On April 28th, 1945, as Soviet shells rained down on the center of Berlin, a small Arado trainer climbed into the burning sky from an improvised runway in the Tiergarten. At the controls sat Hanna Reitsch, the most celebrated pilot in the Third Reich, flying her wounded commander out of the doomed capital. Hours earlier, Adolf Hitler had pressed a cyanide capsule into her hand. Three days before, she had flown into that collapsing city against all odds.
The journey had nearly killed her. By the spring of 1945, she had spent more than a decade risking her life for Germany in the air. Born in 1912 in Silesia to an ophthalmologist who wanted her to become a doctor, she had planned to serve as a flying missionary in Africa. But in 1933, a glider pioneer invited her to fly with him, and she never looked back.
Within a year, she was the first woman in the world to earn the silver C gliding badge. Her talent was extraordinary. At twenty-five, she became the first woman ever awarded the title Flugkapitän, a rank reserved for the most skilled pilots. She performed indoor helicopter demonstrations that stunned crowds at the Berlin automobile show in 1938, hovering a machine that had never flown inside a building before.
Throughout the late 1930s, the regime put her image to work in newsreels and recruitment material. She never joined the party, but she became the public face of the new Luftwaffe. When the war came, she test-flew the most dangerous aircraft ever built. She piloted the rocket-powered Me 163, an aircraft she once described as thundering through the sky while sitting on a cannonball.
On her fifth glide test flight in 1942, the landing dolly failed to release. The aircraft crashed at roughly 240 km/h. Her skull fractured in several places, her nose crushed, her jaw knocked out of alignment. Before losing consciousness, she demanded to write her flight report.
Five months later, she walked out of the hospital. Hitler personally awarded her the Iron Cross first class, an honor almost never given to civilians and almost never to women. By early 1944, Germany was losing the war, and Reitsch decided to offer Hitler her life. She proposed a unit of pilots prepared to fly manned versions of the V-1 flying bomb directly into Allied warships.
The program was formed under the command of SS officer Otto Skorzeny, and she was the first to volunteer. Six of seven test pilots died or were badly injured before she flew the machine. She survived the worst landing of all, bringing the aircraft down at extreme speed where everyone before her had failed. The unit was never used in combat.
Her loyalty now reached beyond aviation. She held private discussions with Heinrich Himmler and called him intelligent. When a test pilot showed her documentation of the concentration camps in 1944, she refused to believe it, dismissed it as Allied propaganda, and raised the matter with Himmler himself. Her own later account claimed he warned her that if Germany lost, the truth would be the rope by which the regime would hang.
In April 1945, Hitler dismissed Göring as commander of the Luftwaffe and summoned Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to Berlin to replace him. Reitsch insisted on flying with him. The route took them through some of the most dangerous airspace in Europe. She rode in the tail compartment of one aircraft while a fighter escort covered their approach; several escorts were shot down.
They landed intact at Gatow airfield, then transferred to a small Fieseler Storch for the final leg into central Berlin. As they approached the improvised landing strip on the avenue leading to the Brandenburg Gate, Soviet anti-aircraft fire caught them. A shell shattered Greim’s right foot. He passed out at the controls.
Reitsch reached over his shoulder, seized the stick, and brought the aircraft down on the street, some 400 meters from the Brandenburg Gate. They reached the Führerbunker that evening. Hitler promoted Greim to field marshal, the last German officer ever to receive the rank, and gave him command of a Luftwaffe that no longer existed. Then he placed cyanide capsules in both their hands.
Reitsch stayed for three days. She watched Hitler’s personality disintegrate. She played with the Goebbels children in the corridors and pleaded to remain in the bunker until the end. Hitler refused.
He ordered them both to leave and to ensure that Himmler, who had attempted to negotiate with the Allies, was punished. Late on April 28th, she climbed into the cockpit of the Arado trainer and flew Greim out through the fire of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. They reached Admiral Dönitz at Plön, carrying a poison capsule and a loyalty no defeat could shake. On May 4th, Reitsch was found at a hospital near Kitzbühel, Austria.
A British test pilot who had known her before the war identified her and handed her into American custody. Days earlier, her father had killed her mother, her sister, and her sister’s three children at the family’s wartime refuge in Salzburg, rather than face Soviet repatriation, then turned the weapon on himself. Reitsch was held and interrogated for roughly eighteen months. Her statements followed her name for the rest of her life.
Asked about being ordered out of the bunker, she called it the blackest day when she could not die at her Führer’s side. She described the bunker as the altar of the fatherland. In 1947, denazification authorities classified her as not affected and released her. She returned to gliding, published a memoir, took third place at the World Gliding Championships in 1952, and in 1959 was invited by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to establish a gliding center in New Delhi.
Two years later, President John F. Kennedy received her at the White House. Her later life produced one irony after another. In the 1970s, she became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International.
Around 1977, at an American air force base, she was photographed wearing a diamond-set brooch with a swastika at its center, a gift from Hitler she said she would wear for the rest of her life, even though displaying it was illegal in Germany. In her final interview, she said, “I’m not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. Many Germans feel guilty about the war, but they don’t explain the real guilt we share, that we lost. ”
In 1979, she wrote to the British test pilot: “It began in the bunker, there it shall end.
” Within weeks, she was dead of a heart attack in Frankfurt, aged sixty-seven. No autopsy was performed. The cyanide capsule Hitler had pressed into her hand thirty-four years earlier was never accounted for.
