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Hanna Reitsch (29 March 1912 – 24 August 1979) was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight-tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler before his death in the Führerbunker in late April 1945. Following her capture, she provided information about her departure from Berlin and denied that she might have helped Hitler escape.
Reitsch set more than 40 flight altitude records and women's endurance records in gliding and unpowered flight, before and after World War II. In the 1960s, she was sponsored by the West German foreign office as a technical adviser in Ghana and elsewhere, and founded a gliding school in Ghana, where she worked for Kwame Nkrumah.
In June 1934, Reitsch became a member of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (DFS) and became a test pilot in 1935. Reitsch enrolled in the Civil Airways Training School in Szczecin, where she flew a twin-engine on a cross country flight and aerobatics in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44. In 1937, Ernst Udet gave Reitsch the honorary title of Flugkapitän after she had successfully tested Hans Jacobs's divebrakes for gliders. At the DFS she test-flew transport and troop-carrying gliders, including the DFS 230 that was used at the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael.
Her flying skill, desire for publicity, and photogenic qualities made her a star of Nazi propaganda. Physically she was petite and very slender, with blonde hair, blue eyes and a "ready smile". She appeared in Nazi propaganda throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Reitsch was the first female helicopter pilot and one of the few pilots to fly the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the first fully controllable helicopter, for which she received the Military Flying Medal. In 1938, during the three weeks of the International Automobile Exhibition in Berlin, she made daily flights of the Fa 61 helicopter inside the Deutschlandhalle.
In September 1938, Reitsch flew the DFS Habicht in the Cleveland National Air Races.
Reitsch was a test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 italic=unset dive bomber and Dornier Do 17 light bomber projects, for which she received the Iron Cross, Second Class, from Hitler on 28 March 1941. Reitsch was asked to fly many of Germany's latest designs, among them the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 italic=unset in 1942. And as such, she became the first and only woman in the world to fly a rocket plane. A crash landing on her fifth Me 163 flight badly injured Reitsch; she spent five months in a hospital recovering. Reitsch received the Iron Cross First Class following the accident, one of only three women to do so.
She was also the only woman to have flown the world's biggest glider, the Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant (Giant). She was instrumental in having a second pilot added to the Me 321. She was also the first woman in the world to fly a jet fighter (Me 262), and the only woman in the world to have flown a cruise missile (Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg). She was also likely to have been the first woman to fly a dive bomber (Ju 87).
In February 1943 after news of the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, she accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to visit the Eastern Front. She spent three weeks visiting Luftwaffe units, flying a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch.
In her autobiography Fliegen, mein Leben, Reitsch recalled that after two initial crashes with the Fi 103R she and Heinz Kensche took over tests of the prototype Fi 103R. She made several successful test flights before training the instructors. "Though an average pilot could fly the V1 without difficulty once it was in the air, to land it called for exceptional skill, in that it had a very high landing speed and, moreover, in training it was the glider model, without engine, that was usually employed."
In October 1944, Reitsch claimed she was shown a booklet by Peter Riedel which he had obtained while in the German Embassy in Stockholm, concerning the gas chambers. She further claimed that while believing it to be enemy propaganda, she agreed to inform Heinrich Himmler about it. When she did, Himmler is said to have asked whether she believed it, and she replied, "No, of course not. But you must do something to counter it. You can't let them shoulder this onto Germany." Himmler replied, "You are right."
The pair arrived in the Führerbunker on the evening of 26 April, when Red Army troops were already in central Berlin. Hitler thanked von Greim for coming in light of Göring's dismissal. Late that night, the Reich Chancellery received the first heavy Soviet barrage. As arranged with Rechlin a day before, on 27 April a Ju 52 landed on the makeshift runway for Reitsch and von Greim, but having learned of Göring's betrayal, they decided to stay in a gesture of loyalty. Later on 27 April, Hitler gave Reitsch two capsules of poison for herself and von Greim, which she accepted. Hitler suggested that General Walther Wenck's 12th Army could still save them and spent the next two days contemplating this. On 29 April, a telegram reported that Himmler had made unauthorised contact with the western Allies regarding surrender terms. Shortly after midnight on 30 April, Hitler ordered Reitsch and von Greim to fly out of Berlin in an Arado Ar 96 that had arrived on 28 April, asserting that they could get Wenck to save Berlin. Von Greim was ordered to command the Luftwaffe to attack the Soviet forces that had just reached Potsdamer Platz and to make sure Himmler was punished for his treachery.
Reitsch reputedly stated during her 1945 interrogation that she left Berlin early on 30 April, less than 12 hours before Hitler's suicide. The interrogation report claims that the plane took off from the Tiergarten's makeshift runway under heavy Soviet fire; it was spotted by searchlights and attacked by shells, but only shrapnel hit the plane. In his 1947 book, Hugh Trevor-Roper dated Reitsch's escape to the early hours of 29 April. Reitsch publicly feuded with the author, stating, "Throughout the book, like a red line, runs an eyewitness report by Hanna Reitsch. I never said it. I never wrote it. I never signed the. It was something they invented. Hitler died with total dignity." Moreover, in her 1951 autobiography, Reitsch claims that although it was fairly clear and moonlit, her plane took off from the Tiergarten on 29 April without detection and she saw only "spasmodic" tracer fire from the Soviets before finding a cloud to hide behind (about a mile away). Although Reitsch claimed to her interrogators that there was no plane in the area that Hitler could have used to escape, in the 1970s she told American journalist James P. O'Donnell that after takeoff, she saw a pilot "obviously waiting for somebody" next to a Ju 52 in the area.
After leaving Berlin, Reitsch and von Greim landed in Rechlin, then flew in a Bücker 181 to Plön, where they heard the German announcement of Hitler's death on the night of 1 May (erroneously dated to 30 April in Reitsch's book) and met with officials of the new government. In an effort to continue engaging the Soviets, Reitsch and von Greim flew to Graz, Austria, on 7 May and to Zell am See two days later, by which time Germany had formally surrendered. Reitsch's family had evacuated from Silesia before the Soviet troops arrived and taken refuge in Salzburg; on the night of 3 May 1945, after hearing a rumour that all refugees were to be taken back to their original homes in the Soviet occupation zone, Reitsch's father shot and killed her mother, her sister, her sister's three children, and himself. Von Greim, after being captured by the Allies, killed himself on 24 May 1945.
On 8 October 1945, Reitsch was captured in the United States occupation zone of Germany and subsequently interrogated by U.S. military intelligence officers. When asked about being ordered to leave the Führerbunker, Reitsch stated: "It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer's side." She asserted that "We should all kneel down in reverence and prayer before the altar of the Fatherland," referring to the bunker. After interrogators suggested that Hitler had been seen alive (in Tyrol, Austria, near where she had flown), Reitsch dismissed assertions of his survival and her possible complicity, stating, "He had no reason to live and the tragedy was that he knew it ... perhaps better than anyone else did."
Reitsch claimed that Hitler's initial motivation was "how to give his people a life free from economic insufficiencies and social maladjustments", but gambled with the lives of people: "the first great wrong, his first great failure". She criticised his incompetence as a leader (e.g. his selection of the wrong persons for office) and stated that Hitler had transformed ideologically, becoming a Despotism. Reitsch stated repeatedly that never again must an individual have so much control over any country. Reitsch's chief interrogator noted that she seemed to be a reliable witness, having struggled with thoughts of suicide since the war but more recently becoming interested in advocating for democracy. She was held for 18 months.
During the mid-1950s, Reitsch was interviewed on film and talked about her wartime flight tests of the Fa 61, Me 262 and Me 163.
In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Reitsch, who spoke fluent English, to start a gliding centre; she flew with him over New Delhi. In 1961, she accepted U.S. President John F. Kennedy's invitation to the White House.
From 1962 to 1966, she lived in Ghana. The then Ghanaian President, Kwame Nkrumah invited Reitsch to Ghana after reading of her work in India. At Afienya she founded 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 school was commanded by J. E. S. de Graft-Hayford, with gliders such as the double-seated Schleicher K7, Slingsby T.21 and a Bergfalke, along with a single-seated Schleicher K 8. She gained the FAI Diamond Badge in 1970. The project was evidently of great importance to Nkrumah and has been interpreted as part of a "modernist" development ideology.
Reitsch's attitudes to race underwent a change. She stated that "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. The details of their relationship are now unclear due to the destruction of documents, but some surviving letters are intimate in tone.
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. Contemporary Ghanaian press reports seem to show a lack of interest in her past.
Throughout the 1970s, Reitsch broke gliding records in many categories, including the "Women's Out and Return World Record" twice, once in 1976 () and again, in 1979 (), flying along the Appalachian Ridges in the U.S. During this time, she also finished first in the women's section of the first world helicopter championships.wwiihistorymagazine.com, Profiles , May 2005, retrieved 6 May 2008
In the same interview, she is quoted as saying,
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 Greim.Reitsch mentions Hitler giving them the capsules in her autobiography The Sky My Kingdom (1991 English-language edition), p.211. There is no record of an autopsy.
Reitsch has been portrayed by the following actresses in film and television productions:
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