Hanna Reitsch
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Hanna Reitsch (March 29, 1912 - August 24, 1979) was a famous World War II German test pilot, and a favourite of the upper echelon of the Nazi party.
Hanna was born the daughter of an ophthalmologist and was in training to become a medical doctor in 1932 when she left that field to pursue a career as a test pilot. In the 1930s she became famous, setting many glider, aerobatic and endurance records, being the first woman to cross the Alps in a glider. Several of her gliding records stand to this day.
In 1937 she was posted to the Luftwaffe testing center at Rechlin by Ernst Udet. While under direct command of Karl Franke she soon became a major test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and Dornier Do 17 projects, as well as one of the few to fly the new Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the world's first fully controllable helicopter. Her flying and her photogenic qualities made her a star of the Nazi party, always looking for publicity, and in 1938 she flew the Fa 61 every night inside the "Deutschlandhalle" at the Berlin Motor Show.
Early guidance and stabilization problems of the V-1 Flying Bomb were finally resolved by a daring test flight by Reitsch in a V-1 modified for manned operation. The V-1 was dropped from a Heinkel He 111 bomber. The data she brought back after fighting the unwieldy V-1 down to a successful landing enabled the engineers to devise the stabilization system. The idea of a piloted V-1 as a suicide weapon sprang from this mission. (See also Selbstopfer.)
As the war progressed, Reitsch was invited to fly many of Germany's latest (and increasingly desperate) designs, including the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, and several larger bombers on which she tested various mechanisms for cutting barrage balloon cables. After crashing on her fifth Me 163 flight, she was badly injured but insisted on writing her report before falling unconscious and spending five months in hospital. Eventually she became Adolf Hitler's favourite pilot. Reitsch was one of only two women awarded the Iron Cross First Class during World War II, and the only woman awarded the Luftwaffe Combined Pilot and Observer Badge with Diamonds. She survived many accidents and was badly injured several times.
In the last days of the war Reitsch was asked to fly her companion, Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim, into Berlin to meet with Hitler. The city was already surrounded by Red Army troops who had made significant progress into the downtown area when they arrived on the 27th April, landing on a city street, and travelled to the Führerbunker. The aircraft she used was the justly famous Fieseler Storch already well known for the exploit that rescued Mussolini (see Otto Skorzeny for information about Mussolini's rescue), only adding to the legend of both Reitsch and that aircraft. She is said to have overheard Hitler laying out plans for Nazi commanders to join together in mass suicide when it was obvious that the war was over. She also hoped to fly out propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' six children, who had been staying in the bunker since April 22 with their parents, but neither Joseph nor Magda Goebbels would allow it. She escaped Berlin on 29th April by flying out through heavy Russian anti-aircraft fire.
She was a devoted and idealistic Nazi, who adored Adolf Hitler and refused to believe the reports of concentration camps and torture. Not until much later would she say that she had been "disgusted" by what she witnessed in the Third Reich. She was held for 18 months by the American military after the war, she was interrogated and subsequently released.
After the war German citizens were forbidden from flying, except, after a few years, in gliders. In 1952 Reitsch won third place in the world gliding championship in Spain (and was the only woman who competed). She continued to break records including the women's altitude record (6848 metres) and became German champion in 1955.
It was shortly after this that she was interviewed on film, and there she discussed her memoirs of wartime flight testing. Some excerpts of these films have been re-broadcast in various television programmes, and remain the authoritative guides to piloting and flight performance of the Fa 61, Me 262 and Me 163.
In 1959 she was invited to India by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to establish a gliding centre there. In 1961 she was invited by US President John F. Kennedy to the White House.
From 1962 to 1966 Reitsch resided in Ghana at the request of the president Kwame Nkrumah, where she founded and ran the national gliding school. In the 1970s she returned to break many gliding records in several categories including the Women's Out and Return World Record in 1976 (715 km); and in 1979 the Women's Out & Return World Record (802 km) flown on the Appalachian Ridges in the USA.
She died in Frankfurt in 1979 of a heart attack, at the age of 67.
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