Hanna Reitsch
| Hanna Reitsch | |
|---|---|
Hanna Reitsch greets well-wishers with the Hitler Salute in her hometown of Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra); April 1941. Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Lower Silesia, is at left.
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| Born |
29 March 1912 Hirschberg, Silesia (Jelenia Góra, Poland) |
| Died |
24 August 1979 (aged 67) Frankfurt am Main, West Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for |
Aviator
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Aviator
Only woman in World War II awarded:
Hanna Reitsch (29 March 1912 – 24 August 1979) was Germany's most famous female aviator and test pilot, starting in the early 1930s. During the Nazi era she served as an international representative for the regime. In the 1960s she was sponsored by the West German foreign office as a technical adviser in Ghana and elsewhere.
She was the only woman awarded the Iron Cross First Class and the Luftwaffe Pilot/Observer Badge in Gold with Diamonds during World War II. She set more than 40 altitude and endurance women's records in gliding before and after World War II. In the 1960s she founded a gliding school in Ghana, where she worked for Kwame Nkrumah.
Reitsch was born in Hirschberg, Silesia (today Jelenia Góra in Poland) on 29 March 1912 to an upper-middle-class family. She had a brother, Kurt, and a sister. She began flight training in 1932 at the School of Gliding in Grunau. While a medical student in Berlin she enrolled in a German Air Mail amateur flying school for powered aircraft at Staaken, in a Klemm Kl 25. She left medical school at the University of Kiel in 1933 to become, at the invitation of Wolf Hirth, a full-time glider pilot/instructor at Hornberg in Baden-Württemberg. Reitsch contracted with the Ufa film company as a stunt pilot and set an unofficial endurance record for women of eleven hours and twenty minutes. In January 1934 she joined a South America expedition to study thermal conditions, along with Wolf, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar. While in Argentina, she became the first woman to earn the Silver C Badge, the 25th to do so among world glider pilots. Reitsch became a member of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (DFS) in June 1934 and became a test pilot in 1935. Reitsch enrolled in the Civil Airways Training School in Stettin, where she flew a twin-engine on a cross country flight and aerobatics in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44. Reitsch was given the honorary title of "Flugkapitan" by Ernst Udet in 1937, after successfully testing Hans Jacobs' divebrakes for gliders.
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