The Horryfying Crimes of Hanna Reitsch – HT
In 1944, a woman walked into a meeting with Adolf Hitler and proposed something so extreme that even the Nazi High Command hadn’t attempted it. A squadron of suicide pilots who would crash explosive-laden aircraft directly into Allied targets. But she wasn’t some fringe fanatic dragged before the Führer.
She was one of the most celebrated aviators in German history. A woman who had set over 40 world records and she had volunteered for the mission herself. Her name was Hanna Reitsch and the most terrifying thing about her story isn’t what she did during the war. It’s what she said after it was over. Hanna Reitsch was born on March 29th, 1912 in Hirschberg, Silesia, a small town nestled against the mountains of what was then Eastern Germany.
From childhood, she was obsessed with flight. Not casually interested, consumed by it. She dreamed of soaring over those peaks and by her 20s, she was doing exactly that. She became one of the most accomplished glider pilots in Europe, setting record after record. More than 40 world records across gliding, powered flight and helicopter categories.
In a field dominated entirely by men, she wasn’t just competing, she was winning. But here’s what most retellings leave out. Every achievement Reitsch earned was immediately conscripted into propaganda. The regime didn’t just tolerate her, it showcased her. She appeared at rallies, in newsreels, in magazines. The Nazis held her up as living proof that German excellence extended even into the skies.
And she wasn’t resisting any of this. She wasn’t flying despite the Nazis, she was flying for them and she knew it. On March 28th, 1941, Adolf Hitler personally presented her with the Iron Cross Second Class for her work test flying Stuka dive bombers and developing techniques to cut barrage balloon cables. She later became the only woman in German history to receive the Iron Cross First Class, awarded after a near-fatal crash that should have ended her career.
Instead, it cemented her legend. And here’s a detail that makes her story even more unsettling. Reitsch was never a member of the Nazi Party. She never held a party card, never joined any official Nazi organization. Her devotion wasn’t institutional, it was personal. She didn’t need a membership to be a true believer.
She just was one down to her bones. The regime rewarded loyalty with increasingly lethal assignments and Reitsch accepted every single one. In 1943, she was asked to test fly the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, a rocket-powered interceptor unlike anything that had ever been built. It wasn’t really an airplane in any traditional sense.
It was a wooden glider strapped to a liquid-fueled rocket engine that could reach speeds above 900 km/h. The thing was as likely to explode on the runway as it was to fly. Reitsch climbed in anyway. During one test flight, the landing skid failed to deploy. The aircraft slammed into the ground at high speed.
She suffered multiple skull fractures, a crushed jaw and severe facial injuries that required months of reconstructive surgery. Doctors weren’t sure she would survive. She spent 5 months recovering in a hospital bed and the moment she could walk again, she went back to flying. Then came something worse. The V-1 flying bomb, the weapon the British called the buzz bomb, was a pulse jet cruise missile designed to terrorize London.
It carried nearly a ton of explosives and was never designed to carry a human being. But the early models had guidance problems. They kept missing their targets. So someone had the idea to put a pilot inside one and Reitsch volunteered to test it. The cockpit, if you could even call it that, was bolted onto the fuselage of a weapon.
It was cramped, deafening and vibrated so violently that it was physically exhausting just to stay conscious. Reitsch flew it anyway, multiple times. Her test data helped engineers refine the guidance and control systems of a weapon aimed directly at civilian neighborhoods. She wasn’t an unwitting cog in a machine.
She understood exactly what the V-1 was for and she helped make it more accurate. But testing weapons wasn’t enough for her. She wanted something far worse. On February the 28th, 1944, Reitsch traveled to Berchtesgaden and personally presented Adolf Hitler with a proposal she called Operation Suicide. The concept was simple and horrifying.
Volunteer pilots would fly explosive-laden aircraft directly into Allied targets, destroying themselves in the process. Europe’s own kamikaze program. Hitler was initially hesitant, but Reitsch pressed. She helped recruit roughly 70 volunteers willing to die for the mission and she played a direct role in training pilots on the Fieseler 103 Arado Reitsch.
A manned version of the V-1 flying bomb. Between 70 and 175 of these manned missiles were actually built. A unit was formed, the Leonidas Squadron, named after the Spartan king who died holding the pass at Thermopylae. The symbolism was deliberate. These men were expected to die. The exact origin of the suicide pilot concept is debated by historians.
Some attribute it primarily to Otto Skorzeny or Hajo Herrmann. But Reitsch’s advocacy and her technical role in making the program operational are well documented. She didn’t just propose the idea, she helped build the infrastructure to carry it out. And she volunteered herself for the first mission. The Leonidas Squadron was never deployed operationally.
The war’s shifting priorities and Allied advances overtook the program before it could be used. But the fact remains, Reitsch spent months of her life working to create a system where young German pilots would be sent to certain death inside flying bombs. So she built weapons, proposed suicide missions and risked her own life repeatedly for the regime.
But none of that compares to what she did when the war was already lost. April 26th, 1945. The war is over in everything but name. Soviet artillery is leveling Berlin block by block. The streets are cratered ruins. The sky above the city is a wall of anti-aircraft fire so dense that no sane pilot would attempt to fly through it.
But Hanna Reitsch is not interested in sanity. She is interested in devotion. She volunteers to fly General Robert Ritter von Greim into Berlin. Von Greim is her close companion and ; ; according to multiple biographical accounts, likely her lover. Hitler has summoned him to the capital for a promotion that borders on absurdity, command of the Luftwaffe, an air force that barely exists anymore.
Reitsch knows this. She flies anyway. They take off in a Fieseler Storch, a light reconnaissance plane with no armor and no weapons. As they approach Berlin at low altitude, Soviet anti-aircraft fire rips through the fuselage. Shrapnel shatters von Greim’s foot. He slumps forward over the controls, bleeding heavily.
Reitsch reaches past him from behind, grabs the stick and lands the plane on a shell-cratered stretch of road near the Brandenburg Gate. They spent 2 days in the bunker. Hitler promotes von Greim to Generalfeldmarschall. He gives both Reitsch and von Greim cyanide capsules, a gift in his mind. Reitsch also tried to convince Magda Goebbels to let her take the Goebbels children out of the bunker to safety.
Magda refused. The children would die there days later, poisoned by their own mother. Then, Hitler orders Reitsch and von Greim to leave. In the early hours of 29th April, she takes off in an Arado Ar 96 trainer using the Charlottenburger Chaussee as an improvised runway. Soviet flak fills the sky around her.
She flies through it and escapes the city. This wasn’t obedience. This was pilgrimage. She flew into a dying city not because she was ordered to, but because she couldn’t bear to be anywhere else. And what she said about leaving that bunker reveals exactly who she really was. Under American interrogation after her capture, Reitsch described the flight out of Berlin not as a miraculous escape, but as a tragedy.
She called it the blackest day of her life because she and von Greim could not die at Hitler’s side. She described the bunker as an altar of the fatherland, a a sacred place where Germans should kneel in reverence and prayer. These weren’t words extracted under pressure. She said them freely, passionately, to interrogators who could barely believe what they were hearing.
Von Greim would use his cyanide capsule. After being captured by the Americans, he took his own life on May 24th, 1945. Reitsch kept hers. She held onto that small glass vial for years, decades in fact. This wasn’t Stockholm syndrome. This wasn’t a woman coerced by fear or trapped by circumstance. She had every opportunity to distance herself from the regime after 1945, and she chose devotion instead.
And what she knew makes that devotion even harder to excuse. At some point during the war, Reitsch admitted to seeing a pamphlet in Stockholm that described the gas chambers. It laid out in plain language what was happening to Jewish people across occupied Europe. Her response was not horror. It was not disbelief.
She went to Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the camp system, and told him he needed to counter the accusations, not investigate them, not reckon with them. Manage the public relations. Himmler dismissed it as enemy propaganda, and Reitsch accepted that framing without another word. Historians still debate how much she truly understood versus how much she chose not to understand.
But the pamphlet incident strips away any claim of ignorance. She saw evidence of genocide, and her first instinct was to protect the regime’s reputation, not to question the regime itself. In the war’s final days, the regime Reitsch served consumed everything, including her own family. On May 3rd, 1945, as Soviet forces swept through Silesia, her father made a decision born of terror and despair.
He killed Reitsch’s mother, Emmy, her sister, Heidi, and Heidi’s three young children. Then he killed himself. He chose annihilation over Soviet occupation, over the expulsion and humiliation he believed was coming. An entire branch of Reitsch’s family wiped out in a single afternoon by the fear and fanaticism the regime had cultivated for 12 years.
This is the kind of detail that humanizes a story without excusing anything. Reitsch lost nearly everyone. The ideology she served destroyed her own household. But here’s what’s remarkable and disturbing. It didn’t change her mind, not then and not ever. Because after all of that, the weapons, the bunker, the suicide missions, her family’s destruction, she walked free.
American forces captured Reitsch after the war and held her for roughly 15 to 18 months. Allied intelligence interrogated her extensively, not as a war criminal, but as a technical witness. They wanted to know whether Hitler had truly died in the bunker. They wanted details on German weapons programs, rocket technology, and aircraft design.
She was useful to them, and useful people rarely face tribunals. When the interrogations were done, they released her. No charges, no trial, no denazification penalty beyond the standard proceedings that millions of Germans went through. She had never been a member of the Nazi Party, which made her case administratively simple.
On paper, she was just a pilot, a civilian test pilot who had served her country. And so, she simply walked back into the world. What came next is almost surreal. Reitsch rebuilt her aviation career as though the previous decade had been a minor interruption. In 1952, she competed at the World Gliding Championships in Spain and placed third.
By 1955, she was German gliding champion. In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru personally invited her to help establish a national gliding center. On May 4th, 1961, she was received at the White House by President John F. Kennedy, reportedly as part of a visit by the Association of Women Helicopter Pilots.
The woman who had flown into Hitler’s bunker 16 years earlier now stood in the Oval Office. From 1962 to 1966, she founded and ran a national gliding school in Ghana with sponsorship from the West German Foreign Office. She became close friends with Kwame Nkrumah, another leader whose authoritarian tendencies she either ignored or didn’t recognize, reinforcing a pattern that defined her entire life.
She set new records into the 1970s, including women’s out and return world records along the Appalachian ridges in the United States. And through all of it, every handshake, every trophy, every new country that welcomed her, she never wavered. In the 1970s, photojournalist Ron Laytner sat down with her for an interview. She told him plainly that she was not ashamed to say she still believed in National Socialism.
She said she still wore the Iron Cross with diamonds that Hitler had given her. And then she said something that strips away every possible excuse. They don’t explain the real guilt we share, ; ; that we lost, not the Holocaust, not the millions of dead. The guilt in her mind was losing the war. Hanna Reitsch died on August 24th, 1979 in Frankfurt am Main.
The official cause was a heart attack. She was 67 years old. But that same month, British test pilot Eric Brown, who had known Reitsch since before the war and interrogated her after it, received a letter from her. The two had maintained a complicated acquaintance across decades. The letter reminisced about flying, about the old days, about the sky.
It ended with a single line in German. It began in the bunker, there it shall end. Brown knew she had kept the cyanide capsule Hitler gave her in April 1945. He speculated publicly that she may have finally honored a suicide pact with Von Greim, three decades delayed. Von Greim had used his capsule immediately after capture.
Reitsch had waited. No autopsy report has ever surfaced, or at least none is publicly available. The cyanide pill was never found among her belongings. Whether she used it or not, the uncertainty is fitting. A woman who spent her entire life in service to a cause she never questioned, whose final act may itself be unknowable.
She is buried at the Kommunalfriedhof in Salzburg, Austria, just steps from the grave of Robert Ritter von Greim. Hanna Reitsch wasn’t a victim of the regime. She was one of its truest believers, and the world let her fly free. Thanks for watching History Hangover. If you found this video insightful, check out our other deep dives into the hidden aftermath of World War II.
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