No pilot in aviation history provokes quite the same mixture of awe and unease as Hanna Reitsch. She was the first woman to fly a helicopter. The first woman to fly a rocket-powered aircraft. The first — and only — woman to receive both the Iron Cross Second Class and Iron Cross First Class. She test-flew nearly every advanced aircraft the Third Reich produced, survived crashes that should have killed her, and in the final days of the war flew into besieged Berlin to reach Adolf Hitler’s bunker when virtually no other pilot on earth would have attempted the mission.

She was also, by her own admission and by the testimony of those who interrogated her after the war, a devoted follower of National Socialism who never fully recanted. Her story is one of the most uncomfortable in aviation history — a tale of breathtaking courage and extraordinary skill entangled with the darkest chapter of the twentieth century. To write about Hanna Reitsch honestly requires holding both truths at once.

The Girl Who Would Fly

Hanna Reitsch was born on 29 March 1912 in Hirschberg, Silesia — a region that would later become part of Poland. Her father was an eye doctor who wanted her to study medicine. Hanna had other plans. She became obsessed with flying as a teenager, beginning with gliders at a time when powered flight training was restricted in Germany under the Treaty of Versailles. She proved to be a prodigy. By the early 1930s, she was setting glider distance and altitude records, including a women’s soaring record that stood for years.

Her talent attracted the attention of the Deutsches Forschungsinstitut für Segelflug (DFS), Germany’s premier glider research institute, and she transitioned into powered aircraft. By the mid-1930s, she was one of Germany’s most celebrated pilots — a petite, fierce-eyed woman in a leather flying helmet who appeared regularly in newsreels and propaganda films. The Nazi regime recognized her publicity value immediately.

Testing the Impossible

Reitsch’s test-flying career reads like a catalogue of aviation firsts. In 1937, she became the first person to fly a helicopter — the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 — inside an enclosed space, demonstrating the machine inside the Deutschlandhalle arena in Berlin to astonished crowds. The flight was a propaganda triumph and a genuine technical milestone.

During the war, she tested the DFS 230 glider used in the assault on the Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael. She flew the massive Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant cargo glider, a machine so unwieldy that towing it into the air required three Bf 110 fighters in formation — a procedure known as the “Troika-Schlepp” that killed several crews before it was abandoned. Reitsch survived.

Her most harrowing test program involved the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, the world’s first rocket-powered interceptor. During one test flight in 1942, the landing skid failed to deploy. Reitsch crashed at high speed, fracturing her skull, smashing her nose, and breaking bones throughout her body. She was not expected to survive. She spent five months in hospital, then returned to flying.

The V-1 and the Suicide Mission

Perhaps the most chilling chapter of Reitsch’s wartime career involved the V-1 flying bomb. In 1944, as Germany grew desperate, Reitsch championed the idea of a piloted version of the V-1 — the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg — that could be used for suicide attacks against Allied shipping. She personally test-flew the piloted V-1 variant, proving it could be controlled despite its fearsome handling characteristics. The suicide-attack program was ultimately never deployed operationally, but Reitsch had volunteered to fly the first mission herself.

Flight Into the Bunker

On 26 April 1945, with Berlin surrounded by Soviet forces and the Third Reich collapsing, Reitsch and Luftwaffe General Robert Ritter von Greim flew into the besieged capital. Their aircraft — a Fieseler Storch, then an Arado Ar 96 — threaded through anti-aircraft fire and fighter patrols. Von Greim was wounded in the leg by ground fire during the approach. Reitsch took the controls and landed on an improvised strip near the Brandenburg Gate.

Hitler had summoned von Greim to appoint him head of the Luftwaffe, replacing Hermann Göring, whom the Führer had declared a traitor. The appointment was meaningless — there was virtually no Luftwaffe left to command. Reitsch spent three days in the bunker. She later described the atmosphere as surreal, with inhabitants oscillating between despair and fantasy. Hitler offered her a cyanide capsule. She accepted it but did not use it.

On 29 April, Reitsch and von Greim flew out of Berlin — one of the last flights to leave the city before it fell. They escaped in an Arado Ar 96 trainer, taking off from a road near the Brandenburg Gate under Soviet fire. It remains one of the most audacious flights in aviation history.

After the War: No Reckoning

Reitsch was captured by American forces and interrogated extensively. Her testimony about the final days in the bunker became an important historical document. She was released in 1946 without charges. In the decades that followed, she resumed flying, set new glider records, and traveled to Africa and India to promote soaring. She was welcomed in aviation circles worldwide — yet she never publicly condemned the Nazi regime in unequivocal terms. Her memoirs, published in the 1950s, portrayed her wartime service as patriotic duty while largely avoiding the moral catastrophe at its centre.

A Legacy That Resists Simplicity

Hanna Reitsch died on 24 August 1979 in Frankfurt. She was 67. Her flying logbook recorded more types flown than almost any pilot of her generation — man or woman. Her courage was never in question. Her judgment, her loyalties, and her refusal to confront what she had served remain deeply troubling.

Reitsch’s story matters precisely because it is uncomfortable. She reminds us that extraordinary skill and extraordinary moral failure can coexist in the same person. Aviation history is full of heroes whose lives fit neatly into inspirational narratives. Hanna Reitsch is not one of them. She is something more complicated and more important: a warning that talent, in the absence of conscience, can serve any master.

Sources: Reitsch, Hanna — “The Sky My Kingdom” (1955); Morrow, Judy — “Hanna Reitsch: Flying for the Fatherland” (1997); US Military Intelligence interrogation reports (1945); Brown, Eric — “Wings on My Sleeve” (2006).