She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times.

Melitta von Stauffenberg flew somewhere between two and two and a half thousand of these dives during the war — historians differ on the exact figure, and none of them find a comparable record anywhere else. She sometimes blacked out under the g-load and came round in time to pull out.

The Reich that decorated her for it had also classified her, by its own race laws, as someone who should not have been in a cockpit at all.

The engineer who learned to fly her own tests

She was an engineer first. She studied mathematics, physics and flight mechanics at Munich, graduating in 1927, and joined the German aeronautical research establishment at Berlin-Adlershof, where she spent around eight years on propeller behaviour and variable-pitch research.

She learned to fly in 1929 for an entirely practical reason: so she could conduct her own flight tests rather than hand her work to somebody else. She ended up holding licences for every class of powered aircraft, the aerobatic licence, and every glider rating there was.

In 1936 she was pushed out of the research establishment because of her Jewish grandparents. She moved to the Askania works in Berlin, where she worked on automatic flight control, blind-flying equipment, and a dive-bombing sight for the Stuka. In October 1939 she was conscripted and seconded to the Luftwaffe test centre at Rechlin.

Useful enough to protect

In 1940 the Reich office for genealogical research classified her as a Mischling of the first degree. Her father, Michael Schiller, came from a Jewish fur-trading family and had converted to Christianity at eighteen; under the Nuremberg Laws that was enough. In 1941 she was granted an exemption — almost certainly because her work had been rated essential to the war.

So the arrangement was explicit on both sides. She was permitted to exist, and to work, for exactly as long as she was indispensable. She responded by becoming more indispensable.

Not Hanna Reitsch

The two women are constantly confused, and the confusion does Melitta a disservice. Hanna Reitsch was the first woman to hold the Flugkapitan title and the first to receive the Iron Cross; she was also a committed Nazi who never repudiated the regime in three decades after the war.

Melitta was a qualified engineer who designed the equipment and then flew the tests herself, was married into the family that tried to kill Hitler, and was arrested by the Gestapo. They knew each other. They did not like each other.

July 1944

She had married Alexander Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in 1937. He was the twin of Berthold and elder brother of Claus — which made her sister-in-law to two of the men at the centre of the 20 July plot.

How much she knew is still not settled. Her diary places her at Berthold’s Berlin flat on 16 July 1944, four days before the bomb. Some accounts hold that Claus asked her to fly him out and she agreed; others find no proof either way. She is reported to have given one answer when the question came up.

In the event she did not fly him. Claus and Berthold were executed. She was arrested on 25 July under Sippenhaft, the law of kin liability, along with roughly a dozen relatives. She was released on 2 September, after about six weeks, because her work was still needed. The Reich dropped the Stauffenberg name from her official style.

She then used her position and a Fieseler Storch to fly food, medicine and bedding to imprisoned members of her husband’s family, and negotiated the right to see him once a month.

8 April 1945

In the last weeks of the war she was searching for Alexander, who had been moved out of Buchenwald. On the morning of 8 April 1945 she was flying a Bucker Bu 181 trainer at treetop height, navigating by the railway line, when she was attacked and came down in a field near Strasskirchen in Bavaria.

She was pulled out alive. A local doctor was turned away by military personnel. She died in hospital at Straubing roughly two hours later, aged 42.

Who shot her down was argued over for decades. Rumour said a German fighter, feeding a story that the Gestapo had finally settled with her. The weight of research now points to an American reconnaissance Mustang whose pilot logged a kill nearby that morning and mistook the little Bucker for something else. It has never been proved beyond doubt.

Clare Mulley’s account of both women, filmed by the Imperial War Museums:

A longer discussion of the research behind the book:

And a further interview on the two pilots and their politics:

Sources: Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 22 (2005); Clare Mulley, The Women Who Flew for Hitler, 2017; Imperial War Museums; Richard Whittle, Air & Space Quarterly, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2024.