Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
Audiobook15 hours
The Women Who Flew for Hitler: A True Story of Soaring Ambition and Searing Rivalry
Written by Clare Mulley
Narrated by Christa Lewis
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented, courageous, and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different and neither woman had a good word to say for the other.
Hanna was middle-class, vivacious, and distinctly Aryan, while the darker, more self-effacing Melitta came from an aristocratic Prussian family. Both were driven by deeply held convictions about honor and patriotism; but ultimately, while Hanna tried to save Hitler's life, begging him to let her fly him to safety in April 1945, Melitta covertly supported the most famous attempt to assassinate the Führer. Their interwoven lives provide vivid insight into Nazi Germany and its attitudes toward women, class, and race.
Acclaimed biographer Clare Mulley gets under the skin of these two distinctive and unconventional women, giving a full-and as yet largely unknown-account of their contrasting yet strangely parallel lives, against a changing backdrop of the 1936 Olympics, the Eastern Front, the Berlin Air Club, and Hitler's bunker.
Hanna was middle-class, vivacious, and distinctly Aryan, while the darker, more self-effacing Melitta came from an aristocratic Prussian family. Both were driven by deeply held convictions about honor and patriotism; but ultimately, while Hanna tried to save Hitler's life, begging him to let her fly him to safety in April 1945, Melitta covertly supported the most famous attempt to assassinate the Führer. Their interwoven lives provide vivid insight into Nazi Germany and its attitudes toward women, class, and race.
Acclaimed biographer Clare Mulley gets under the skin of these two distinctive and unconventional women, giving a full-and as yet largely unknown-account of their contrasting yet strangely parallel lives, against a changing backdrop of the 1936 Olympics, the Eastern Front, the Berlin Air Club, and Hitler's bunker.
Author
Clare Mulley
Clare Mulley is the author of The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, which won the Daily Mail Biographers’ Club Prize.
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Reviews for The Women Who Flew for Hitler
Rating: 3.9545454545454546 out of 5 stars
4/5
11 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In this parallel history of two German aviatrix, the notorious Hannah Reitsch and the less well-known Melitta von Stauffenberg, one essentially has a meditation on the limits of patriotism. While both started out wanting to build a new Germany after the Great War Reitsch believed until the end of her life in the Nazi dream of one land and one people, wherein those who did not belong to that people were edited out of the picture; this is not news. Stauffenberg is the more interesting case as she was the sister-in-law of Claus von Stauffenberg and so was associated with the July 20th Plot. Further, while Reitsch appears to have been the better natural pilot Stauffenberg was a full-fledged engineer working in the German aviation industry until the point where her taint of Jewish ancestry caught up with her; but not before she received the Iron Cross for her work. In the end, while Reitsch lived long enough to be reviled, Stauffenberg died in the waning days of the war trying to assure the survival of her husband. Mulley ends on the note that whatever else the lives of these women demonstrate they illustrate the short-sighted and stupid limitations of the Nazi worldview.