Hanna Reitsch walked into the Führerbunker in April 1945 and stayed for three days as Berlin collapsed around her. By then, she was already the most celebrated female pilot in the Third Reich, a woman who had broken records, tested the Luftwaffe’s most dangerous aircraft, and become a personal symbol of the regime’s aerial ambitions. But the final chapter of her life inside Hitler’s inner circle, and what she did after, would overshadow everything that came before. Reitsch was born in 1912 into a family of doctors, but her passion was flight.
By the mid-1930s, she was a world-record holder, and in 1937 she became the first person to fly a helicopter inside a building, hovering a Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 between the rafters of an exhibition hall during the International Automobile Show. The following year, she became the first woman ever to earn the silver C gliding badge and broke the women’s gliding endurance record during a research expedition to Argentina. In 1938, her skills earned her the rank of Flugkapitän, the first woman in the world to hold the title, and she was posted to the Luftwaffe’s testing center at Rechlin-Lärz. She was photogenic, articulate, and fearless, and the regime put her image to work in newsreels, magazines, and recruitment material throughout the late 1930s.
Though she never joined the Nazi Party, she became central to the public face of the new Luftwaffe, testing aircraft like the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and the Dornier Do 17. By 1942, she was flying the regime’s most experimental designs, including the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, an aircraft she once described as thundering through the skies sitting on a cannonball. Her one powered flight in it came in May of that year, and there would never be another. Before losing consciousness during that flight, she insisted on writing her flight report.
For surviving the most dangerous aircraft in the Luftwaffe, Hitler awarded her the Iron Cross first class, a medal almost never given to civilians and almost never to women. She was the first of only three German women to receive it during the war, and she received it personally from Hitler. From that point on, the line between her role as a pilot and her role as an advocate for the regime began to disappear. In February 1943, weeks after the surrender at Stalingrad, she accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to tour the Eastern Front.
For three weeks, she flew between Luftwaffe units in a Fieseler Storch, raising morale at a moment when morale was beginning to matter more than equipment. Greim, a World War I ace and one of Germany’s most respected airmen, became a close personal friend. Their relationship would shape the last two years of her life. By 1944, with the war turning decisively against Germany, Reitsch met with Hitler to propose a radical solution.
Germany, she told him, needed a unit of pilots prepared to die in their aircraft, flying manned versions of the V-1 flying bomb directly into Allied warships and bridges. The result was the SS Selbstopferkommando Leonidas, formed under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Otto Skorzeny. Reitsch was the first to volunteer. But the program was as deadly to its own as to the enemy.
Six of its seven test pilots were killed or seriously injured before Reitsch was called in to fly the machine herself. Her experience landing the Me 163 at extreme stall speeds allowed her to bring the manned V-1, known as the Reichenberg, down at over 200 km/h, a feat no one else had managed. Hitler eventually agreed to the formation of the unit but never authorized an operational mission. In April 1945, as the Red Army closed in on Berlin, Reitsch was summoned to meet Hitler one last time.
She was ordered to fly to the capital with Greim, who had been appointed commander of the Luftwaffe in the wake of Hermann Göring’s dismissal. By her own later account, she said that Himmler told her the truth would be the rope by which they would hang the regime if Germany lost the war. She was determined to fly into the room where her own reckoning would take place. The route into Berlin took them through some of the most dangerous airspace in Europe.
From Munich, they were flown north to Rechlin, then west to Gatow airfield in Berlin, with Reitsch riding in the tail compartment of the Fieseler Storch through an emergency opening. For the final leg into central Berlin, Greim took the controls of the Fieseler Fi 156 Storch. They landed near the Brandenburg Gate, and Greim was wounded, but they made it. Inside the bunker, Hitler handed Reitsch a vial of cyanide and gave another to Greim.
By her own account, she accepted it without hesitation, prepared to die in the bunker if ordered. She spent those final days in the bunker, playing with the Goebbels children in the corridors and pleading to remain. Hitler refused. He ordered Greim to leave Berlin, to ensure that Heinrich Himmler was punished for his attempt to negotiate with the Allies, and then sent them out into the city.
Late on April 28th, they took off in an Arado Ar 96 trainer from the same improvised airstrip, climbing through fire from the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. They carried two things out of the bunker: the poison capsule from Hitler’s hand, and a loyalty that no defeat would shake. On May 4th, 1945, Reitsch was found near a hospital in Kitzbühel, Austria. The British test pilot Eric Brown, who had known her before the war, identified her and handed her into American custody.
Days earlier, on the night of May 3rd, Reitsch’s father had killed her mother, her sister Heidi, and Heidi’s three children at the family’s wartime refuge in Salzburg, rather than face Soviet repatriation, then turned the weapon on himself. Her last interview with the American photojournalist Ron Leckner in 1978 ended any remaining ambiguity about her beliefs. “I’m not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism,” she said. “Many Germans feel guilty about the war, but they don’t explain the real guilt we share, that we lost.
” The cyanide capsule Hitler had pressed into her hand 34 years earlier was never accounted for. Reitsch died of a heart attack in Frankfurt in August 1979 at the age of 67. She never returned to the place where her most dangerous flights had taken her, and she spent the rest of her life flying, and speaking, on her own terms.