She was daughter of Dr. Wilhelm (Willy) Reitsch, who was an ophthalmology clinic manager, and his wife Emy Helff-Hibler von Alpenheim, who was a member of the Austrian nobility.

[4] While a medical student in Berlin, she enrolled in a German Air Mail amateur flying school for powered aircraft at Staaken, training in a Klemm Kl 25.

[5] In 1933, Reitsch left medical school at the University of Kiel to become, at the invitation of Wolf Hirth, a full-time glider pilot/instructor at Hornberg in Baden-Württemberg.

[6] Reitsch contracted with the Ufa Film Company as a stunt pilot and set an unofficial endurance record for women of 11 hours and 20 minutes.

[7] In January 1934, she joined a South America expedition to study thermal conditions, along with Wolf Hirth, Peter Riedel and Heini Dittmar.

[10] Reitsch enrolled in the Civil Airways Training School in Stettin, where she flew a twin-engine on a cross country flight and aerobatics in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44.

[11] In 1937, Ernst Udet gave Reitsch the honorary title of Flugkapitän after she had successfully tested Hans Jacobs's divebrakes for gliders.

[17] In 1938, during the three weeks of the International Automobile Exhibition in Berlin, she made daily flights of the Fa 61 helicopter inside the Deutschlandhalle.

[citation needed] A crash landing on her fifth Me 163 flight badly injured Reitsch; she spent five months in a hospital recovering.

[citation needed] In February 1943 after news of the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, she accepted an invitation from Generaloberst Robert Ritter von Greim to visit the Eastern Front.

[23] On 28 February 1944, she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which "would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved."

They adapted the V-1 flying bomb into the Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg, including a two-seater and a single-seater with and without the mechanisms to land.

"[29] In October 1944, Reitsch claimed she was shown a booklet by Peter Riedel which he had obtained while in the German Embassy in Stockholm, concerning the gas chambers.

[30] During the last days of the war, Hitler dismissed Hermann Göring as head of the Luftwaffe and appointed Robert Ritter von Greim to replace him.

[Note 1] Troops of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army, which was fighting its way through the Tiergarten from the north, tried to shoot the plane down fearing that Hitler was escaping in it, but it took off successfully.

[Note 3] When asked about being ordered to leave the Führerbunker on 29 April 1945,[43] Reitsch and von Greim reportedly repeated the same answer: "It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer's side."

She criticised his incompetence as a leader (e.g. his selection of the wrong persons for office) and argued repeatedly that never again must an individual have so much control over any country.

In 1952, Reitsch won a bronze medal in the World Gliding Championships in Spain; she was the first woman to compete[50] and in 1955 she became German champion.

In 1959, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited Reitsch, who spoke fluent English, to start a gliding centre, and she flew with him over New Delhi.

At Afienya she founded the first black African national gliding school, working closely with the government and the armed forces.

But today in all of Germany you can't find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power ...

Former British test pilot and Royal Navy officer Eric Brown said he received a letter from Reitsch in early August 1979 in which she said, "It began in the bunker, there it shall end."

Brown speculated that Reitsch had taken the cyanide capsule Hitler had given her in the bunker, and that she had taken it as part of a suicide pact with Greim.