Hanna reitsch hitler goring

By King Alan Johnson

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The woman who would one day become one of the best-known test pilots of the Third Reich was born on March 29, , into an upper-middle-class family in Hirschberg, Silesia. From early on, Hanna Reitsch was an intense, determined and intelligent individual. She became fascinated with flying at a young age, reportedly attempting to jump off the balcony of her home at age 4 in her eagerness to experience flight. Looking back on her childhood, she wrote in her autobiography The Sky My Kingdom: &#;The longing grew in me, grew with every bird I saw go flying across the azure summer sky, with every cloud that sailed past me on the wind, till it turned to a deep, insistent homesickness, a yearning that went with me everywhere and could never be stilled.&#;

By the time she was 14, she had set her sights on becoming a flying missionary doctor in Africa. It was a dream that seemed likely to please both her authoritarian ophthalmologist father, a Protestant, and her devout Catholic mother. During her teens she studied the writings of Ignatius of Loyola to discipline her mind and develop highly focused concentration. She made a pact with her father that if she did not mention going to a glider school until she had completed her secondary schooling, she would then be allowed to learn how to

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Hanna Reitsch was born on 29 March in Hirschberg (now Jelenia Góra, Poland). Dreaming of becoming a pilot since she was a young child, she often visited local air clubs. Although she studied medicine, she managed to get a pilot license in and later decided to leave medical school to become a professional test pilot. In the following years, she tested various civil and military airplanes before and during the war, which led to several accidents and injuries. For her successes she – among only a few German women – was awarded with both classes of the Eisernes Kreuz (Iron Cross) and became a propaganda star in the Third Reich.

Her political attitude towards National Socialism could be described merely as ‘naïve’, although she proposed the idea of ‘self-sacrificing’ pilots in , which was nevertheless rejected by Hitler. After Hermann Göring was suspended of his duties as the Luftwaffe commander-in-chief on 23 April , Reitsch flew the German Luftwaffe Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim to Berlin on 26 April , so that Greim could be appointed the new commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe by Hitler personally. During their flight over Berlin, which was already encircled by the Red Army, their airplane came under anti-aircraft fire with Greim wounded in the right foot an