President John F. Kennedy With Hitler Bunker Pilot Hanna Reitsch

President John F. Kennedy With Hitler Bunker Pilot Hanna Reitsch

This one's really, really strange. Hanna Reitsch was a German test pilot who at one point in her career, flew a normally-unmanned V-1 rocket to work out some of the bugs the Nazi's were having with the danged things. She also championed the possibility of adapting the V-1, which was designed to be a pilotless robotic bomb, to a kamikaze vehicle. But she's best known for the bizarre trip she made with General Robert von Greim to Hitler's Bunker in the very final days of the war in Europe. An excerpt from WWII History Magazine:

Greim steered the little spotter plane at treetop level across the outskirts of the capital in order to avoid Soviet fighters. Looking down, he and Hanna saw a hellish landscape of fire, smoke, and street fighting. “From the ground, out of the shadows, from the treetops themselves, leapt the very fires of Hell,” Hanna reported. “Below, Russian tanks and soldiers were swarming among the trees.” Dogfights raged above the Storch as it droned steadily onward.

The plane was rocked by Soviet antiaircraft bursts as it flew eastward over the Tiergarten toward the Brandenburg Gate and the Chancellery. An armor-piercing shell crashed into the underside of the Storch, and a gaping hole appeared in the cockpit flooring. Greim slumped over with his right foot shattered. As the plane began to dive out of control, Hanna reached over and grabbed the stick. She managed to right the craft as it was showered with shell splinters. Then she calmly steered downward to a safe landing, as planned, on the broad Charlottenburger Chaussee near the Brandenburg Gate. She flagged down a passing German staff car, and the pair rode to the Chancellery.

They both got out of the bunker on April 29, 1945, just one day before Hitler's suicide. According to Wikipedia, she died in 1979, but not before visiting JFK as his guest in the White House in 1961. I'm not sure which one of those ladies is supposed to be her in the photograph above. It would be interesting to learn more about that visit and what it was all about. Like I said, this one's really, really strange.

Comments

[R.L.]

"After visiting [Berchtesgaden], you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambitions for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made."

--JFK, summer 1945, from his European Diary

[sb]

JFK probably discussed Hitler with Reitsch because she was one of the few who knew Hitler and was not a war criminal.

[GM]

Hanna is the short woman on the far left of the picture with what looks like a napkin on her head.

[GM]

Hanna was also a close personal friend of Werner von Braun as they had worked together at Peenemunde rocket testing base. He designed Rockets and dreamed of the Moon. She had flown in rocket planes ( the ME-163a ) and wanted to reach the Moon herself.
Since Von Braun was the master mind of Kennedy's Moon project Von Braun had probably recommended that the president would enjoy talking to the brave pocket dynamo Hanna.

[wow power leveling]

Hanna was also a close personal friend of Werner von Braun as they had worked together at Peenemunde rocket testing base. He designed Rockets and dreamed of the Moon. She had flown in rocket planes ( the ME-163a ) and wanted to reach the Moon herself.
Since Von Braun was the master mind of Kennedy's Moon project Von Braun had probably recommended that the president would enjoy talking to the brave pocket dynamo Hanna.