Title: Hanna Reitsch: Excerpts from Two Letters [de: Auszug aus zwei Briefen von Hanna Reitsch an F. Schubert in São Paulo (Brasilien)]
Author: Hanna Reitsch
[LINK]
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 03, Issue 01 (January 1949)
[ToC LINK]
Page(s): 29-34
[SCAN LINK]
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
The magazine Der Weg (El Sendero), was German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich Government.
The magazine ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
Excerpt from Two Letters to F. Schubert in São Paulo, Brazil
by Hanna Reitsch
First Letter:
Only a few days ago, your letter of May 22, 1948, came into my hands, and I can scarcely express how immense my joy has been at your steadfast remembrance. Do not believe a word of what has been trumpeted about me into the world. I am writing about it in detail myself, but for that, I would almost need a cloister cell, since not a single day belongs to me, overwhelmed as I am by the distress of all those who come to me seeking help.
The claim that I had hidden Hitler in Argentina was the reason for my imprisonment, which I learned upon my release into freedom after fifteen months in a prison cell. While I was utterly cut off from the outside world, an American journalist concocted a so-called “eyewitness account by H. R.,” a piece utterly false and most shamefully exploiting my name for a sensational journalistic venture. In it, tales—and with them a slender, red thread of truth—were twisted into a novel of falsehoods. And since only what leaves a sensational impression is deemed interesting, I was thereby dragged into human and political filth, despite the fact that everyone who knows me understands I was never part of any political organization. Instead, I was a pilot with body and soul, with every fiber of my heart, forging bridges of friendship from my country to others—until the outbreak of war imposed upon me the duty to apply my expertise, as every one of the best did, out of fervent love for their fatherland, as a matter of course.
That success and achievements are now demeaned and trampled upon is the cross one must bear upright and proud. Yet one is repeatedly stunned by the untruth and forgery tied to it—take, for instance, H. R. in Trevor-Roper’s work as a historian, The Last Days of Hitler, an article that courses through history books, alongside all similar works claiming to be history but wrought with utter unscrupulousness. They care only for sensation and profit, neither verifying documents nor applying the faintest scientific methods to uncover the objective, truthful core of things.
All the vile things read over there in connection with me surely belong to a cunningly devised system of lies, a realization that has, especially in recent weeks, sharply opened my eyes. For those who persist on a straight, clear, clean, proud path are not welcome in these times, and every effort is made to shatter such examples, to strip people of their faith in lived and exemplified values Litteratext. I am deeply grateful if you would help shed light to dispel these untruths from the world. Do not misunderstand me; this is not about me, but through these vile slanders, the faith in the goodness of others has been broken in many, and therein lies the danger I see. An adversary recently told me: One must destroy the German’s examples, and then one breaks him. It is a diabolical plan, yet sadly, it rings all too true.
Everything offered to me since my captivity—whether from North America or other lands, promising the most enticing opportunities to fly—I have rejected without exception, so that in this time of need, I might belong to my beloved fatherland. It is easy to do so in times of fortune, but it is a self-evident duty to offer it all one’s love and strength even more ardently in disgrace and distress. Thus, I stayed—like one fallen from the sky, standing in the street—at the place where I spent the final months of my arrest. That was Oberursel. And so I came to be here. A loyal soul made himself available to me with his strength, managing my household, allowing my own energy to remain free thus far for helping others. You may wonder how such help is possible. On that alone, I could write volumes. The victor did not provide us the example that might have changed people. He did the very things we condemn in the past, and coupled with the agonizing distress, poverty, and hunger, he has thereby made people far worse than they were. I am not a politician, nor will I ever be. I am an idealist and will remain one, living by values that stay constant across all times and every land in the world. To “preserve” them today, or to awaken them in individuals through love, is harder than perhaps it ever was. Yet because many hearts open to me in love and trust, there exists the chance to untangle confusions and break the cycle of hatred into which the victors, through their methods, have wholly enmeshed themselves.
I could tell you much more, at great length. It would fill volumes and could go on day and night. In closing today, I wish to say that everything I was privileged to experience over there in 1934 remains a vivid, shining memory, among the most beautiful I hold from beyond the fatherland.
Second Letter:
For the first time since the war, a circle of those affected by this conflict has gathered here, united by an extraordinarily harsh fate—a fate so heavy and severe that it has, until now, shunned “the market and the street” to proclaim itself, borne instead in silence to the very limits of human endurance.
(Here, the great sisterhood of women has assembled, those from whom the war took their husbands—whether irrevocably, with the news of death received, or with the faint hope a missing person report still sustains, or perhaps for just a little longer until he, still in captivity, returns after all these years. — Common to all these women is the burden and worry, the suffering and sadness, filling the daily life of the solitary woman who, at every step, misses her companion.)
Perhaps it is already worth much that, in the bitter loneliness of our individualism, we can at least affirm the community of our fellow sufferers when we gather, if only to see that others bear even heavier loads than we do, yet still carry on. It is a comfort to know one need not traverse the dark valley of loneliness and need alone, and that alone can help.
It is our lot that our thoughts circle endlessly around what we have lost. Many lost much in the war, but what we had to surrender surpasses home and hearth, money and goods; it exceeds even health or the wholeness of limbs; we have lost more than our happiness, though that is so easily said! What remains within us as the war’s saddest ruins stretches far beyond personal affliction—there, families have become ruins.
The marriage to which we devoted our lives is something beyond the personal, more than just one plus one. From it sprang the wider family when we bore children. As father and mother, we were set within a broader circle of life.
Now the man, the father, is gone. He is missing not only among the children but also in that greater entity we call family. The family has become a crippled being, a truth we feel at every turn.
A woman becomes a mother not only physically through a man; he belongs to her for further motherhood too—for raising children, for upholding true motherly love, for sustaining the warmth of the nest. True motherhood also entails being protected and cared for, the security only the father of our children can provide.
Instead, we who belong in the bosom of the family are thrust into the struggle for survival, tasked with men’s duties we must shoulder both inwardly and outwardly. This cannot occur without altering our womanhood; we grow hard, and harder still, more independent, more commanding. Never can we, as we long to, lay both hands gently—nurturing, guarding, healing—around what we cherish; always, we must wield a harsh hand too, harsh for men’s work, harsh for fatherly discipline and punishment. And how often we fail, our children gazing at us with questioning eyes. It is, after all, something unnatural, something beyond our strength: to be man and woman, father and mother, all at once.
Let no one then come and cast the first stone at the woman who can no longer bear it and seeks oblivion; let no one come to carp at our children, sneering:
"Yes, yes, the father’s missing."
If our children grow into normal people, we have accomplished something extraordinary. And many women do achieve this extraordinary feat, their children becoming more capable than those from intact marriages and families where father and mother shirk their duties. Yet we will neither hide it from ourselves nor others: we widows and solitary women with our children are no longer something whole, rounded, or right. We are more vulnerable than if the man stood for us…
And do not others know this all too well? — Do we not time and again face the reality that:
"they can do this to us,"
as some say in resignation? Even here, in the most Christian community of Morsbach, it is not always clear, even to the highest ranks, that oppressing widows and orphans ranks among the sins that cry to heaven. Here too, much follows the path of least resistance—sometimes from superficiality, often not from malice, but from the easiest way. They rid themselves of us swiftly, giving little further thought.
And so, from reflecting inwardly on our plight, we turn to our outward condition. What does the community do for us, that we might preserve and sustain the grievously wounded “family” with our children as best we can? But this leads us to ask: what does our fate matter to the rest? That we are war victims cannot be hushed up.
Our men did not fall to chance or misfortune, a mere “personal stroke of bad luck”; they walked a path of sacrifice that concerns all. They gave their lives to a service commanded from within or imposed from without. Our men loved us no less than those who spared themselves. We will not be robbed of the pride that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s own. — That millions were then demonically toyed with in their sacrifice, let another judge that.
We live in a state that even now assures provision for the kin of those who served it lifelong, should they die. Likewise, there once was a law promising care for the survivors of those ready not just to live for the state but to die for it. That law was one day simply erased. — Since then, war victims walk in beggar’s rags. — This breach of law was justified as a means to crush the lust for war. Women were cast into hardship so men might learn to decry war. One would think that since the Boer War, such a method would be deemed barbaric in Europe. One would also think the flimsiness of this excuse would have been unmasked by men tasked with guarding morality and custom.
War, the great antithesis of peace, is reborn and brewed wherever people cannot live in peace, where destructive forces, not constructive order, seize them. How then can the son of a war widow, watching his mother waste away in the fight for life, not become a fierce hater of all who permit this—not for love of her, but against them? How can he believe in justice, let alone serve it? — Must not envy grip him even in childhood? How can he learn to value authority when all authorities failed by not aiding his mother?
Peace cannot be decreed or bestowed; it must grow from humanity’s deepest roots. Yet in all ages, the family has stood as the first haven and symbol of peace. — Where the family is shattered, war festers. The family is the foremost cell of order; if it dissolves or is torn apart, morality and ethics areची imperiled as by nothing else. Only through love has the world ever been, or ever will be, redeemed.
But what if the innermost circle of love—the family—has, in countless cases, already frozen amid the terrible external distress crashing over it? What if children, who already knowsoever no father’s love, must also lack their mother’s, her heart brimming with worry and need, her hands full of toil, her nights steeped in sorrow, her days leaving no time? — Yet the new welfare laws offer us no other path; no family can live on what is granted there. It is a disgrace! — And still, no one has stepped forward. — Back when the pension law was scrapped, we thought it impossible that our men’s comrades would allow it.
We know, and bear witness, that there were men who flung their lives into the breach for others; those men did not return. Where now are those who will stand for us at home, as our men once did for them out there? — So it falls to the war-wounded, those burdened with the war’s own scars, to take up our suffering too. Only they, it seems, have not forgotten:
"I had a comrade…"
only they strive to see and fill the void torn where they lost that comrade. The rest, it seems, have forgotten. — For who among those not personally touched knows of the widow and orphan welfare rules? Ask around: time and again, the stunned reply:
"Surely that can’t be?"
— But it is so. Perhaps one day the returnee must face the fallen. Then we will have no choice but to accuse! — A people must one day again look its dead in the eye; so long as our nation bears the shame of this “provision” for its victims, it cannot heal, cannot reclaim its honor. Is it not dire enough that we women, we widows—who in nearly all times and among most peoples went “veiled”—must step into the public square to voice our demands? That too is unnatural atop all else. We cannot seize our cause ourselves, seek our rights; daily life already devours our strength, our children ever languishing. — We thank the comrades in the Reichsbund, who bear our load alongside their own. We know only unity can now make us stronger. Yet all remains wanting so long as the state does not act to preserve families. It must realize that, as things stand, it performs a gravedigger’s service to its own existence.
For a people’s graves are not its sorrow alone; a people’s fallen are its pride, and a people’s pride, this highest of all, gives birth anew to the world. Today, on the day of the currency reform, we Germans tread another path of sacrifice. Currency supplants currency; even our last pennies, still clinging to the sweat of our men’s labor, are now lost, paid into the great treasury. But let us hold fast to this: we have already paid into that treasury once with a currency no man or power under the sun has the right to devalue—we paid with blood! — Perhaps that blood settled a debt heavier on a people than the one addressed today. Perhaps it is the secret of the millions our nation gave up, if we yet hold reserve for a currency not yet minted, where loyalty and faith, love and peace, are not yet restored to worth and circulation. Think of the dead, and strike the first peace coin of this new currency.