2RHPZ
04-30-2006, 01:15 PM
Hanna Reitsch: Hitler's Female Test Pilot
Groundbreaking pilot Hanna Reitsch was determined to fly from early childhood, and she would set more than 40 records in her lifetime. But she was tragically slow to recognize the ruin into which the Nazis were leading her homeland.
By R.E. van Patten
The woman who would one day become one of the best-known test pilots of the Third Reich was born on March 29, 1912, 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 1955 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 fly. Thanks to her determined silence, she managed to fulfill that pact. On the condition that she would also take a course in what was then called "domestic science," she was allowed to go to the Grunau School of Gliding.
historynet.com (http://historynet.com/ahi/bl-hanna-reitsch/)
Groundbreaking pilot Hanna Reitsch was determined to fly from early childhood, and she would set more than 40 records in her lifetime. But she was tragically slow to recognize the ruin into which the Nazis were leading her homeland.
By R.E. van Patten
The woman who would one day become one of the best-known test pilots of the Third Reich was born on March 29, 1912, 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 1955 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 fly. Thanks to her determined silence, she managed to fulfill that pact. On the condition that she would also take a course in what was then called "domestic science," she was allowed to go to the Grunau School of Gliding.
historynet.com (http://historynet.com/ahi/bl-hanna-reitsch/)