Feud of Hitler's flying frauleins: The Fuhrer’s two most prized test pilots were brilliant, fearless and female... but they also loathed each other

  • Melitta von Stauffenberg was a pilot and aeronautical engineer in Nazi Germany
  • During the war, her job was to perfect the Fuhrer’s Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers
  • Fellow test pilot Hanna Reitsch deliberately flew a Dornier Do 17 bomber into a heavy steel cable that tethered a barrage balloon to the ground
  • But as a new book reveals, the women were rivals and poles apart politically

Within the cockpit of the Stuka dive bomber, the pilot reached the top of the climb, rolled the plane sideways and tore down almost vertically towards the earth at 350 mph.

The engines howled, the wings whistled and the fuselage shook so violently that the instruments on the control panel were almost unreadable.

Astonishingly, given that this was macho Nazi Germany in 1941, the pilot was a woman. With her gloved hands, Melitta von Stauffenberg clung to the juddering joystick as the plane plummeted 10,000 ft.

Melitta von Stauffenberg was a pilot and aeronautical engineer in Nazi Germany. During the war, her job was to perfect the Fuhrer’s Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers

Melitta von Stauffenberg was a pilot and aeronautical engineer in Nazi Germany. During the war, her job was to perfect the Fuhrer’s Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers

With the ground just 500 ft below, she pulled up as hard as she could, her oxygen-starved brain perilously close to blacking out. The nose lifted and, just in time, the bomber flattened out, skimmed across the runway and landed. Another death-defying test flight, one of thousands Melitta made, was over for that rarest of breeds — a woman aviator in Hitler’s Third Reich.

Within minutes, Melitta would be back in the air repeating the exercise as many times as necessary before returning to her drawing board to analyse the results. She was not just a test pilot but a brilliant aeronautical engineer.

Defying the Nazi mentality that confined a woman’s role to the three Ks; ‘kinder, kuche, kirche’ [children, kitchen, church], her job at this time was to perfect the Fuhrer’s Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers, a potent weapon in his armoury as he plundered Europe.

Meanwhile, the only woman comparable to her in Germany, Hanna Reitsch, was flirting with death by deliberately flying a Dornier Do 17 bomber into a heavy steel cable that tethered a barrage balloon to the ground.

The British used hundreds of these balloons to bring down planes, so a German scientist had designed razor-sharp steel blades, fixed to the leading edge of a bomber’s wings, to slice through the anchor cables.

Hanna aimed the plane directly at a taut cable, knowing full well she could be decapitated or disfigured in seconds. There was a jerk as she hit; the cable parted... but the cut end whipped back through the air, gouging chunks out of her propellers. Metal splinters flashed through the cockpit and past her head. The starboard engine went berserk.

Watchers on the ground waited for the crash and explosion. But somehow Hanna landed the crippled plane.

These were the golden air girls of the Third Reich in action. Fearless Hanna, blue eyes, blonde curls peeking out from under her leather flying cap, so tiny she had to have wooden blocks on the rudder pedals to reach them. And brainy, handsome Melitta, tall with a Roman profile beneath bobbed chestnut hair.

Meanwhile, Hanna Reitsch was flirting with death by deliberately flying a Dornier Do 17 bomber into a heavy steel cable that tethered a barrage balloon to the ground

Meanwhile, Hanna Reitsch was flirting with death by deliberately flying a Dornier Do 17 bomber into a heavy steel cable that tethered a barrage balloon to the ground

The pioneers challenged the sexist stereotyping of the Third Reich and proved themselves every bit as brave and capable as men. They weren’t allowed anywhere near combat duties, but they flew in conditions just as dangerous, often more so.

Everyone loved and admired Hanna and Melitta for the way they put their lives on the line to test out new weapons.

They were feted by the Nazi leadership, with Hitler defying the men-only tradition to pin an Iron Cross on Hanna in recognition of her courage and achievements. (Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, awarded Melitta hers — the Fuhrer presumably keeping his distance because she had Jewish ancestry.)

But — as a new book detailing their extraordinary lives and achievements reveals — the women loathed each other. Theirs was no sisterhood of the sky but a personal rivalry marked by lasting contempt. Even when working on the same project, the most they would ever give one another was a cursory nod.

Apart from the thrill-seeking and passion for flying they had in common, they were complete opposites in background and personality, and they grated on one another.

Melitta, the elder by nine years (as Hanna cattily liked to remind people), was a serious engineering graduate, a top scientist who pioneered research in aeronautical laboratories before taking to the air to test her theories.

Shy and withdrawn, she dismissed the bumptious Hanna as an adventuress without scientific credentials who was seduced by glamour. Melitta stood aloof and treated Hanna with disdain, which riled her even more.

Certainly Hanna, a champion glider pilot who’d competed around the world, was a sucker for celebrity. She thought Melitta stuffy and haughty — with good reason. Melitta had married into the very grand Stauffenberg family (which produced the German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler, of which more later), and was a Grafin, a countess, no less.

And the pair were poles apart politically. Hanna was utterly devoted to her beloved Fuhrer. She was happy to be used in propaganda for the Reich, laughing merrily in a white shirt and pale trench coat, as ‘a symbol of German womanhood and the idol of German aviation’.

Hitler’s henchmen Goering, Goebbels and Himmler sent her gifts and invited her to parties. She had a secretary to handle the fan mail from her adoring public. Everywhere she went, she was a hit.

But not with Melitta. The Countess was part of a patrician circle which, while fiercely patriotic, had serious reservations about the dictatorial regime in power — though for now it kept its counsel.

She was further alienated when Nazi anti-Semitism turned into full persecution. Her grandfather had been a non-practicing Jew, and pernicious Nazi race laws threatened to classify her as Jewish, too. It would be the end of her career, the end of everything.

Both women were feted by the Nazi leadership, with Hitler defying the men-only tradition to pin an Iron Cross on Hanna (pictured) in recognition of her courage and achievements

Both women were feted by the Nazi leadership, with Hitler defying the men-only tradition to pin an Iron Cross on Hanna (pictured) in recognition of her courage and achievements

Melitta quietly petitioned to be classified as ‘of German blood’ and ‘equal to Aryan’, pulling whatever strings she could. Because of her contacts and contribution to the war effort, she succeeded — and not only for herself but for her parents and siblings, saving them, too, from deportation and extermination.

But when Melitta’s background leaked, Hanna, an unabashed anti-Semite (and a Holocaust denier all her life), found another reason to mock her rival. She would ever after refer disparagingly to Melitta’s ‘racial burden’, and even wonder aloud whether she ‘works for the enemy’.

She even confided to friends the unlikely tale that Melitta had made lesbian advances — an allegation that under homophobic Nazi laws could have seen her sent to a concentration camp.

For her part, Melitta kept up the feud by insisting on being paid a third more than Hanna because of her superior qualifications. She got her way, putting Hanna’s nose even more out of joint.

Yet through the nastiness and jealousy, they continued with their perilous work on the aircraft that an increasingly desperate Hitler hoped would win him the war.

One of these was the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, which was propelled into the air by a rocket motor, reaching speeds of 500 mph, before gliding back to earth.

It very nearly killed Hanna. She was testing its ability to glide when things went wrong at 10,000 ft and she was told to bail out. Reluctant to abandon the valuable machinery, she went down with the plane as it crashed in a field.

Hanna’s skull was fractured in four places, her brain damaged, several vertebrae smashed and her nose completely obliterated. She was not expected to live. But she mended over five months in hospital, had reconstructive surgery to her face and went back to work.

She restored her shattered sense of balance — essential for a pilot — by making herself stand on the edge of a gabled roof until she overcame the giddiness.

For Melitta, meanwhile, a different disaster was waiting to drag her down. She had long been married to Count Alexander von Stauffenberg, whose brother Claus, an army colonel, masterminded the plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in his military headquarters in July 1944. He confided in Melitta beforehand, and at one stage it was planned that she would fly the plane that took him to Berlin to seize power.

After Hitler survived the blast, his vengeance came down not only on the plotters and their supporters but the entire Stauffenberg family. ‘The whole brood must be wiped out,’ the Fuhrer declared.

The Gestapo grabbed Melitta and held her in prison for six weeks of interrogation. Only the importance of her war work saved her, and it took Goering’s personal intervention to secure her release.

She immediately went back to her latest research, developing a life-saving technique for fighter pilots to use in night landings.

Her spare time was devoted to tracking down family members, including her husband Alexander, in prisons and concentration camps, bringing comfort to them and trying to get them out.

Hanna, too, was back in business and, with Germany collapsing into ruins, squeezed between the Allies and the Red Army, she was working on a last-ditch plan for a suicide squadron to fly piloted V1 bombs, or doodlebugs, at the enemy.

With Hitler’s approval, she attracted scores of volunteers and was training them when the operation was called off. There weren’t enough V1s left for them to fly.

But by a quirk of history, Hanna was at the very heart of the death of the Third Reich as she flew into a surrounded and defeated Berlin with General Ritter von Greim, a close friend for many years (and possible lover). Hitler had summoned Greim to his besieged bunker to name him head of the Luftwaffe. Hanna flew with Greim through Soviet flak and tank fire to land on an avenue leading to the Brandenburg Gate.

They scrambled over to the bunker, where Hitler welcomed Hanna crying: ‘Brave woman! So there is still some loyalty and courage left in the world.’

Hitler wouldn’t leave, despite Hanna offering to fly him out. She asked him for the ‘ultimate privilege’ of dying beside him and he gave her glass phials of cyanide. But the next day, Hitler changed his mind and ordered Greim to leave with Hanna to organise the (now nonexistent) Luftwaffe in one last drive against the Soviets.

Behind them, Hitler married Eva Braun, and the Fuhrer and his new wife then killed themselves. By now, Hanna’s arch-enemy was dead. Three weeks earlier, Melitta had been chasing a party of VIP prisoners, including her husband Alexander, as they were ferried from one concentration camp to another, hoping to reach him before orders for his execution did.

She was hedge-hopping in southern Germany, flying just 30 ft off the ground, when an American fighter fired a burst and sent her spinning into a field. Despite crash-landing successfully, she died of her injuries in hospital. (Alexander survived the war and remarried.)

As the war ended, the other woman who took to the air for Hitler flew on into a future that she hated. Hanna Reitsch never came to terms with the Allied victory.

The Americans took her into custody but she resisted all attempts to de-Nazify her. She denied the Holocaust had taken place. She kept up her feud with the long-dead Melitta, trashing her reputation whenever she got the chance, harping on about her ‘racial burden’ and claiming she had never flown a bomber and didn’t deserve her Iron Cross.

Hanna died in 1979, aged 67, from a heart attack, a sour old woman consumed by jealousy and denying the truth to the bitter end.

The Women Who Flew For Hitler: The True Story of Hitler’s Valkyries by Clare Mulley is published by Macmillan at £20. To order a copy for £14 (offer valid until July 22, 2017), visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15.

The comments below have not been moderated.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

We are no longer accepting comments on this article.