She walked into the Führerbunker and stayed three days while Berlin collapsed around her. By the end of her life, Hanna Reitsch had become one of the most decorated and most controversial pilots in history, a woman whose name remains permanently bound to the Nazi regime she served to the very end. In 1938, the 25-year-old pilot—who stood just under five feet tall—hovered a Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 between the rafters of an exhibition hall for three weeks of nightly demonstrations during the International Automobile Show. No one had ever flown a helicopter inside a building before.
By the following year, on a research expedition to Argentina, she had become the first woman in the world to earn the silver C gliding badge and had already broken the women’s gliding endurance record. Two years later, Generaloberst Ernst Udet awarded her the title of Flugkapitän, the first woman ever to hold that rank, and posted her to the Luftwaffe testing center at Rechlin-Lärz. Reitsch was photogenic, articulate, and entirely fearless in the cockpit, and the regime put her image to work. She appeared in newsreels, magazines, and recruitment material throughout the late 1930s.
She was never a party member, but she became central to the public face of the new Luftwaffe. She tested 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 while sitting on a cannonball. Her one powered flight in it came in May.
There would never be another. Before losing consciousness during that flight, she insisted on writing her flight report. Afterward, Hitler awarded her the Iron Cross first class, an honor almost never given to civilians and almost never given to women. Reitsch was the first of only three German women to receive it during the war, and she received it personally from Hitler.
She had survived the most dangerous aircraft in the Luftwaffe. What she did next would put her at the center of one of the regime’s last and most extreme programs. From that point on, the line between her role as a pilot and her role as a symbol of the regime would 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. That relationship would shape the last two years of her life. During an audience with Hitler, she used the opportunity to propose something else.
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. Six of its seven test pilots were killed or seriously injured before Reitsch flew it herself.
Her experience landing the Me 163 at extreme stall speeds let her bring the Reichenberg down at over 200 kilometers per hour, a feat everyone before her had failed. Hitler eventually agreed to the unit’s formation but never authorized an operational mission. By her own later account, Himmler told her the truth would be the rope by which they would hang the regime if Germany lost the war. She was prepared to fly into the room where it would happen.
In late April 1945, with Berlin encircled, she and Greim were summoned to the Führerbunker. The route in 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 through an emergency opening. For the final leg into central Berlin, Greim took the controls of a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch.
Russian flak shredded the open frame, and a shot tore through Greim’s foot, breaking his leg as Soviet defenders fired directly at the small aircraft. They landed on an improvised airstrip near the chancellery, and Reitsch pulled Greim from the machine, carrying him up the stairs of the bunker. When Hitler saw Greim’s wound and learned of the flight, he ordered head surgeon Dr. Habeerer to operate immediately, despite Habeerer’s protests that he could no longer respond to the spiritual or physical call.
Hitler then pressed a vial of cyanide into Reitsch’s hand, with another for Greim. By her own account, she accepted it without hesitation, prepared to die in the bunker if ordered. She played with the Goebbels children in the corridors and pleaded to remain. Hitler refused, ordered Greim to leave Berlin, and told him to ensure that Heinrich Himmler was punished for his attempt to negotiate with the Allies.
He 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 had carried two things out of the bunker: a 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. The US Air Force Intelligence Report compiled on October 8th, 1945, contains the lines that have followed her name ever since. Asked about being ordered out of the bunker, she said it was the blackest day when she could not die at her Führer’s side.
In 1947, denazification authorities classified her as not affected, citing her lack of formal party membership, and released her. She returned to gliding and authored a memoir. The English edition, The Sky My Kingdom, followed in 1955. From 1962 to 1966, she lived in Ghana, founding the first national gliding school at Afienya for Kwame Nkrumah.
Surviving letters between Reitsch and Nkrumah are intimate in tone. Her later life produced one irony after another. She tactfully avoided the 1972 Munich Olympics and never publicly commented on the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. At Edwards Air Force Base in California around 1977, observers recorded her wearing a diamond-set brooch with a swastika at its center—Hitler’s gift—which she said she would wear for the rest of her life, though displaying it was illegal in Germany.
Her final interview with American photojournalist Ron Leckner in 1978 ended any remaining ambiguity. “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 on August 24, 1979, in Frankfurt, at the age of 67, of a heart attack. She never explained what happened to the capsule.