The roar of a single-engine Fieseler Storch cut through the artillery barrage hammering central Berlin on the afternoon of April 26, 1945, a sound so audacious it momentarily silenced the Soviet gunners below. The aircraft, riddled with shrapnel and trailing smoke, was attempting the impossible: a landing on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, a broad avenue lined with shattered trees and burning vehicles, just four hundred meters from the Brandenburg Gate. Inside, the pilot, Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim, was unconscious, his right foot a bloody ruin from a Russian round that had shattered his bones.

Reaching over his slumped body, a diminutive woman with fierce eyes and a pilot’s instinct took the controls, her hands steady as she guided the stricken machine onto the makeshift runway. She was Hanna Reitsch, and she had just flown into the heart of the Nazi apocalypse, not to escape it, but to join her Führer in his final hours.

The woman who would become the most celebrated and reviled female aviator in history was born on March 29, 1912, in Hirschberg, Silesia, a region now part of Poland. The daughter of an ophthalmologist, she was a frail child, small and sickly, but possessed of an iron will that would define her life. Her father envisioned a future in medicine, and she initially agreed, dreaming of becoming a flying missionary doctor in Africa.

That plan evaporated in 1933 when she abandoned her medical studies at the invitation of Wolf Hirth, a legendary glider pioneer who recognized a rare, almost supernatural talent in the young woman. By the following year, she had shattered the women’s gliding endurance record and become the first woman in the world to earn the Silver C gliding badge, a feat achieved during a research expedition in Argentina. Her ascent was meteoric, a trajectory that would place her at the very center of the Third Reich’s technological ambitions.

By 1935, Reitsch was a test pilot for the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug, the German Research Institute for Gliding. Two years later, Generaloberst Ernst Udet, a World War I ace and head of the Luftwaffe’s technical office, awarded her the title of Flugkapitän, making her the first woman in history to hold the rank. She was posted to the Luftwaffe’s secret testing center at Rechlin-Lärz, where the regime’s most dangerous and experimental aircraft were put through their paces.

In February 1938, she stunned the world by flying the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 helicopter indoors at the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, hovering the fragile machine between the rafters for three weeks of nightly demonstrations during the International Automobile Show. The regime, recognizing her photogenic appeal and fearless demeanor, thrust her into the spotlight, using her image in newsreels, magazines, and recruitment material throughout the late 1930s. She was never a formal party member, yet she became the public face of the new Luftwaffe, a symbol of German technological prowess and national resolve.

Her wartime service pushed her into the realm of the suicidal. She tested the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and the Dornier Do 17, but it was her work on the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, a rocket-powered interceptor that was as lethal to its pilots as to the enemy, that cemented her legend. She described flying it as “thundering through the skies sitting on a cannonball.”

On October 30, 1942, during her fifth glide test in the Me 163B, the takeoff dolly failed to release. She attempted every recovery technique, but the aircraft crashed at roughly 240 kilometers per hour. The impact fractured her skull in multiple places, crushed her nose, and drove her jaw out of alignment.

Before losing consciousness, she insisted on writing her flight report, a testament to her fanatical dedication. Five months later, she walked out of the hospital and was personally awarded the Iron Cross First Class by Hitler, one of only three women to ever receive it. The decoration was a profound validation, binding her loyalty to the regime in a way that no political ideology could.

In February 1943, weeks after the catastrophic surrender at Stalingrad, Reitsch accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to tour the Eastern Front. For three weeks, she flew a Fieseler Storch between Luftwaffe units, raising morale at a moment when the German war machine was beginning to crack. Greim, a highly respected airman, became a close personal friend, and their relationship would ultimately lead them both to the gates of hell.

In February 1944, Reitsch was summoned to Berchtesgaden for a personal commendation. She used the audience to propose a desperate, fanatical plan: a unit of pilots prepared to die in their aircraft, flying manned versions of the V-1 flying bomb directly into Allied warships and bridges. Hitler was initially unenthusiastic, but Reitsch pressed, and the result was the SS Selbstopferkommando Leonidas, a suicide squadron placed under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Otto Skorzeny.

Reitsch was the first to volunteer, test-flying the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, a manned V-1 with a cockpit grafted onto its fuselage. Six of its seven test pilots were killed or seriously injured before she flew it, but her experience landing the Me 163 at extreme stall speeds allowed her to bring the Reichenberg down safely where others had failed. The Luftwaffe High Command resisted the program, and it was ultimately disbanded in 1945 without ever flying a combat mission.

Her loyalty by this point extended beyond aviation into a willful blindness. She held private discussions with Heinrich Himmler, describing him afterwards as “intelligent and rational.” In October 1944, when test pilot Peter Riedel showed her a booklet documenting the horrors of the concentration camps, she refused to believe it, dismissing it as Allied propaganda and taking the matter to Himmler personally.

By her own later account, Himmler told her that the truth would be the rope by which they would hang the regime if Germany lost the war. Reitsch chose to believe she had been told the truth, a decision that would define her legacy for decades to come.

By April 1945, the regime was in its death throes. On April 23, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as commander of the Luftwaffe, and within hours, Greim was summoned from southern Germany to Berlin to take his place. Reitsch, who had said her goodbyes to her family at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg on the evening of April 25, insisted on flying with him.

The route into Berlin was a gauntlet of Soviet anti-aircraft fire and marauding fighter patrols. They flew from Munich to Rechlin, then to Gatow airfield on the outskirts of Berlin, with Reitsch riding in the tail compartment of the aircraft. A fighter escort of roughly forty aircraft covered the run; several were shot down.

For the final leg into central Berlin, Greim took the controls of a Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, with Reitsch navigating a route that had been scouted by Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur. Soviet anti-aircraft fire caught them on the approach, and a round shattered Greim’s right foot, knocking him unconscious. Reitsch reached over his shoulder, took the stick, and put the Storch down on the avenue, a feat of aviation that defied all odds.

They reached the Führerbunker that evening. Hitler, his hand trembling, promoted Greim to Generalfeldmarschall, the last German officer ever raised to that rank, and gave him command of a Luftwaffe that scarcely existed. Then he pressed a vial of cyanide into Reitsch’s hand, with another for Greim.

By her own account, she accepted it without hesitation, prepared to die in the bunker if ordered. They stayed for roughly three days, during which Reitsch later described Hitler as a man whose personality had completely disintegrated. She played with the Goebbels children in the corridors and pleaded to remain, but Hitler refused.

He ordered Greim to leave Berlin and ensure that Heinrich Himmler was punished for his attempt to negotiate with the Allies. Late on April 28, they took off in an Arado Ar 96 trainer from the same improvised airstrip, climbing through fire from the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. They reached Karl Dönitz at Plön, carrying two things out of the bunker: a poison capsule from Hitler’s hand and a loyalty that no defeat would shake.

On May 4, 1945, Reitsch was found at a hospital near Kitzbühel, Austria. The British test pilot Eric Brown, who had known her before the war, identified her and handed her into American custody. Days earlier, on the night of May 3, her father had killed her mother, her sister Heidi, and Heidi’s three children at the family’s wartime refuge in Salzburg, rather than face Soviet repatriation, then turned the weapon on himself.

Reitsch was held and interrogated for roughly eighteen months. The US Air Force Intelligence Report compiled on October 8, 1945, contains the lines that have followed her name ever since. Asked about being ordered out of the bunker, she said it was “the blackest day when I could not die at my Führer’s side.”

She described the bunker as “the altar of the fatherland.”

In 1947, denazification authorities classified her as “not affected,” citing her lack of formal party membership, and released her. She moved to Frankfurt, returned to gliding, and in 1951 published her memoir, Fliegen, Mein Leben. The English edition, The Sky My Kingdom, followed in 1955.

She finished third at the 1952 World Gliding Championships in Spain. In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited her to establish a gliding center in New Delhi. In 1961, President John F.

Kennedy received her at the White House. From 1962 to ’66, she lived in Ghana, founding the first national gliding school at Afienya for Kwame Nkrumah. Surviving letters between Reitsch and Nkrumah are intimate in tone.

The arrangement ended when he was deposed in February 1966.

Her later life produced one irony after another. In the 1970s, she became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International. She tactfully avoided the 1972 Munich Olympics and never publicly commented on the murder of 11 Israeli athletes.

At Edwards Air Force Base in California around 1977, observers recorded her wearing a diamond-set brooch with a swastika at its center, Hitler’s gift, which she said she would wear for the rest of her life, though displaying it was illegal in Germany. Her last interview with the American photojournalist Ron Leckner in 1978 ended any remaining ambiguity. “I’m not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism,” she told him.

“Many Germans feel guilty about the war, but they don’t explain the real guilt we share, that we lost.”

In August 1979, she wrote to Eric Brown, “It began in the bunker, there it shall end.” Within weeks, she was dead. A heart attack in Frankfurt on August 24, 1979, aged 67.

No autopsy was performed. The cyanide capsule Hitler had pressed into her hand 34 years earlier was never accounted for. The woman who flew into the heart of the Nazi regime, who defended it for over three decades, took her secrets with her, leaving behind a legacy of extraordinary courage and inexplicable moral failure.