In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.

Nobody had flown a helicopter indoors before. The Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 was the first genuinely controllable helicopter in the world, and Hanna Reitsch flew it night after night in front of an audience, in a building, with no room for error in any direction.

She was among the most gifted pilots of her generation. She was also, to the end of her life and entirely without regret, a Nazi. Both things are true, and any honest account of her has to carry them at the same time.

The glider pilot

She began in gliders at Grunau in 1932, which in Germany between the wars was where serious flying started. The Treaty of Versailles had restricted powered aviation, and the country responded by building the best soaring culture in the world.

In 1934 she joined a thermal-research expedition to South America and became the first woman to earn the Silver C badge, the twenty-fifth issued anywhere. In May 1937 she crossed the Alps in a glider, among the first to do it.

The title of Flugkapitän came in 1937, conferred by Ernst Udet of the Air Ministry’s technical branch after she demonstrated a new set of glider dive brakes by putting the aircraft into a vertical dive and holding it there. She was the first woman to hold it, and she was posted to the Luftwaffe test centre at Rechlin that September.

The helicopter, and what it meant

The Fa 61 flights are the reason she appears in every history of rotary flight. Sources differ on the exact run, describing anything from a debut on 19 February 1938 repeated over fourteen successive evenings to daily flights across three weeks of the motor exhibition.

What is not in dispute is the significance. Precise hovering inside a confined space, in a machine of a type barely a year old, in front of an audience, is a demonstration of airmanship that would be respectable today.

The rocket that nearly killed her

In autumn 1942 she flew the Me 163 Komet, the rocket interceptor that killed a great many of the men who flew it. She made three flights in the prototype and one in the first production machine.

On her fifth the takeoff dolly failed to jettison. Her radio was dead, so nobody could tell her. She attempted a landing anyway, stalled and went into a ploughed field short of the runway.

The injuries were severe. One detailed account describes her nose nearly sheared off, her skull fractured in four places and her jaws displaced. She spent five months in hospital and underwent extensive facial reconstruction, and was flying again ten months after the crash. The cockpit had been too large for her throughout; she could barely reach the rudder pedals and flew without a shoulder harness.

She had already received the Iron Cross Second Class from Hitler personally in March 1941, for test work on the Ju 87 and Do 17 programmes. The First Class followed after the Komet crash, making her one of a very small number of women to hold it.

The manned flying bomb

In February 1944 she put a proposal to Hitler at Berchtesgaden for what was called Operation Self-Sacrifice: German pilots flying weapons into targets and not coming back. Accounts differ over whether the idea originated with her or with a circle of friends she then championed. Hitler was reluctant, said it was not the right psychological moment, and authorised experimental work only. Around seventy volunteers came forward.

The hardware was the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, a V-1 with a cockpit. Testing began in September 1944 and went badly: the first pilot lost control after accidentally jettisoning his canopy, and the second flight crashed the following day. Reitsch and Heinz Kensche took over.

She identified the lethal problem, which was the landing speed, and demonstrated it by putting the machine down at over 200 km/h. Sources disagree on how many of the small test cadre were killed or injured, with figures ranging from two of seven to six of seven. They agree that Reitsch was the only one unhurt.

Whether she ever flew it under pulse-jet power is genuinely unclear. Her own memoir says training normally used the unpowered glider version.

The Imperial War Museums film above sets her alongside Melitta von Stauffenberg, the other woman who test-flew for the Reich, and whose politics ran in the opposite direction.

Into the bunker

On 24 April 1945, with the Red Army inside Berlin, Hitler summoned Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to the Reich Chancellery. Reitsch went with him.

They reached Gatow, the last airfield in German hands, in an Fw 190 with Reitsch folded into the tail through an emergency hatch, escorted by around forty fighters and taking hits on the way. With the Chancellery telephone lines cut they took a Fieseler Storch onward. Ground fire tore out the floor and shattered Greim’s right leg, and Reitsch flew the aircraft from behind him, putting it down on the East-West Axis near the Brandenburg Gate.

They were in the bunker by early evening on 26 April. Hitler appointed Greim commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and gave them each a vial of poison with instructions that neither body should be recoverable. At half past one on the morning of 29 April he ordered them out. They took off from about four hundred metres of uncratered pavement, under searchlights and shellfire, in an Arado Ar 96, and landed at Rechlin fifty minutes later.

Greim killed himself with Hitler’s capsule in Salzburg on 24 May. Reitsch was captured near Kitzbühel on 4 May, identified by the British test pilot Eric Brown, and interned for somewhere between fifteen and eighteen months.

On 3 May, in Salzburg, her father shot her mother, her sister, three of her nieces and nephews, and himself.

What she said afterwards, and the problem with it

Her American interrogation summary of October 1945 contains the line most often quoted about the bunker.

That has to be handled carefully. The document itself states that no pretence is made that the quotations are in all cases exact, and that they are given as she remembers them. Reitsch later repudiated the reports entirely, telling a journalist that she never said it, never wrote it and never signed anything. It is a record of an interrogation, not a transcript of her words.

What she said on the record decades later is not ambiguous at all.

She was in her sixties when she said it, in a democratic Germany, with nothing to gain. There is no reading of her life that makes that sentence go away.

The second career

She flew competitively again almost immediately. Third place at the 1952 World Gliding Championships in Spain, the first woman to compete. German champion in 1955. A women’s altitude record of 6,848 metres in 1957. Nehru invited her to India; Kennedy received her at the White House.

From 1962 to 1966 she lived in Ghana, founding the country’s national gliding school at Afienya at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, with West German government backing. She was dismissed after the 1966 coup. Historians have since written at length about what it meant for a newly independent African state to have taken on a former Nazi test pilot as its aviation adviser.

She was still breaking records at the very end, twice taking the women’s out-and-return world record on the Appalachian ridges: 715 kilometres in 1976 and 802 in 1979, the year she died.

How to hold both halves

There is a temptation, writing about Reitsch, to resolve the tension. To make the flying redeem the politics, or the politics erase the flying. Neither works.

She was a superb pilot, arguably the finest of her generation in Germany, who volunteered for work that killed almost everyone else who attempted it and survived by being better at it than they were. She was also an unrepentant believer in a regime that murdered millions, who said so plainly when she no longer had any reason to.

The aviation is worth studying. The person does not need defending, and the record is clear enough that nobody should try.

Sources: Imperial War Museums; Clare Mulley, The Women Who Flew for Hitler; Copy of Document 3734-PS, Summary of Interrogation of Hanna Reitsch, 8 October 1945; Public Opinion Quarterly, 1946; Britannica; Aviation History (HistoryNet); Defense Media Network; Jean Allman, The American Historical Review, 2013; The Deseret News, 1981.