An event in Canada is being held to encourage girls and women to think of careers in aviation. The international event is being held at the airport in Lachute, Quebec and is part of a wider international movement called “Women in Aviation Worldwide Week”. The event in Canada is timed to coincide with International Women’s Day. But, it has created a storm of controversy.
This year the organizers have decided to honour German pilot Hanna Reitsch, who held a number of piloting records and aviation firsts in gliders and powered aircraft. She was for example the first woman to fly a helicopter. She was a Luftwaffe test pilot and competed in air races and acrobatics.
However, the controversy comes from the fact that she is alleged to have been an unrepentant Nazi and throughout the 1930’s and 40’s was a major figure in Nazi propaganda. Said to be close to Hitler she was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd and later 1st Class. This came after she made test flights of the Luftwaffe’s Me 163 Komet rocket interceptor.
Among other things, during the war she also made a proposal to Hitler of creation of a suicide force of pilots and even test flew piloted models of the V-1 flying bomb to that end.. Fortunately the German suicide force was never brought to fruition although the idea would be picked up by the Japanese just months later with their kamikaze squadrons.
B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights is protesting the choice and asking for an apology from the Canadian organizers of the aviation event.
The theme for the event this year is “female helicopter pilots” where Reitsch is featured but with no mention of her Nazi past. Reitsch is even spent some of the final days with Hitler in the Berlin bunker as Russian troops closed in on the city.
Historians have said Reitsch, who died in 1997, remained unapologetic for her Nazi past.
Mireille Goyer, the founder and president of the Vancouver-based Institute for Women of Aviation Worldwide (WOAW) responding to questions from the CBC she said, Reitsch was chosen for her piloting skills and “If you’re aiming to talk about her maybe controversial part in political history, to me, that’s not relevant”.
She also said Reitsch’s Nazi past was not mentioned as the WOAW is “not into making political statements”.
A spokesman for B’nai Brith Human Rights League called the WOAW choice of a “Nazi hero” was “wildly inappropriate”. adding that the choice was insulting to the memories of the millions murdered by the Nazi’s. Spokesperson Amanda Hohmann added, “I don’t think that they would think it was irrelevant that someone who was complicit in the genocide of millions of people is now being honoured.”
During interviews in the 1970’s she is reported to have criticized modern Germany as being “soft” and that she was not ashamed to have believed in National Socialism adding the real guilt Germans shared was that they lost.
When she died in 1979 at age 67, apparently from a heart attack, although it has been suggested that is was suicide and that she had taken the cyanide pill Hitler gave her in the final days inside the bunker. There was no reported autopsy.
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