Hanna Reitsch (1912-1979): The Global Career of a Nazi Celebrity

Abstract

Drawing on the German, Indian and Ghanaian press, personal correspondence, published memoirs and diplomatic records, this article examines the career of gliding pilot Hanna Reitsch as a case study in transnational history. In the Third Reich, while working as a test pilot on military projects, Reitsch emerged as the most prominent female aviator. After 1945, Reitsch failed to distance herself from her earlier support of the Nazi regime, but this did not prevent her from re-launching an international career after the downfall of National Socialism. Funded by the West German diplomatic service, she served as a prominent aviation advisor to the left-wing governments of postcolonial India and Ghana between 1959 and 1966. She found it unproblematic to work for Marxist governments in the postcolonial world, which, in turn, courted her for her technical expertise irrespective of her reactionary political outlook. Her career reveals how experts with morally questionable records came to play crucial roles in the global diffusion of scientific and technological knowledge, upon which prominent notions of modernity remained predicated all over the globe. Remarkable for its longevity and global reach, Reitsch's professional life brings into view domestic and transnational aspects of German twentieth-century history rarely treated in the same frame.