national gliding school, working closely with the government and the armed forces. The West German government supported her as technical adviser. The project was evidently of great importance to Nkrumah and has been interpreted as part of a "modernist" development ideology.

 

Despite her close association and adoption of the Nazi philosophy during her twenties and thirties, Reitsch's attitudes to race underwent a change. "Earlier in my life, it would never have occurred to me to treat a black person as a friend or partner ..." She now experienced guilt at her earlier "presumptuousness and arrogance". She became close to Nkrumah. In Ghana, some Africans were disturbed by the prominence of a person with Reitsch's past, but Shirley Graham Du Bois, a noted African-American writer who had emigrated to Ghana and was friendly towards Reitsch, agreed with Nkrumah that Reitsch was extremely naive politically. In an interview late in her life she said, "I asked Herman Goering one day, "What is this I am hearing that Germany is killing Jews?" Goering responded angrily, 'A totally outrageous lie made up by the British and American press. It will be used as a rope to hang us someday if we lose the war.' Contemporary Ghanaian press reports seem to show a lack of interest in her past political life.

 

Like many of her generation, in later life she lamented the defeat of Germany, saying, "And what have we now in Germany? A country of bankers and car-makers. Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders. I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me. But today in all of Germany you can't find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power ... Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don't explain the real guilt we share – that we lost.

 

Hanna Reitsch passed away at the age of 67, on 24 August 1979 in Frankfurt apparently from a heart attack. Former British test pilot and Royal Navy officer Eric Brown said he received a letter from Reitsch in early August 1979 in which she said, "It began in the bunker, there it shall end." Within weeks she was dead. Brown speculated that Reitsch had taken the cyanide capsule Hitler had given her in the bunker, and that she had taken it as part of a suicide pact with her wartime lover, Greim. No autopsy was performed, or at least no such report is available