Hitler's Heroine: Hanna Reitsch (4 page)

Instead, the Nazi Party continued to gain popularity, as did its paramilitary branch, the SA – despite a ban on their activities. Across Silesia membership of the SA had gone from 17,500 in December 1931 to 34,500 in 1932. As sheltered a life as Hanna led, it would be impossible to avoid all signs of the conflict within Germany. It was akin to a small revolution. SA storm troopers, identifiable by their brown shirts, would rumble into the streets after dark and seek out Communists for a fight. Soon the police and the Reichsbanner (a half-forgotten republican militia) were absorbed into the fray and all-out brawls turned streets into battlefields, with residents finding evidence of the violence the next morning in the blood on the pavements, smashed windows and the odd lost knuckle-duster. Still, in 1931 Hanna was lost in her plans to fly.

The School of Gliding in Grunau would have done little to inspire a casual observer; there was a large hangar where the gliders were kept and a small wooden building that served as a canteen and shelter during bad weather. The rest was open ground. But for Hanna riding up on her bicycle, the scene was electric. ‘My heart was filled with joy,’ she later recalled.

The instructor at the school was Pit van Husen, a man who would later be remembered as the greatest of glider pilots. Van Husen was strict with his pupils, for good reason. Gliding looked simple, even safe, but it was far from it. Glider pilots did die when their flimsy craft were hurled into an unexpected storm or they misjudged a landing. Hanna rarely knew fear, however, and now she was on the practice field she would not be deterred by talk of accidents. Nor would she be upset by the unpleasant stares and comments made by her fellow, all-male, students. Hanna was not welcome. Her presence was resented and openly mocked. She was a petite 5ft 5in among the lean, tall Aryans who sidled around the airfield and she endured her fair share of snide remarks that a woman should know her place and stay in the kitchen. She later claimed that she ignored these comments, but evidence from other sources suggests she was more sensitive than she cared to admit. The sneers of her fellow students stung and they spurred her to become defiant and to be the first to truly fly.

Van Husen started his students slowly, first allowing them to learn to balance the glider on the ground while he held one wing-tip, then having them perform short slides on the ground. It was during one of these that Hanna decided enough was enough – she would show these obnoxious boys what she was made of! She had completed one slide and was restless. ‘Flying does not seem difficult,’ she thought to herself as she sat in the glider waiting for her last slide. ‘How would it be if I pulled back the stick just a fraction, without anyone noticing? Would the “crate” take me a yard or so up into the air?’

So the School of Grunau learned what the real Hanna was like. The daredevil within had taken over. The other students, wanting to spook this frail little girl who had infiltrated their class, hauled extra hard on the rope to give her a really fast slide. Hanna pulled back the stick just a few inches, and the combination sent the glider soaring. Hanna was jerked forward then back, for a moment she had no sense of what was happening, then she was looking up into blue sky. Hanna was flying!

From below a frantic Pit van Husen was shouting for her to come down. Hanna pushed the stick forward, the glider’s nose dropped steeply. She didn’t want to land, didn’t want to come out of her bubble, and she pulled the stick back and climbed again. But then something happened, the airspeed dropped, the glider lost whatever thermal it had found and she plunged downwards. There was a crash and Hanna found herself thrown from the plane with a gang of whooping boys tearing towards her. The glider was in one piece, so was Hanna, and she stood up and laughed at the oncoming students, who were delighted to see a woman fail so dramatically. Pit van Husen was another matter. ‘What did you think you were doing?’ the instructor was screaming at her, bellowing in his fury and fear. ‘You are a disobedient, undisciplined girl! I should never have allowed you here, you are completely unfit for flying!’

Hanna was cowed before the boys who were smirking and enjoying the performance. ‘As a punishment,’ continued van Husen, ‘you will be grounded for three days!’ Van Husen spun on his heel and stalked off. Several students followed, but a few remained. They were quietly impressed by Hanna’s daring. After all, she had been the first to fly. As they helped her haul the glider back to its start point, they gave her a new nickname – Stratosphere.

Hanna cycled home more dejected than she liked to admit to herself. Her foolhardiness had stripped her of her dream to fly before she had even begun. Now she would have to ensure she stayed on van Husen’s good side to avoid any further bans. It was to be far from the last time Hanna’s tendency to act before she thought landed her in trouble. What Hanna could not know as she rode home, arguing with herself that she was
not
completely unfit for flying, was that Pit van Husen was working on removing her from the course altogether. After Hanna had gone, he went to report to Grunau’s director, Wolf Hirth, and explained the full problem. A pioneer of gliding, Hirth was something of a god to his young students. He had a round, jovial face which, when he smiled, folded into happy creases and crumpled up his eyes. He was never happier than when flying, undeterred at having to wear both glasses and a prosthetic leg, having lost the original limb in a 1924 motorcycle accident. If anyone spotted him smoking they might have noted his unusual cigarette holder carved from the fibula of his lost leg.

Hirth had taken up gliding at the same age as Hanna, in the days just after the First World War, when gliding was all that remained of Germany’s aviation industry. He had excelled at competitive gliding, particularly in annual competitions at Wasserkuppe. Nothing deterred him. Certainly not the loss of a leg. Hirth’s brother, Hellmuth, had founded the Hirth Aircraft Engine Manufacturing Company and this, coupled with having a father who was an engineer, spurred Hirth to explore aircraft construction. In 1928 he attained his diploma in engineering from the Technical University of Stuttgart and over the next decade would promote gliding in almost every country across the world.

The year 1931 had brought another dramatic change in Hirth’s life: he was involved in a serious crash during a gliding demonstration tour in Hungary. Sustaining major injuries, he was confined to hospital for four months and had not been long back in Germany at his training school when the reckless, headstrong Hanna landed on his doorstep. Still reeling from the effects of his own crash, van Husen’s tales of Hanna’s adventures were enough to make him sweat. The last thing the Grunau School needed was a fatal accident involving a girl. ‘We must get rid of this girl,’ Hirth told van Husen. ‘We don’t want any corpses.’

That night Hanna sat on her bed mulling over what she had done. Her temper was dulled by thoughts of what could have happened, how she could have been seriously hurt or worse. Van Husen’s words kept ringing in her ears and it was difficult to contain tears of frustration and humiliation. It would be hard to live down the episode, especially among her fellow students. Worse, Hanna was now grounded. She had a tendency towards self-pity throughout her life, but as a teenager it was natural enough and the long hours of winter darkness were not helping. She desperately wanted to prove herself to van Husen, to everyone.

Finally, at some point in the wee hours of the night an idea struck her; she might be physically grounded, but no one could ground her mentally. She sat on the bed and wedged a walking stick between her knees as if it were the steering column in a glider. Then she imagined the finely balanced plane all around her, and practised keeping the stick perfectly upright so a wing-tip would not dip and touch the ground. In her mind the students were clustered around the bungee, she called to them, ‘Heave!’ They pulled. ‘Double!’ They pulled harder. ‘Away!’ They released her and Hanna was so engulfed in her fantasy she felt her body jerk as the glider started on a long ground slide. So Hanna continued for the next hour, practising ground slide after ground slide, before falling into an exhausted sleep. Hanna would fly one way or another.

Three days without flying were torture, but Hanna endured them, consoling herself with her imaginary night-time flying. Van Husen was watching her like a hawk, looking for any reason to be rid of her for good, but Hanna refused to give him such pleasure. Instead she was the perfect student and even began to form friendships with some of the boys on the course. One was a handsome student with curly blond hair and a broad smile who seemed like any other enthusiast to Hanna, even if he was a little dreamy, his mind far away out in the reaches of space. Wernher von Braun was a rocket man. As a boy in Berlin he had found himself in a police station after attempting to create the first rocket-powered child’s wagon. The experiment, in the middle of fashionable Tiergartenstrasse, had gone disastrously wrong. The six large skyrockets he had attached to his wagon had quickly gone out of control, shooting the flimsy cart violently back and forth across the street while streaks of flame flew out behind. Naturally he had scared a number of people, caused a minor panic and come close to endangering the wellbeing of several passersby. It was an inauspicious start to the career of the man who would be pivotal in the creation of the V2 rocket and jet-propelled aircraft. Sitting quietly on the grass between gliding flights, Hanna could hardly imagine the role this young, dashing man would play in her future. By 19 von Braun had his glider pilot’s licence; by 21 he had a regular pilot’s licence. Throughout her life Hanna would remain friends with the boy who dreamed of rockets.

But friendship at Grunau was always tainted with the mockery Hanna ‘Stratosphere’ earned simply for being female. She had failed and no one would let her forget it. Then luck finally fell in Hanna’s favour. Another student had had a disastrous A test flight and van Husen wanted to explain the reasons why to his students. He told Hanna to sit in the empty glider to ensure it didn’t move while he lectured the group. Hanna did as she was told; sitting at the controls, she envisaged herself on her bed and stared out at the sky as if about to be launched. She was so absorbed in her dreaming it was only the laughter of her fellows that roused her. Pit van Husen was amused; he should never have allowed this undertrained girl into the sky, but an odd, mischievous thought arose in his mind. ‘All right, harness up!’ he shouted, and before Hanna knew it she was in position to be launched into the air.

Hanna took to the skies; she focused on a spot ahead and concentrated all her energy on keeping the glider straight and true. She was in the air for less than forty seconds, but it was enough to convince her that she must spend her life flying. She landed perfectly, having unexpectedly passed the A test for gliding. It was pure chance, of course, the boys yelled. Van Husen was similarly unconvinced. ‘I expect that was just luck. I can’t count it for your A test,’ he said. Then he paused. ‘You had better try it again, straight away.’ Naturally, Hanna flew perfectly and passed the test a second time.

Curiosity now overcame Wolf Hirth. Who was this girl who was in danger of fatally crashing one minute and the next passing her A test without any practical experience? Hirth had to meet her in person. Petite Hanna was neither awe inspiring nor impressive in appearance, but then neither was Wolf Hirth. He was a little on the plump side and very ordinary looking for someone treated as a god of gliding. He liked Hanna almost instantly: she reminded him of himself. Hirth took Hanna under his personal tutelage and soon she was flying and passing her B and C tests. She impressed him so much that he allowed her the privilege of flying the school’s newest glider, one normally reserved for instructors and Hirth. Hanna had permission to stay in the air as long as she pleased; she stayed there for five hours and landed to learn that she had broken the world record. For the first time Hanna’s name was on the radio and Hirth was delighted – he could not have asked for better publicity for his training school.

Hanna was meant to be training as a medical student, but her head was now, quite literally, in the clouds. She could no more concentrate on her studies than she could resist the temptation to fly again – this time in a powered aircraft. She was studying medicine in Berlin and it happened that nearby was a flying school run by the German Air Mails. Based at Staaken, the school ran a course in flying sports planes and Hanna persuaded her father to pay for yet another set of lessons. By this point Herr Reitsch was despairing of his daughter achieving anything in her studies, but she swore she would stick to medicine if only he would let her learn to fly. In fact, she had plans to become a flying doctor in Africa, so she
had
to take a flying course, didn’t she?

There were a few more women at Staaken than at Grunau, though female friendships would never be a priority for Hanna. In fact, for most of her life she was quite a lonely individual; her relationships were professional and often with men, but they rarely developed into anything close. At Staaken she came to know Elly Beinhorn, five years her senior, who had recently returned from flying around the world. They were friendly enough at the time, though years later Elly did not warrant a mention in Hanna’s memoirs,
The Sky My Kingdom
. One person who did, however, was a young actor named Mathias Wieman, who had only recently appeared as a supporting actor in the German film
Avalanche
, ‘… with whom I soon formed a real flying friendship’, Hanna recalled.

Not all was happiness at Staaken. The years were ticking by towards Hitler’s catastrophic accession to power and the reek of politics was often in the air. Hanna was politically ignorant; in fact, politics was a topic that entirely failed to interest her. She had been raised a good German patriot and this she would remain without questioning it unduly. Honour, to her, meant loyalty, even when that loyalty was misplaced. Hanna lived partly in a world of imagination; escaping into the skies was part of that. When something penetrated that happy sphere she was shaken and uncomfortable, she would turn away and dig her head into the figurative sand. Hanna did not want to know about the world of politics. It was too complicated, too frightful and it would destroy her brave dreams of loyalty, honour and hope. These were her exact feelings when she befriended a group of workers near Staaken. Every now and then the workers would launch into arguments over politics: