Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were the only two
women to serve the Nazi Third Reich as test pilots during the Second World War.
These women were in many ways similar. They were both brilliant pilots, they had a very strong
sense of honour and duty for their their nation, although they had a very different understanding
of what honor 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 she fought to actually help bring down.
Hanna Reitsch started the war testing a machine called the Gigant or Giant which is actually
a massive glider. It could take up to 100 armed troops or even a tank and the front of it would
open sort of bit like a seed pod and this tank would come juddering out into action.
She was about five foot four, her head only reached the top of the wheels and in fact
she had to tie wooden blocks to the bottom of her feet in order to be able to reach
the pedals to test this machine. From there she tested things called wing blades on the
front of bombers which were designed, sort of as prototypes, to cut through the steel cables that
tethered barrage balloons, Britain's main defense against bombers and later against the v1s.
She went on to test even the Messerschmitt 163 comet which was powered by the combustion of
these very unstable fuels an incredibly dangerous machine that cost the lives of many of the test
pilots. Her great skill was in gliding and these machines would burn their fuel incredibly fast
and then have to glide down and she was testing the gliding landings. This is a V1 here by 1944
Hannah proposed having a manned version just like this, but with a little cockpit
on the top and the idea was that then they could target shipping in in advance of D-day and be
very precise in in what targets they took out. Essentially she tested a prototype cruise missile.
Melitta Schiller, Melitta von Stauffenberger as she became with her married name,
wasn't just a pilot she was a brilliant test pilot but she was also an aeronautical engineer.
And so she would spend her days developing the equipment for some of the most pioneering
military aircraft. For example she developed the dive sites and the dive breaks for the Juncker
JU-87 and she also worked on the JU-88s. The 87 is the Stuka dive bomber so these machines they're
absolutely extraordinary they are the machines that are synonymous with the blitzkrieg. They
go incredibly fast and then they the way it works is they come up quite high and then they turn and
they come down at virtually 80 degrees this will be at about 350 miles an hour. And they come down
to target very individual tanks or particular targets on the ground. And Melitta was not just
the aeronautical engineer on these things, but also insisted on conducting her own test. So if
a male test pilot would test a dive bomber in the morning, do a nosedive I mean that was considered
courageous. Melitta would test a Stuka dive bomber 15 times in a single day. She did over 2,000
tests during the course of the war. No one else came anywhere near her, so really she was working
at the limit of what was humanly possible. As you come down at those speeds what happens is
normally you red out first the blood gets forced into your face and into your eyes and then
very often the pilot would black out. So part of the value of Melitta's work was the development of
the dive breaks which would automatically kick in slow the machine and enable it to curve up again
and circle back around to the airfield and this is what saved the lives of many of those pilots.
There was a reason why Melitta was working so hard because in in 1937 when the Nuremberg
laws came in Melitta found out that her father had actually been born Jewish. So she tried to
secure not only her life, but to save her family by making herself so valuable to their regime
that they offered her what was called "equal to Aryan status" so she was working under
duress. Later Melitta also worked on the Bf-109 sometimes called the ME or Messerschmitt 109
which was a very versatile plane. It was initially conceived as an interceptor, but
it was used in day bombing and night time bombing as well. It was a very pioneering plane, it was
enclosed, it had retractable wheels, and Melitta worked on it for the the blind flying equipment.
I think if there's one thing that really comes from this story that is quite simple it's the
absolute hypocrisy of the Nazi regime who believed that there was only you know one space for women
really Kirche, Küche, Kinder, and there was no place at all for Jews. And yet when they
needed them they gave two women in the very masculine, as they thought, field of flight
the highest honors the Iron Cross. They're both nominated for the Iron Cross First Class
and they were women of course and one of them the Third Reich themselves designated as Jewish.