{"id":18857237,"date":"2026-09-01T11:27:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T09:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/hanna-reitsch-luftwaffe-test-pilot-explained\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T11:27:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T09:27:47","slug":"hanna-reitsch-luftwaffe-test-pilot-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/es\/hanna-reitsch-luftwaffe-test-pilot-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Hanna Reitsch: The Test Pilot Who Flew Everything the Reich Built"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>.et_pb_title_container h1.entry-title { padding-top: 40px !important; }<\/style>\r\n<p>In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f5f5f5;padding:20px 22px;margin:26px 0;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 10px;font-weight:700;font-size:17px;color:#222\">Datos r\u00e1pidos<\/p><table style=\"width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;font-size:15px;line-height:1.6\"><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Name and dates<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Hanna Reitsch, 29 March 1912 in Hirschberg, Silesia, to 24 August 1979 in Frankfurt am Main<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Estado<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Honorary Flugkapit&auml;n from 1937, the first woman to hold the title; civilian Luftwaffe test pilot<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Archivos<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">More than 40 altitude, distance and endurance records claimed across powered and motorless flight<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Helicopter first<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">February 1938, the first person to fly a helicopter indoors, at the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Rocket aircraft<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Me 163 Komet, 1942; crashed on her fifth flight and spent five months in hospital<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Piloted flying bomb<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, tested from late 1944<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Decorations<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Iron Cross Second Class from Hitler in March 1941, and later the Iron Cross First Class<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Berlin<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Flew into the besieged city on 26 April 1945 and out again on 29 April<\/td><\/tr><tr><td style=\"padding:6px 14px 6px 0;color:#555;white-space:normal;vertical-align:top;min-width:130px\"><strong>Postwar<\/strong><\/td><td style=\"padding:6px 0;white-space:normal\">Third in the 1952 World Gliding Championships; founded Ghana&rsquo;s national gliding school, 1962 to 1966<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The glider pilot<\/h2><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p>\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=657398791  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:HV6U.d042\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/09\/hanna-reitsch-gliding-competition-wasserkuppe-1936.jpg\" alt=\"Hanna Reitsch at a gliding competition on the Wasserkuppe in 1936\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">Reitsch at a gliding competition on the Wasserkuppe in August 1936, the only woman in the field. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-W-0801-512 \/ Heinrich von der Becke \/ CC-BY-SA 3.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<p>The title of Flugkapit&auml;n came in 1937, conferred by Ernst Udet of the Air Ministry&rsquo;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.<\/p><h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The helicopter, and what it meant<\/h2><p>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.<\/p>\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=336905101  fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:ng9Z.d043\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/09\/hanna-reitsch-flying-focke-wulf-fw-61-prototype.jpg\" alt=\"Hanna Reitsch flying the Fw 61 helicopter prototype\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">Reitsch flying the second Fw 61 prototype. She was the first woman in the world to fly a helicopter, and became member number one of the Whirly-Girls. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QDZxXheJGnU\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The rocket that nearly killed her<\/h2><p>In autumn 1942 she flew the <a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/es\/aeronave\/me-163-komet\/\">Yo 163 Komet<\/a>, 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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The manned flying bomb<\/h2><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>Whether she ever flew it under pulse-jet power is genuinely unclear. Her own memoir says training normally used the unpowered glider version.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #1565c0;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;By 1944, Hanna proposed having a manned version just like this, but with a little cockpit on the top. Essentially, she tested a prototype cruise missile.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Clare Mulley<\/strong> &mdash; Historian and author of The Women Who Flew for Hitler, in an Imperial War Museums interview<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RDY1WMaLtuI\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;They were both brilliant pilots, they had a very strong sense of honour and duty for their nation, although they had a very different understanding of what honour meant. For Hanna Reitsch it was blind patriotism, for Melitta it was patriotism for her nation Germany but not for the Nazi regime which she fought to actually help bring down.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Clare Mulley<\/strong> &mdash; Historian, on the two women, Imperial War Museums<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">Into the bunker<\/h2><p>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.<\/p><p>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&rsquo;s right leg, and Reitsch flew the aircraft from behind him, putting it down on the East-West Axis near the Brandenburg Gate.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>Greim killed himself with Hitler&rsquo;s capsule in Salzburg on 24 May. Reitsch was captured near Kitzb\u00fchel on 4 May, identified by the British test pilot Eric Brown, and interned for somewhere between fifteen and eighteen months.<\/p><p>On 3 May, in Salzburg, her father shot her mother, her sister, three of her nieces and nephews, and himself.<\/p><h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">What she said afterwards, and the problem with it<\/h2><p>Her American interrogation summary of October 1945 contains the line most often quoted about the bunker.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #d32f2f;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;Hitler is dead! The man I saw in the shelter could not have lived. He had no reason to live and the tragedy was that he knew it well, knew it perhaps better than anyone else did.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Hanna Reitsch<\/strong> &mdash; As recorded in the summary of her US interrogation, 8 October 1945<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n<p>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.<\/p><p>What she said on the record decades later is not ambiguous at all.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f8f9fa;border-left:4px solid #d32f2f;padding:20px 22px;margin:18px 0 24px;font-size:16px;line-height:1.7;display:flex;gap:20px;align-items:flex-start\"><div><em>&ldquo;I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism.&rdquo;<\/em><div style=\"margin-top:10px;font-size:14px;color:#555\"><strong>Hanna Reitsch<\/strong> &mdash; To photojournalist Ron Laytner, published in The Deseret News, 19 February 1981<\/div><\/div><\/div>\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n<div style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;margin:24px 0\"><iframe class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/23Gw6TyzMBo\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\r\n<h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">The second career<\/h2><p>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&rsquo;s altitude record of 6,848 metres in 1957. Nehru invited her to India; Kennedy received her at the White House.<\/p>\r\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\" style=\"margin:0 0 24px;width:100%\"><img data-opt-id=1966323670  decoding=\"async\" class=\"skip-lazy\" data-no-lazy=\"1\" loading=\"eager\" width=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/ml5psubhxdln.i.optimole.com\/cb:ng9Z.d043\/w:auto\/h:auto\/q:mauto\/ig:avif\/https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/09\/hanna-reitsch-portrait-finland-1961.jpg\" alt=\"Hanna Reitsch photographed in Finland in 1961\" style=\"width:100%;height:auto;max-width:100%;display:block\"><figcaption style=\"font-size:13px;color:#777;text-align:center;margin-top:6px;font-style:italic\">Reitsch in Finland in 1961. She flew competitively for another three decades after the war and was still setting records in her sixties. Photo: Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<p>From 1962 to 1966 she lived in Ghana, founding the country&rsquo;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.<\/p><p>She was still breaking records at the very end, twice taking the women&rsquo;s out-and-return world record on the Appalachian ridges: 715 kilometres in 1976 and 802 in 1979, the year she died.<\/p><h2 style=\"padding-top:22px\">How to hold both halves<\/h2><p>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.<\/p><p>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.<\/p><p>The aviation is worth studying. The person does not need defending, and the record is clear enough that nobody should try.<\/p><p><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\r\n<div style=\"background:#f0f4ff;border-left:4px solid #5C91FF;padding:16px 20px;margin:32px 0 8px\"><p style=\"margin:0 0 8px;font-weight:600;color:#333\">Publicaciones relacionadas<\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/es\/fieseler-reichenberg-manned-v-1-suicide-bomb\/\">The Fieseler Reichenberg: Germany&rsquo;s Manned V-1<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/es\/focke-wulf-fw-61-first-helicopter\/\">The Focke-Wulf Fw 61: The First Helicopter That Really Worked<\/a><\/p><p style=\"margin:4px 0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/migflug.com\/afterburner\/es\/eric-winkle-brown-greatest-test-pilot-487-types\/\">Eric Winkle Brown: The Greatest Test Pilot, 487 Types<\/a><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She flew a helicopter indoors in 1938, survived the Me 163, tested a manned V-1 and flew into the Berlin bunker. She was also, to the end, an unrepentant Nazi. Both halves of the record.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":18856547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[666,664],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18857237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-and-legends","category-military-aviation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Hanna Reitsch: Test Pilot for the Third Reich | MiGFlug<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hanna Reitsch flew a helicopter indoors in 1938, survived the Me 163 and tested a manned V-1. She was also an unrepentant Nazi. 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