Hanna Reitsch (29 March 1912 – 24 August 1979) was a German aviator and test pilot. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler before his suicide in the Führerbunker in April 1945. Following her capture, she provided information about her departure from Berlin and denied that she might have helped Hitler escape.
During the 1930s, Reitsch set more than 40 flight altitude records and women's endurance records in gliding and unpowered flight. In the 1960s, she was sponsored by the West German foreign office as a technical adviser in Ghana and elsewhere. She also founded a gliding school in Ghana, where she worked for Kwame Nkrumah.
Reitsch was born in Hirschberg, Silesia, on 29 March 1912 to an upper-middle-class family. She was daughter of Dr. Wilhelm (Willy) Reitsch, who was an ophthalmology clinic manager, and his wife Emy Helff-Hibler von Alpenheim, who was a member of the Austrian nobility. Despite her mother being a devout Catholic, Hanna was raised a Protestant. She had two siblings, brother Kurt, a naval Fregattenkapitän (frigate captain), and younger sister Heidi. Reitsch began flight training in 1932 at the School of Gliding in Grunau. While a medical student in Berlin, she enrolled in a German Air Mail amateur flying school for powered aircraft at Staaken, training in a Klemm Kl 25.
In 1933, Reitsch left medical school at the University of Kiel to become, at the invitation of Wolf Hirth, a full-time glider pilot/instructor at Hornberg in Baden-Württemberg. As well as instructional duties, she set an endurance record for women of 11 hours and 20 minutes but this had to be "unofficial" because the observations that were necessary for a record were not fulfilled.
Reitsch also contracted with the Ufa Film Company as a stunt pilot for a film called "Rivals of the Air", in which as well as other flying, she had to land in a lake.
In January 1934, she joined a South American expedition to study thermal conditions, along with Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar. While in Argentina, she became the first woman to earn the Silver C Badge, the 25th in the world.
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 Stettin, where she flew a twin-engined aircraft 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.
In September 1937, Reitsch was posted to the Luftwaffe testing centre at Rechlin-Lärz Airfield by Ernst Udet.
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 US National Air Races. By the end of the 1930s, Reitsch had set more than 40 flight altitude records and women's endurance records in gliding and unpowered flight.
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. Reitsch was asked to fly many of Germany's latest designs, among them the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet in 1942. 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.
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.
On 28 February 1944, she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which "would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved." Although Hitler "did not consider the war situation sufficiently serious to warrant them ... and ... this was not the right psychological moment", he gave his approval. The project was assigned to Gen. Günther Korten. About 70 volunteers enrolled in the Suicide Group as pilots for the human glider-bomb. By April 1944, Reitsch and Heinz Kensche finished tests of the Me 328, carried aloft by a Dornier Do 217. By then, she was approached by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, a founding member of the SS- Selbstopferkommando Leonidas (Leonidas Squadron). They adapted the V-1 flying bomb into the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, including a training single-seater with landing flaps, a training two-seater with no power unit, and an operation single-seater without landing flaps. The plan was never implemented operationally due to other war concerns.
In her autobiography, 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."
In late April 1945, during the Battle of Berlin, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as head of the Luftwaffe and appointed Robert Ritter von Greim to replace him. Reitsch had been making military and personal flights between Breslau (Poland), Munich (Germany), and Kitzbühel (Austria) when von Greim instructed her to meet him in Munich, thinking he might need her to pilot a helicopter. Reitsch said goodbye to her family late on 25 April at the Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg before driving to Munich. That night, she and von Greim were flown in a Ju 188 from Germany's Neubiberg Air Base to the Rechlin airfield, about 100 km (60 mi) northwest of Berlin. They were then flown to Gatow, Berlin, in a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 (Reitsch riding in the tail by way of an emergency opening), protected against the Soviets by perhaps 40 fighters, including 12 other Fw 190s from Jagdgeschwader 26 under Hauptmann Hans Dortenmann's command. The pair took a Fi 156 Storch, first piloted by von Greim until his foot was struck by a bullet, then by Reitsch reaching over him to land on an improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate.