Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 19 - Hanna Reitsch Hitler's Squadron

The use of the proverb "seek the woman" in the study of history is gaining in the biographies of various leaders, especially tyrants, with scholars pointing to the roles their wives, played in the rise and fall of different countries. The search for the woman behind the rise and fall of the Third Reich leads the researcher to one woman, who more than any other influenced the fate of this regime. The woman is Hanna Reitsch, whose character and career as a test pilot served as a source of inspiration and an essential contribution  for the regime.

Hanna Reitsch [1912-1979] began her activities as an outstanding glider pilot. She broke about forty world records of gliding industry, during a very long career of about fifty years, before and after World War II. Simultaneously with her gliding career she became a test plot of the most advanced and important Nazi fighter aircraft. One remarkable accomplishment of her was being one of the first helicopter pilot in the world,  flying experimental model in 1938, in an Indoor stadium in Berlin.

Her autobiography, "Flight is my life", on which this chapter in the book "Holocaust and Aviation" is based entirety, is full of fascinating and unique flight descriptions, which testify to her skills as a pilot. Reitsch expands on describing her experiences during the experimental flights and most of the book is devoted to the love of flight. But at the same time one learns of her blind loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime, which provided her with the opportunity to realize her love of flying. The racist anti-Semitism demonstrated in Germany, which was an integral part of her daily life, does not receive any attention in the book, so it is understandable that she supported it.

Reitsch gradually became one of the pillars of the regime, as the propaganda of German aviation achievements was an integral part of the Nazi air dictatorship. As a photogenic woman she became one of the most prominent symbols of propaganda and traveled on many international tours, in order to cultivate foreign relations.

Hanna Reitsch had a short and slender boyish figure, with a lovely but common appearance. She was far more important and famous than any other woman pilot in the world, including the well-remembered American Amelia Earhart from that period. Earhart was a global media star. After Earhart disappeared in the Pacific in 1937, a vacuum was created. Reitsch became the most famous pilot in the world.

Although she belonged to the Nazi Party, which was right-wing and conservative in its views on women, she was opinionated, unconventional and controversial. She was greater then life, aspired to full self-realization and breakthrough of limitations. To some extent she was swept out with her enthusiasm, that became destructive for her. She is remembered in this way in history.

Hannah Reitsch has influenced global public opinion, the German public and the fanatical Nazi elite. She held the stick at both ends. On the one end, she gained international recognition and acclaim as an ambassador for the masses on the aviation world. At the same time she was at the forefront of the development of secret weapons for the Nazi army. It was an unusual combination that had no equal in Nazi Germany. It placed her in an excellent position of inheriting Hitler's place, along with her partner, the Luftwaffe chief Robert Greim, Hermann Goering's successor at the end of the war.

More than any other biographical detail, significant is the fact that her personal career accurately reflected all of the history of the Third Reich: in her early days, in the early 1930s, she was a personal student and friend of some of the forerunners of the gliding sport in Germany. Gliding linked war veterans with the aviation industry and air force established by the Nazis, who violated Versailles Treaty. Later in her career, in the late 1930s, she became an outstanding test pilot for Ernest Udet, head of the development department of fighter airplanes, during the period of establishing and strengthening of the Luftwaffe. In the early 1940s, at the middle of the war, She was involved in several ambitious aviation projects designed to overthrow the Allies. Towards the end of the war, when Nazi Germany collapsed, she set up the Nazi Suicide Squadron, with the aim of using pilots to fly the guided bomb V-1. 

She made the last flight to Hitler's bunker in Berlin in the last days of the war and was one of the few witnesses to his last days. After the war she became an object of admiration for the neo-Nazis, because her last flight to Berlin was the key in their conspiracy theory, about Hitler's survival. Although she remained a firm supporter of the Third Reich after the war, declaring its achievements with no remorse, her international activities in the gliding and helicopters arenas helped her connections with third world leaders, who hoped to promote aviation in their countries. She contributed greatly to the restoration of Germany's international status.

Because Reitsch was in many ways an exemplary figure of a woman larger than life, a brave pilot, who opened up new frontiers in aviation, the autobiography is a challenge for the critical approach to Nazism. The solution to the riddle of her character lies in the set of social reasons for the rise of Nazism. She was not a fanatic. Like most German citizens, she was undecided about her full solidarity with the regime. It is not clear whether notable events that should have served as personal warning signs such as the Nuremberg Laws, the violation of the laws of Versailles and the conquest of Czechoslovakia, Kristallnacht and the Final Solution, were part of her ideological worldview. Maybe she saw them only as necessary or as alien propaganda. She belonged to the "state generation". Her personal development as a person and as a pilot was integrated with the development of the Nazi regime. Her love of flying was combined with German patriotism and admiration for Hitler, along with the many personal benefits that she received thanks to her volunteering spirit. As a test pilot she was also trapped in a career in which only the few and best survived the challenges. This could make her identify with the race theory and ''survival of the strong''.

Hannah Reitsch wrote "Flight is My Life" in chronological order. Each chapter describes another stage in her life. As a result, Reitsch focuses on the technical side of test flights. In addition, she describes the landscape, her feelings and opinions of the people around her. The whole is very technical, personal and difficult to separate into its components. For this reason, Reitsch has apparently not received the proper attention of researchers of The Nazi regime.

You can learn about Reitsch's world from the chapter in her book that deals with her conversations with SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Reitsch had two long private conversations with him during the war. The first was immediately after she recovered from the serious injury she suffered in 1942, during a test flight on the ''Comet'' airplane. The Comet was a very fast and dangerous airplane, with rocket engine, designed to take off at great heights very fast and then, using gliding maneuvers, attack Allied bombers from above. Reitsch was the chief test pilot of the project, that the Luftwaffe hoped for its success desperately. Following the flight accident she was hospitalized for several months, delaying the entire effort to stop the Allies.

Himmler sent her many congratulatory letters and she went to him to thank him. She stayed with him for many hours and was positively impressed by his friendly nature and his interest in design. She was honest with him and revealed her opinion that like many in Germany, she disagrees with his steps in two main areas: the attitude towards religion and the attitude towards women. Himmler answered her at length on both subjects. He attacked the Christian religion for its hypocrisy, but failed to respond substantively to her claims regarding the right of every person to religious freedom. Regarding the inequality for women in Nazi Germany, which was expressed in the propaganda as the role of women in having Aryan children, he claimed that it was a misunderstanding and distortion of his views and that he was about to establish a big military unit of combat women, proving that he strived for gender equality. The issue of treatment of Jews did not come up at all in the conversation.

In October 1944, Hanna Reitsch spoke again in private with Heinrich Himmler, this time about the "Final Solution''. Reitsch learned of the issue through a friend, after the Allies sent a special booklet to German embassies around the world, describing the horrific face of Nazi Germany. The friend met Reitsch at the pilots club in Berlin. He threw the booklet on the table and challenged her: "If you want to know what's going on in Germany, look at it!" Reitsch glanced at the booklet, which described the gas chambers and asked angrily, "And do you believe that? In World War I enemy propaganda depicted the German soldier conducting every conceivable barbarism. Now it's the gas chambers!''

The friend said his opinion was similar to hers, but still asked her to find out from Himmler. Reitsch called Himmler and obtained permission to visit him at his headquarters on the Eastern Front. When she got there, she put the booklet in front of him and asked: "What do you say about that Reichsfuhrer?" Himmler picked up the booklet and flipped through the pages and then, without changing the tone of his voice, looked up, examined her quietly and asked: "And do you believe that, Frauline Hanna?" Reitsch replied: "No, of course not, but you must do something against it. You can not let them publish this about Germany''. Himmler placed the booklet on the table, looked at it once more, and said: "You are right''."

Reitsch contented herself with this answer and immediately returned to her test flights. As for Himmler, this booklet was probably also a warning sign. He realized that the final solution, conducted in the utmost secrecy, had been revealed to the Allies. In the event of the defeat of Nazi Germany he would thus be the first they will look for. He began to slow down the extermination and sent some of the Jews to camps such as Bergen-Belzen, where they remained in horrible conditions until the end of the war. Only few of them survived the Holocaust.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 18 - The Nazi Doctors

World War I ended in November 1918, at the end of a wave of influenza epidemics among soldiers. It is possible that the German political and military leadership saw the epidemic, which drastically reduced the number of able soldiers, as the main factor for which surrender should be declared. The plague intensified around the world after the war, causing losses and suffering to dimensions that overshadowed the war itself. A state of weakness is typical of the post-war period. In this case it caused suffering on a scale that overshadowed the war itself. The social impacts of the epidemic were worldwide. They have led to general weakness of the international political system. Hiding information from the public about the extent, military significance of the epidemic, its severe social impact and the danger of psychiatric complications, constituted the habitat for the far-right and Nazi party in Germany.

Support for the Nazis reached a peak among German doctors. Three-quarters of German doctors were members of the Nazi party. There was no social group in Germany that joined them on such a large scale. A significant number of them joined the SS. The Nazi party promised health care reforms and doctors saw the need for an immediate change in the national medical system so that new tools such as X-rays and statistical records of the entire population, would help prevent the spread of epidemics.

X-ray was a state-of-the-art technology that allowed anyone to take part in the Nazis' new social experiment. X-rays have a transparency similar to that of the air element. Statistics cards were another component of health care reform. The doctors' new motto was to keep documents and numbers. The medical computing of the entire German population began. Racial theory was seen as complementary to the reform of the German public health system. Racial theory ensured the efficiency of the system, both by eliminating hopeless patients and by eliminating in any way the non-Nordic minority, the Jews and the rest of the dark-skinned, whose presence in Germany was inconsistent with the new and severe health norms. The "gracefull killing" and the "killing of the Jews" complemented each other, within the framework of Nazi medicine. They reflected the Nazi political schizophrenia. They were bound together under the value of the Supreme Man.

According to Gaston Bashelar, in the infinite air the dimensions are erased and we come into contact with a dimensionless substance that gives us a sense of complete inner purification. Having arrived with the help of the air so far and high, the mind is carried on uncontrollably. Eager to try the reality of the upper air, the imagination in its entirety will double any impression by adding a new image to it. In this transformation, the imagination expresses one of its ambiguous flowers, blurring the colors of good and evil and violating the most stable laws governed by the values ​​of humanity. The end result of this longing may be a moral ambiguity.

On January 30, 1933, the Nazis came to power, by a large majority of the German people. Hitler promised "a healthy Germany" and the doctors sent a letter of congratulations to the new Chancellor: "The German doctors are very pleased to be in the service of patriotism, and swear to fulfill their duty with maximum loyalty, as servants of the nation's health''. Their motto became: "Work for the Fuhrer". On June 2, 1935, the ''Nazi School of Leadership in the Medical Professions'' was opened in a picturesque village in northern Germany. Physicians were trained in it to apply the laws of racial theory: heredity, reproduction, selection, the survival of the strong. The participants in the courses were doctors from various fields, as well as nurses. They lived in barracks and underwent a training regime similar to that of soldiers. The culmination of each course was the ceremonial swearing-in at the end, in which the students declared: "We will be honest, faithful and friends only to our brothers in blood, and to no one else''. The school trained the leaders of Nazi medicine to carry out euthanasia effectively and for their roles in the extermination facilities and concentration camps.

A flood of laws cancelled the Jewish doctors' rights. Their registration in the German health system was initially denied, which was in effect an economic sentence. They were then required to hang a Star of David on the office sign and to use the middle name "Israel" to identify themselves as Jewish. They were allowed to treat only Jewish patients. About 9,000 Jewish doctors lost thetr career. Most of them left Germany. Very few have succeeded in re-establishing themselves. The ban on engaging in their profession pushed many of them into desperate acts of suicide. Others were murdered at the extermination facilities. Established and profitable clinics of Jewish physicians were taken by non-Jews and became "Arian", as it was called.

Among many Nazi doctors there were some whose teachers, students, colleagues, friends and even family members were Jews. Physicians, more than any other sector of the population, could and did appreciate the intellectual and human level of the Jews and their importance to Germany. They became criminals, as they gained a huge direct profit when they took the place of the many Jewish doctors.

Dr. Eugen Fischer was one of the founders of the race theory and the founder of the Genetic Institute in Berlin in 1927. Fischer was in the life sciences for the Nazis what Carl Haushofer was in the social sciences. Fisher gave the Nazis the appearance of scientific legitimacy. Fischer's writings were incorporated into "Main Kampf" and he was quoted by Hitler in many of his speeches, already the world authority on the subject.

Dr. Karl Brandt was Hitler's personal physician, who was asked by him to run the "euthanasia" program in the period before World War II. What began as solutions to the plight of a few citizens who had severly disabled family members, became an industry in which hundreds of thousands of patients were murdered on the basis of superficial judgment. The methods and teams employed under this program were transferred during the war to the extermination facilities of the Jews.

Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on humans, stood for about two years, almost daily, on the ramp in Auschwitz and classified those who came to "right - left" according to their ability to work. He is the embodiment of the monster in man, which is the inevitable development of race theory.

After the war, senior members of Nazi medicine were tried in what became known as the "Doctors' Trial" in Nuremberg, which was conducted after the better-known "Nuremberg trials" of senior Nazi officials and in the same courtroom. A total of 23 doctors were on trial, six of them from the Nazi Air Force. The Minister of Health of the Reich, K.Venetti, committed suicide before the trial in his cell in Nuremberg. During the trial, the full scope of the role of physicians in the Holocaust was revealed. The aversion to them led to the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws on Medical Ethics.

This is what the chief prosecutor in the trail, Talford Taylor, said about the defendants' responsibility: ''Doctors were pioneers who paved the way for the Holocaust. They defined the ''Jewish race'' and they wrote the racial reports that sent Jews to the extermination camps. Doctors stood on the platform in Auschwitz and selected twins, dwarves and others, for medical experiments. They tore up families. Everyone had to appear before a doctor. Children under the age of 14, all women and the elderly, were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The test lasted 2-3 seconds, then the doctor pointed his thumb. Doctors implemented the fanatical racial policy of the Nazis, whether as their executors or as executioners. Doctors determined the lethal gas dose. Doctors monitored the killing process. Doctors ordered the stripping of the bodies and the search for gold fillings in the teeth. Doctors were masters of life and death, co-responsible for the murder of millions. Some may have been sadists who killed and tortured for pleasure. But not everyone. They are not ignorant people. Most are skilled doctors and some are respected scientists. We must clearly state the ideas and motives that motivated the defendants to treat humans as inferiors to animals. The distorted thoughts and distorted perceptions that caused these atrocities did not perish. Cannot be killed by force of arms. The distorted thoughts and distorted perceptions that led to the trial did not develop in neighborhood bars, but in well-known scientific institutions.''

The verdict in the trial of the Nazi doctors was given on 20/8/1947. The execution of six of them, led by Brandt, took place on June 2, 1948. The prosecution does not appear to have succeeded in clarifying the motives of the Nazi doctors. Despite the clear proof of their crimes, in the face of the firm determination about the quality of their personality and sanity, their motives have remained a mystery so far. Similar to what happened to Rudolf Hess, Nazi doctors became one of the symbols of neo-Nazi Germany. They, too, became an unsolved riddle. The human imagination failed to unite their personalities with their exploits and they remained a '‘fascinating riddle'’. The only explanation is that they arrived with the help of the air so far and high, that their mind was carried on uncontrollably.

The Nazi regime had two systems of operations. There were two types of orders and directives: the official and accepted and the ideological and voluntary. The official system behaved according to the accepted norms of cultural society, the rule of law, individual freedom and the like. The unofficial system did not recognize any norms or laws. It was arbitrary and uncontrolled, untidy. The two systems overlapped, and acted side by side. This means that in the official system the norms gradually became invalid and at the same time, in the unofficial system a normal-looking code of laws was built. Anyone who was interested in improving his socio-economic status volunteered for the informal system.

Joseph Mengele was the epitome of the satanic evil of the Nazi regime. Mengele's conscience acted as a scientist. He was a scientist who justified what he did by thinking that purpose sanctifies means. His split personality is the individual end of the process that began with Nazi ideological dualism and continued with the splitting of the implementation systems in the regime. The absence of a humanity has become his only certainty. The irony is that while modern-day genetics researchers are trying to find the genes that causes schizophrenia, the most prominent schizophrenics in human history have been genetics researchers with pagan moral hygiene.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 17 - Albert Speer and the Architecture of Distance

Albert Speer was the second most important figure in Nazi Germany during World War II. He was the spearhead of Hitler. Unlike the rest of the fanatical bunch, Speer was a rational and as a result a more significant figure. He gave the Nazis a semblance of sanity, moderation and practical logic.

Speer was an architect, who joined the Nazi party in 1930, after hearing Hitler speak at a mass rally. After successfully performing a number of professional tasks in Rudolf Hess's offices, he was appointed Chief Architect of the Nazi Party in 1934.

Hitler's political mission and passion for architecture were inseparable. This combination was reflected in him as early as 1925, when he designed, as an amateur painter, two megalomanial structures: the Dome of Victory and the Victory Gate in Berlin. This was at a time when his political career was at a low ebb.

At the beginning of the Nazi regime Speer, as the official architect, became a close friend of Hitler and formulated with him the aesthetic conception of the Nazis. In parallel with the Nazi physicians in the life sciences and Karl Haushofer in the social sciences, Speer designed the unique design style that allowed the Nazis cultural visibility. The visual style is familiar to all, to a large extent, through Lenny Riefenstahl's documentaries. This is a modern version, in bold lines, of neoclassicism.

Speer was the one who, through his education and skills as an architect, would streamline Hitler's initial images of the Nazi model of action, in the reality of modern society. Inspired by them, he created a megalomanial setting for the crowd. Early in his career he designed the mass marches and demonstrations. He later designed the buildings, boulevards and cities, which were the focus of Hitler's interest.

Hitler valued the closeness of artists most of all. He saw Albert Speer as his closest friend, who provided his abstract ideas with a perfect practical expression, design, planning and organization alike. Without him, his vision would not have come true. He thanked him at every opportunity. Speer received a private residence in the Oberselzberg compound in the Alps. It was an expression of appreciation and a sign of closeness, apart from him only Goering, Himmler and Martin Borman received.

According to Speer, before the outbreak of the war Hitler was swept away by a building fever, which swept away all the heads of the Nazi regime and upset their mental balance. He describes how all the district chiefs were busy erecting magnificent public buildings, usually in a grandiose neoclassical style, which was the hallmark of the Nazis. They came to Berlin with detailed plans and construction specifications that required expensive raw materials, such as marble and steel. The war plots were concocted, in his opinion, for the purpose of financing public construction in Germany.

During the war, Speer was appointed Minister of Armed Forces. His talents in the field of organization led to the extension of the war by two years. They directly affected all areas of life in Germany and included the use of forced labor. Speer thus became the de facto ruler of Germany.

In February 1942, Speer redesigned the structure of the arms industry. He created a spiral scheme, according to which each component of production was given a separate place in the ascending rank. In the traditional German industry each product was made, with all its components, in one factory, by professionals who were experts in separate fields. The transition was to an industry where each factory specializes in one of the components and the complete product is obtained only at the assembly stage. This was the beginning of the modern industry that is known today. The reorganization was very successful and led to an dramatic increase output of weapons.

Speer elaborate the bearings industry in this context. When he took office, each weapons factory was responsible for creating all the components it needed and was producing the bearings. For example, car bearings were manufactured in car factories, aircraft bearings were manufactured in aircraft factories and so on. Speer united the production of bearings in a single factory, which was located in one city, Nuremberg. This plant created all the bearings required in the various industries. Other examples of specialty manufacturing were indicators and monitors factories. This was done for each of the many components required for the manufacture of modern technological weapons. The many different components were sent to the original factory, where the weapon was designed, for the purpose of assembling the final product.

The weakness of the method was that paralysis of one of the important production links was able to paralyze the whole of German industry. Speer claims that if the Allies had focused their aerial bombardment on the bearings plant in Nuremberg, they would have been able to bring the war to an end within a few weeks. But the Allies did not know that this was a weak link. They carried out thousands of bombing raids, with hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, on many factories that were known to them as producing finished products, instead of focusing on the weak link. Speer adds that they had to systematically bomb the same factory every few weeks, without paying attention to the results of each separate raid, in order not to allow it to recover.

When the Allied air forces of Britain and the United States began bombing from the air, it greatly affected the Nazi industrial poroduction. Beyond the direct damage to industry and morale, it forced the Nazis to allocate enormous resources to air defense and damage repair. These massive bombings continued until the end of the war and forced Speer to devote the best of his energy to them. The Air Defense Force was greatly intensified and was equipped with thousands of  large and sophisticated cannons against aircraft, which were deployed throughout Germany and consumed enormous resources. Restoration of damage to ground structures was carried out very quickly, efficiently and cheaply. Speer has organized a stockpile of raw materials for construction, such as steel, stones and cement, near vital bridges and other important structures. In this way, after a bomb had hit, all the required stock of raw materials for rapid restoration was available attached to the site.

Albert Speer was sentenced at the Nuremberg trials to ten years in prison. After his release, he set up, together with his sons, a prestigious and prosperous architecture firm. Speer wrote, while in prison, the most comprehensive confessional document on the Third Reich, written by a man from the Nazi elite. His book, "Inside the Third Reich", was published in the late 1960s and is the cornerstone for documenting the period.

The book is built around the gap between internal and external. The inside was his personal closeness to Hitler and the close artistic collaboration between them, described in many chapters. Speer fed Hitler's artistic soul with the constant fire of classical architecture. Their close personal relationships found expression in the book in detailed descriptions of Hitler's daily life.

On an almost symmetrical scale the outside is depicted. This was Speer's activity as Minister of Armed Forces, which focused on responsibility for all the technical and organizational issues involved in German armaments. This, too, in close contact with Hitler, who outlined and approved every move. These issues included: organizing the German infrastructure for a war economy, managing the industrial-military production, responsibility for developing modern weapons including ballistic missiles, dealing with Allied air bombs and advising on strategic military moves. A large part of his duties were taken from Herman Goering, after his failures.

The preoccupation with two different areas created a dramatic psychological gap, which Speer was unable to bridge. The gap creatred for him a constant legitimacy for the perception of distance and detachment from guilt. Speer, in all his descriptions, is like someone who watches from a distance what is happening, indifferent and objective, uninvolved, cool-headed even when it comes to the main thing. Such a psychological gap, common in a technocratic society, existed in most of the people close to Hitler.

Speer claimed that he did not know about the Holocaust, as a result of the sophisticated means of communication available to Hitler, which led to direct orders from the Supreme Command to the level of execution, in all government bodies. According to him, an extreme compartmentalization was created, in which only the topmost leadership knew everything that was happening, while all those subordinate to them and he among them, knew only what was ordered to be done.

But the Nazis never hid the racist vision that was their real goal. On the contrary, they have announced it publicly countless times and implemented it in constitutional, administrative and practical steps. It was impossible not to understand what their ultimate goal was.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 16 - Hitler's Air Force secretary

 

Nicholas Von Bilow was by Hitler's side, sa military secretrary of the Air Force, from 1937 until his last days in a bunker in Berlin in 1945. He was a witness to all the upheavals that Hitler went through and one of the last to see him alive. He began his career as a twenty-nine-year-old pilot, who was recommended for the job by Goering. He was with Hitler at every stage of the planning and occurrence of World War II. His diary is a first-rate source of information. Von Bilow was close to Hitler day and night, along with his other two military secretaries, the Army and Navy and the limited office staff. His diary describes all the events from Hitler's point of view. He states that Hitler headed the hierarchy of command so rigidly that the Nazi state was Hitler and Hitler was the Nazi state.

It can be understood from the diary, published as a book, that the development of military aviation was a major priority for Hitler. He acted during the war on the assumption that the German Air Force would be the force that would win it. This was reflected in the campaigns on all fronts, which were always conducted on the notion that a new Nazi plane would tilt the face of the battle, similar to what happened in the First World War. Thus, for example, the battle for Britain began immediately after the medium-speed bomber Yonkers-88, whose development was completed on the eve of the war, reached in a sufficiently large numbers for the squadrons. Similarly, the Messerschmidt 109 and the Shtoka were aircraft that gave Germany a sense of air superiority and led to the decision to open World War II.

Poland had excellent pilots and a very large air force. But the German planes were of a more advanced generation and easily defeated the Polish Air Force. The Polish pilots who fled to Britain set up squadrons with Spitfire planes, which were of better quality than the Germans. Thanks to their daring and skill they won the battle over Britain.

The sense of air superiority was created among decision-makers and the general public by an extensive discourse on the set of concepts involved in the ever-expanding aviation world, which undermined the peaceful agenda. The discourse included justification for the aggression against anyone according to Nietzsche's Superman philosophy. The sense of superiority permeated all levels. It undermined Hitler's uniqueness and gave him a personal reason to go to war, in addition to the ongoing threat of air strikes by Germany's enemies, which were also surprisingly intensifing.

Von Bilow gives an in-depth description of the motives for the invasions of Poland, France, Russia and the rest of Europe. He describes how Hitler reacted to the US joining the war against him and in particular to aerial bombardment. His point of view is clearly pro-Nazi in the early stages of the war and in particular regarding the invasion of Poland, which he describes as a result of the Poles' harassment of the German minority in the Danzig enclave. His enthusiasm continues with the invasions of Norway, the Low Countries, France, the Balkans and North Africa. The invasions are described by him with satisfaction as a military man, as military successes whose very success justifies them. His enthusiasm waned towards the invasion of the Soviet Union and from that passage in the diary he became increasingly skeptical about Hitler and increasingly depressed about the fate of the war and Germany.

Von Bilow's testimony is crucial for describing Hitler's motives in the second phase of the war, when it was clear to him that the order of forces and the course of the war guaranteed a decisive victory to the Allies and a crushing defeat of Germany. He explains and describes in details how Hitler put his trust in the development of the jet fighter.

The phrase that prevailed in Hitler's command circle in 1944 was: "The key word is airplanes." The concept of "airplanes" became a medium and a message, similar to the other key concepts of the Nazis, which advocated abbreviated semantics. The Nazis wanted to catch up with the 1940 backlog, in which Hitler made the decisions to give priority to resources to ground forces ahead of the invasion of Russia.

In 1944 Germany was constantly bombed from the air by bombers and Hitler was mainly concerned with air defense. There was an urgent need for a fast interceptor to stop the bombers. At the same time Hitler predicted the imminent Allied invasion of Germany. He therefore ordered the re-development of the revolutionary jet interceptor M-262, a light and agile aircraft, which was the first jet fighter in the world and the top product of the Nazi aviation industry. This instruction critically delayed the production of the aircraft, as significant changes had to be made in its design in order for it to be able to carry heavy bombs under its wings. On June 6, 1944, when Hitler was mainly focused on the technical problems that arose in the plane, which began to enter the battle in large numbers, Allied forces invaded Normandy and began to advance mile after mile towards Germany. The M-262 was ineffective in assisting ground forces. The design changes made to it greatly reduced its capabilities in air battles as well.

Hitler was very fond of Von Bilow, who appreciated him and became his young friend. There is no doubt that the friendship made Hitler invest more in aviation. Von Bilow was closer to Hitler than anyone else during the war, except for Martin Bormann, his personal secretary. He was much closer than Albert Sapir, who had rarely met with Hitler, and Goering, who had hardly seen Hitler since the outbreak of the war.

Von Bilow writes that he was impressed by Hitler's personality, and by his power to make the right decisions, often contrary to the opinion of experts. He was portrayed as a determined man, with normal and healthy impulses, who overcame his passions out of devotion to purpose. Hitler also became his family friend, an uncle to his children. In the same breath he confirms that the decision to exterminate the Jews was at the heart of Hitler's plans. It was not a spontaneous decision. It had existed in him in one version or another since the beginning of his reign.

That is why Hitler's personality is the main explanation for the Holocaust. He claimed to be the "ideological man" type, with Icarus and Napoleon complexes, who by the power of leaning on ideology, reinvented himself. The charcter, similar to that of members of fundamentalist terrorist organizations, permeated his commands at all levels. Every terrorist is a privately likable person, but what makes him meaningful is the rigid ideology.

One of the consequences of ideological rigidity versus private kindness was that in the Nazi regime, fickleness was a major character trait. Hitler excelled at it while writing "Mein Kampf" as a mixture of black and white, clean and dirty, and it became his "trademark". This fickleness permeated all levels of command and society and allowed for double personal morality. Von-Bilow had to be a "little head" in one area, and a "big head" in another, without admitting to himself the internal contradiction. He identified himself with the success and stayed away from failure, as long as it served him. It was a personal complexity similar to that of Udin, the senior god in Norse mythology, in whom wisdom and madness resided.

Plans to exterminate the Jews can be compared to the military development of airplanes, which is cleary an area of ​​start-ups. Initially these were projects on paper, which received experimental budgets and some of them progressed in this way further. A few of them ended up being used in the war. If they entered the battle and succeeded, they gained momentum and created a change in the balance of power. They have become a self-fulfilling prophecy and created a new strategic reality, which has given them many additional budgets and inspiration for supportive activities from other sectors. What seems, in retrospect, to be an elaborate mechanism,was actually created step by step, in a systematic but fickle process of trial and error.

Air force failures, which have caused severe political defeats, are a widespread phenomenon in 20th century history. The decisive air confrontations take place for a few hours or days, but it takes many years and huge capital to build a serious air force. This is at a time when there is no definite information about the strength of the enemy. The gap between victory and failure is often the result of a tiny technological advantage. Air intelligence is crucial for the existence of any country.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 15 - Reinhard Heydrich Planner of the Final Solution

Reinhard Heydrich was the chief planner of the Holocaust, Eichmann's direct commander and chairman of the Wannsee Conference. He began his career as an officer in the Nazi secret police and managed to be accepted into the Air Force at a relatively old age to become a fighter pilot, combining the pilot's career with being Hitler's most vicious executioner, who saw him as his possible successor. 

At the beginning of the war he was regularly on the line between his squadron at the front and his offices in Berlin. In his role as Deputy Himmler, he controlled all the German secret police, led by the Gestapo. In addition, at the end of 1941, he was also appointed the cruel governor of Czechoslovakia, a position he managed to perform by regularly skipping between Berlin and Prague in a light airplane which was at his disposal and flying it himself.

Despite his excellence, Heydrich was characterless and complicated, stuttering and nervous, quick-reacting, lacking in social skills, who felt like a wolf in a pack of wolves. He saw obedience to command as a supreme value and combined it with intoxication of power and lust for promotion. He was haunted by employment and excellence, in part because of his Jewish background which he sought to hide. He had medals of heroism in battle along with medals for sporting achievements. In addition, he was an obsessive violinist and a talented pen man who wrote a regular column in an important magazine. His arrogance was at odds with him and he was killed in Prague in the open limousine he used for dily transportation, in the spring of 1942.

The boy Heydrich was a member of one of the many militias that operated in Germany after the First World War. In 1922 he enlisted to the Navy. Early in his military career he was a signaling officer on ships. He joined the Nazi party in 1931. Himmler asked him to be the head of his SS intelligence office. 

At the time it was still an insignificant mechanism and Himmler was preparing to make it a major organization. Heydrich became his partner. They succeeded and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the SS gradually took over the German police. In 1935 the young General Heydrich commanded all areas of the huge secret police service in Nazi Germany. Heydrich and his office were officially subordinate to Himmler. But in practice, from the beginning of the collaboration among them, he was more dominant.

He wanted to develop himself and advance in other areas. That same year, through Goering, he was transferred to the Air Force Reserve Corps and in time received the rank of Major. He arranged for himself a position in a combat squadron outside Berlin. By the beginning of World War II he had became, despite his age, one of the excellent pilots in the German Air Force. He acquired his skills as a pilot by leaving his home in the summer at four in the morning, driving at high speed in his official car to his fighter squadron and training hour after hour before the others woke up. He then returned to the Central Ministry of Defense.

The personalities of Goering and Heydrich had many common lines, which enabled cooperation between them. They were the heads of the most prestigious mechanisms that created extremist Nazism, the Luftwaffe and the SS. Both were powerful and influential, but constantly feared for the loss of their prestige and status. They strived for a common leadership and realized that in order to do so they had to expand their popular support base in the party, by radicalizing positions on racial and anti-Semitic policies. The dynamics of their relationship played an important role in the creation of the Holocaust. The reader between the short lines of the infamous order from Goering to Heydrich, sees that it was based on previous understandings between two people who thought and acted similarly.

Heydrich played a multidisciplinary role in the short campaign against Poland. He concocted the intelligence plots that preceded it, commanded the SS storm units that brutally took over the population on the front lines, flew fighter airplanes in numerous operational sorties and organized the implementation of racial policy.

For Heydrich, the shift from peace to war was also significant as the number one expert on the secret police apparatus. On September 27, 1939, Hitler signed the decree defining the tasks of the "Central Office of the Reich Security" headed by Heydrich. The office integrated the Gestapo, the secret police, and the intelligence system of the Nazi party. Heydrich first appeared in the eyes of the German public as a central figure, with a position equivalent to that of a minister in the government.

On January 30, 1940, Heydrich convened a staff meeting of the Central Office of the Reich Security. Eichmann was the chief technical adviser at the meeting. Heydrich gave sharp, quick and clear instructions that another four hundred thousand Jews should be expelled from western Poland, in as short a time as possible. The expulsions, death marches and mass killings in gunfire, immediately went into high gear.

In September 1941, immediately after he was appointed governor of Czechoslovakia, Heydrich sent 60,000 Jews to his colleague Arthur Greiser, governor of southwestern Poland. It was followed by a letter to Greiser from Heinrich Himmler, their joint commander, stating: '' The Fuhrer wants the territories annexed to the Reich to be clean and purified of Jews, as soon as possible. As a first step I will try to send this year as much as I can, all the Jews from the Old Reich and its protected countries first to the territories in the East which were annexed in 1939. This spring, they will send them further east to Russia. "

Greiser ordered to deal with the "overcrowding''. He obtained Himmler's consent to the extermination of all Jews incapable of forced labor. His commands began to address the problem by experimenting with mass extermination by gas trucks, at a facility in the town of Chelmno near Lodz, which became the first mass extermination facility as part of the final solution.

Heydrich continued to be an active pilot. As governor of Czechoslovakia, he began daily flights between Berlin and Prague every forty-eight hours, using two light airplanes made available to him. On January 20, 1942, he summoned all the representatives of the relevant government ministries to outline the "Final Solution" plan at Wanssee conference. On the morning of the conference he flew from Prague to Berlin, a distance of 280 kilometers, in about two hours.

The Japanese airstrike on Pearl Harbor, a few weeks earlier, considered one of the greatest and most successful in history, was for him a source of inspiration at just the right time. It was a great opportunity for him as a pilot to boast and enforce his personality. Heydrich's main goal at the conference was to ensure the commitment of the various authorities in Germany regarding the final solution plan. The second reason was running a show off his arrogance.

At the beginning of the conference he mentioned the authority that Goering had delegated to him and went on to say that, as part of the final solution, the Jews should be transferred, without geographical restrictions and under proper management, to labor units in the East. Those who will be able to work will be led in long marching columns to work. As a result, a large portion of them will be eliminated because of natural reasons. Those who will eventually survive will die after a short period of hard labor.

Most of those present in the sitting room agreed to his plan without hesitation. The representative of the Ministry of Justice even transferred the punitive powers of the Jews from his office to Heydrich. In doing so, the Jews lost all meaning in terms of the law. The sitting in the presence of Heydrich lasted only nineteen minutes. He then left the place. The remaining attendees continued to chat and process the details.

The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague was carried out on May 27, 1941 by a squad of the Czech underground. It was a few days before Battle of Midway, the aerial-naval battle in the Pacific Ocean between the United States and Japan, which was another important turning point in the war. Most of his activity as the planner of the "Final Solution" took place during the six months between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway.

Hitler and Himmler received the news of his assassination as a direct hit on them. They initiated an unprecedented response action on a large scale. It was named, after him,  "Operation Reinhard".  The construction of the extermination facilities in Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek and Sobibor, which had progressed slowly till then, gained immediate momentum. Most of the Jews of Poland were murdered in these facilities, between the spring and autumn of 1942.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 14 - Arthur Greiser, Governor of Western Poland

During World War I, Arthur Greiser was a pilot and officer in the German Air Force. He was promoted to the rank of Air Force Squadron Commander. Greiser served in Hermann Goering's  wing during the final stages of the war, when the "Flying Circus" assimilated the remains of the squadrons that still remained in service, for concentrated activity on the Western Front. He was awarded the Iron Cross first and second degree, the Medal rfor the Wounded and other medals of honor.

From 1919 to 1921 he belonged to one of the army veterans' militias held by the Weimar government and fought in the Baltic states against Soviet invasion.

In the early 1920s he lived in the port city of Danzig, as one of the leaders of an extremist militia. Danzig was a city under joint Polish-German rule, within western Poland.

Greiser joined the Nazi Party in 1928. He gained great party prestige as the hot-tempered mayor of Danzig, between 1935-1939.

In this position he was directly responsible for the escalating tensions with the Polish Republic, which were the main cause of the outbreak of World War II.

After the occupation of Poland, in October 1939, western Poland was annexed to Nazi Germany and divided into two districts. Greiser was appointed head of the party administration and governor of the Reich in the southern region, whose capital was the city of Lodz.

As an extremist racist, he enthusiastically implemented a "ethnic cleansing" program designed to remove from the area all Poles and put Germans in it. In all, he replaced about 600,000 Poles he had expelled, with about 600,000 ethnic Germans.

His anti-Polish policy was been implemented in various spheres, such as property confiscation, restrictions on education and culture, the massacre of Polish orphans and the campaign against the Catholic religion and its clergy. Mass executions were the norm.

Greiser turned the district in which he ruled for example of Nazification to the rest of Europe's Nazi-occupied areas. The Nazification and later the Lodz ghetto and the extermination of the Jews, were the first of their kind in the occupied territories of Poland. They became a reality and a model for the pattern of action throughout the Reich. This was the model by which the final solution was carried out.

The largest ghetto in Poland operated in Lodz. Its inhabitants justified their existence in the eyes of the Nazi regime thanks to the extensive industry in which they worked, which contributed to the German war effort.

Despite this, Greiser refused to respond to requests to improve the food rations of the Jews in the ghetto and his extremist anti-Jewish stance guided his subordinates in this spirit.

Greiser was active in Holocaust planning. In the area of ​​his rule, the first extermination facility was established in Chelmno. Many attempts were made at the facility until it became effective. Later lessons were learned from its operation in all extermination facilities. During the war, about 320,000 people were killed in this facility, 98 percent of them Jews.

The first Jews sent to Chelmno came from Czechoslovakia, under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, the governor of this country.

Graiser praised the members of the Nazi unit who operated the facility. In a letter to Himmler, during the extermination operation, he suggested using the same method for Poles infected with tuberculosis and endangering the health of the Germans.

Grazer knew how to get the support of the top officials at the Chancellor's Office in Berlin. He was the most prominent and influential of all the many dozens of governors of the Nazi districts, most of whom were Flavian and even ridiculous figures. He belonged to the military elite along with Goering, Hess and Heydrich. In 1942 he was promoted to the rank of General in the SS. He may also have been marked as Heydrich's successor after his liquidation.

At the end of the war, Greiser was the victim of intrigue among the regime's leaders in Berlin and received conflicting orders regarding the defense from the approaching Soviets. As a result he was sent to Bavaria. At the end of the war he was captured by the Americans in the Alps and extradited to Poland. He was tried for war crimes. He claimed to have carried out orders, but the ample evidence against him clarified his character and motives. He was convicted of genocide and other counts, sentenced to death and was hanged in public.

Greiser is a clear example of a Nazi criminal, a militant nationalist from the border region, who acted mercilessly and out of hatred. A look at his picture shows an amazing resemblance to Goering, which is the result of cultivation no less than a natural resemblance. Like Goering, they both had bright, large, bold, watery and cold shark eyes, a plump but firm face and a love for fancy military uniforms. They were also similar in character traits: ambition, composure, cruelty, intrigue and love for risk-taking. They were both greedy and loved a life of luxury. What saved some of the Jews of the Lodz ghetto was his greediness.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 13 - Rudolf Hess the Solo Pilot

Rudolf Hess was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt. From an early age he understood the iron connection between militarism and imperialism. He dreamed that Germany would emulate the model of expansion of the British Empire, based on a combination of industrial progress, military power and colonial expansion.

Hess excelled as a infantry fighter in the battles of World War I, was wounded several times, won medals of heroism and was promoted to the rank of junior officer. Lying in a hospital after one of his injuries, he became enthusiastic about the stories of the German flight champions' air battles and asked to be accepted to a pilot's course. Hess completed the course in October 1918. He joined the Flying Circus Squadron on the Western Front. It was already clear that the German Empire had lost, and the pilots' mood was low. Nevertheless he flew operational flights and took part in the last air battles of the war.

Germany's surrender, which took place in stark contrast to the uplifting mood of 1914, was accepted by him personally and created a mental crisis. It led to the elimination of all his plans for the future. He felt the humiliation completely. Bitterness, frustration, hatred and a sense of revenge accumulated in him. They found expression in the words of his squadron commander, Herman Goering, who addressed his soldiers after receiving the surrender order: "Our day is yet to come!"

His political view was formulated by geography professor Karl Haushofer, his teacher and friend at the University of Munich, where he began studying after the war. Haushoffer's sons, Albert and Heinz, became Hess' best friends. Albert had advanced degrees in geography and a senior academic position from the University of Berlin. The brothers helped Hess in Berlin in the critical days before Hitler came to power and later during Nazi rule.

Two other figures who influenced Hess at the time were Dietrich Eckert, who was the spiritual teacher of Hitler, and Ernest Roham, commander of the ''Brown Shirts''. Through them he got to know Hitler. He joined the Nazi Party in May 1920, after hearing Hitler speak and get excited about it. Hess was fascinated by the metamorphosis he envisioned. The content of the speech, which ranged from hatred of the Jews, through the supremacy of the Aryan race to the re-establishment of Germany as a power, was very appealing to his ears. There is no doubt, based on his personality, that Hess was also influenced by Hitler's suggestive powers.

Hess, who was the No. 16 member of the Nazi party, began assisting in activities, including personal assistance to Hitler. Hitler greatly appreciated Hess and liked to hang out with him. They were a cute duo. Hess was tall, masculine, and energetic, with an ascetic face and fanatical eyes, very restrained compared to Hitler, who insisted on being the center of social attention everywhere.

He decided without hesitation to accept Hitler's offer to be his political secretary. He believed in his ability to combine his military and intellectual skills and thought he could exert influence in different directions. It was suitable for him to serve as a connection between the people and the educated circles and at the same time between the party and the institutions of government. This subject has become his area of ​​expertise.

Hess linked Hitler's ideas to those of Haushofer. He estimated that the two would find a common language. He invited Haushofer to Hitler's speech and thus began a close relationship between them.

After the putsch in Munich in 1923 Hess was imprisoned along with Hitler. Between the thick walls, Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf." Haushofer visited them several times in prison and formulated the spiritual and scientific infrastructure. In light of the fact that Hitler was inexperienced in writing books, it seems that Haushofer and Hess were full partners in writing and at least the brains behind it.

Hess was by nature an ardent idealist with no social skills and saw in the figure of Hitler his social messenger. Hitler, after appointing Hess as his personal secretary, could devote himself to public appearances. Hess was a regular speaker at the openings before Hitler's speeches. Beyond that he ran the Nazi party on a daily basis. Hess became one of the main influences on the path of the Nazi party and its "idealist" figure.

Hess had a strong card he used to strengthen his position in the party and undo the contempt he recieved due to his overt subservience to Hitler. He remained an active pilot, a fact which gave him great prestige in the public.

Hess continued to be one of the few active German pilots during the post-war recession period in Germany. He had several missions as a pilot in a legitimate militia organization. He participated as a pilot in the suppression of the Spartacist revolt in the Ruhr Valley.

Some time after Charles Lindbergh's historic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Hess planned a parallel flight in the opposite direction. Had the flight been carried out, it would have compared his political status to that of Hitler.

Following the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 1929, Germany held another round of elections. The meaning of it was clear: the vote would determine whether Germany would abide by the Versailles Agreements and meet its debt repayments, or turn its back on the Allies and develop an independent policy, as the Nazis wanted. 

The political left organized a huge demonstration in Munich of war veterans. Hess took off in a light aircraft painted with Nazi slogans and flew at low altitude in circles for about three hours above the crowd, disrupting and distracting the public through propeller noise and low flight. The noise was so loud that the speakers' voices were not heard. Eventually the demonstration dispersed with a sense of failure for the organizers. In the election a month later, the Nazi party soared to second place in the Reichstag, with a fifth of the electorate.

Hess continued to hone his flying skills. In 1932 he finished second in the German air race "around the summit of Mount Zugspitze". In 1934 he won the prestigious race.

At the center of his political pursuits during the period of the Nazi Party's growth was the question of the party's economic direction, socialist or capitalist. Hess had no doubt. He came from a capitalist background. The party clung to the great capital tycoons, the owners of industrial enterprises depended on cheap labor, who enslaved the German people.

Goering at that time began to be the most prominent and popular figure in German politics. The Hess-Goering coalition and their comrades from the military, academia and the economy had no problem controlling its will. This coalition became the leading factor in the party, which at the time was about to disintegrate. They linked Hitler to the tycoons and obtained the funding needed to propel the party wheels. They gave the party its new, reactionary image. They understood that Hitler controlled the the broad popular base of the party and at this stage did not openly undermined it.

Hess and Goering riped the fruits from the election results in which the Nazi party came to power. They maneuvered their men to the central positions of control and created the SS empire. Hess' junior aide, Himmler, was the commander of the SS, who until that elections had been just Hitler's small personal guard. 

Himmler and Hess had similar psychological needs in a strong leader and an interest in which they could invest themselves. Both adhered to the anti-Semitic, anti-communist and anti-Catholic, anti-democratic, anti-humanist party platform and the mission of the noble Nordic race. Unlike the introverted Hess, Himmler was a determined political animal and took on every task he was asked to do. He enlisted Hess to the SS as an honorary general. Inspired by Hess, Himmler became the cultivator of official Nazi esotericism.

Hitler appointed Rudolf Hess as his second deputy, along with Goering. Hess' status as Fuhrer deputy included the role he had held since 1925, as Hitler's secretary and head of the party organization. His duties were defined as overseeing that the party would fulfill the tasks assigned to it by the Fuhrer, presenting the party's demends to state bodies and in the field of law enforcement and ensuring that Nazis claims will become a reality. In addition to that he also served as a super commissioner for public complaints.

For these ends, Hess built an organization similar to the government offices in Berlin and in some cases carried out their tasks from the outside. For example, the "Ribbentrop Office" he held in Berlin was a shadow of the official Foreign Ministry and competed with it. Ribbentrop, his protégé, would later become Foreign Minister.

Hess showed a special interest in foreign relations both because of the intelligence aspect, and also because of his origins as a German from abroad. He personally felt as a representative of Germany's interests abroad. He and Karl Haushofer were appointed presidents of another special foreign organization, which under cover as a cultural organization established the Nazi base among German minorities in neighboring countries. Through this organization, Hess established exclusive intelligence mechanisms outside Germany. As a cabinet member he made a crucial contribution through them in making decisions about the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland.

His ''Homeland Affairs'' organization had offices for public law, art, culture, journalism, employment, finance, technology and organization. He had a total of about twenty offices by 1939. His vast empire was headed by Martin Bormann, later Hitler's personal secretary. His varied activities were the basis for many mechanisms that grew rapidly and a springboard for many senior members of the Nazi party.

The main issue he dealt with was the rewording of German law. It was a concept of "revolutionary justice" that came from his Ministry of Law and crushed the traditional law of state authorities. This allowed Himmler to create the secret terrorist state shaped like a triangle: political police - concentration camps - SS, while bypassing all legal processes. This was the cooncept according to which Himmler ran the concentration camps. Himmler's authority rested on Hitler's will. However, it was Rudolf Hess's law enforcement officers who interpreted the law so that Himmler could create the system.

Hess had an important office for "public health" with two sub-ministries, one for "blood proximity research" and the other for "race policy".

In the Ministry of Blood Research Hess created the mechanisms, recruited the ardent supporters and mostly removed the medical inhibitions by gradually transferring the medical ethical responsibility from the doctor to the state. This was the beginning of totalitarian medicine and as such the beginning of the process that ended in Auschwitz, Treblinka and the other death camps. His officials founded the "Hereditary Health Courts'', which secretly ruled who to sterilize. He was involved in all the medical controversies, methods and processes designed to examine family origins of "Jewish blood''.

At the same time, the Ministry of Race Policy outlined the issue of the colonial question and the idea of ​​race. The working paper dealt mainly with "proper leadership for various peoples". The most important goal of the white race was defined as: "to function as a race of masters." 

Rudolf Hess decided to fly to England alone, in order to talk about it with Winston Churchill. Ribbentrop, who had been ambassador to England before being appointed foreign minister, led the "English policy" already referred to by Hitler and Hess in "Main Kampf" as such that would liberate Germany for search of living space in the East. The ''English policy'' made the grand opening of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin possible. Hess expected to find in England people like him in their thinking, embodying the arrogant aerial psyche, who think of the British Empire as the Nazis thought of Russia. But among most English politicians there was no such approch.

Hess was convinced of the necessity of the idea of ​​his famous peace flight to England, as a dramatic gesture that suited his romantic and unstable character. It might have put him back in line with Hitler, in the sense of: "Hitler conquered France and I made peace with England''. Hess acted mostly out of a sense of self-conviction. He felt he was fulfilling the Fuhrer's wish, without talking to him. He will bring peace with Britain, prevent war between two fronts, and gain personal prestige and promotion after his return. All of these had no basis in reality. It was not preceded by comprehensive consultations, discretion and decision-making cooperation.

The sense of self-conviction that was central to Hess's decision-making process eliminates the need to delve into whether he had collaborators. Flight experts claim that no professional pilot would have dared to fly in an area as crowded with radar and anti-aircraft fire protection as the shores of England were in those days. Hess would not have hesitated anyway. He believed in the Supreme Providence and the higher the degree of risk, the greater the reward  was considered for him.

He took off on his flight on Saturday May 10, 1941. Hitler was like a madman and completely surprised when he learned of the flight. The announcement he made for publication on German radio was as follows: ''Party member Hess, who was explicitly banned by the Fuhrer from using airplanes due to an illness that has worsened in recent years, managed to place his hands on a plane recently contrary to this order. The letter he left behind shows, unfortunately, Unfortunately, signs of mental disorder, which justify the fear that he was a victim of hallucinations. " In view of this reaction of Hitler no senior English government official agreed to talk to him and Hess was sent to an isolated prison. 

In England, psychological experts drew Hess' personality profile. He was described as having a pale personality, a dubious moral character, to whom the nickname "the first lady of the country" and other feminine nicknames stuck. Hess was described by them as quite peaceful, but a little unbalanced. He turned and turned in his mind on his own initiative until it became a madness for one thing. Hess used flight to reinforce his weak character traits. He convinced himself that Germany would win the war, but at a heavy cost and after a long time. He thought that if he he would only succeed in convincing the English people that there was a basis for peace, this would bring an end to the war and avoid unnecessary suffering.

Hess had periods of ups and downs in his mental state. There were times when he was as normal as one would expect an inmate in solitary confinement. When he learned of the deterioration of Germany's situation and that he would be tried as a war criminal, gloomy moods struck him. He had fits of rage in which he shouted at himself and severe forgetfulness attacks in which he forgot what happened five minutes ago. When his memory returned to him, he was re-attacked with tantrums, paranoid hallucinations centered on "Jewish conspiracies'', neglected his outward appearance and made failed suicide attempts.

Hess was sent to trial in Nuremberg on October 8, 1945 and experienced a drastic decline in his living conditions. When the psychiatrists visited him, he forgot every detail of his previous life. It seems that with the suicide of Hitler, most of his personality was also erased. He had to be told where he was born. Hess took an interest and tried to cooperate, but without success. Even when they met him with Goering he did not remember anything. He did not remember the putsch in Munich nor the flight to England. They met him with Haushofer and a host of other senior Nazis in prison, but failed to evoke his memory.

Psychiatrists were united in their views that the basis of amnesia was his hysterical tendencies, which may have originated in the traumas he experienced in World War I and perhaps earlier, in his childhood and adolescence. His psychiatrists determined: 1. Hess is sane and responsible. 2. Hess is a fundamentally neurotic and hysterical type. His amnesia stems from a mixture of autosuggestion and a conscious onset of a hysterical personality.

Hess, who had a split personality, became one of the symbols of Germany's geographical split during his lifetime. This combination of personal and geographical division prevented world public opinion from properly condemning Nazi crimes. He died in 1987 at the age of 93 in Shepandau Prison, after many years of deteriorating health. The circumstances of his death, apparently in the wake of a suicide that finally succeeded, became a political event in the vanity fire of the media. His death provoked general unrest in Germany, which eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, three years later.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part II, Chapter 12 - Herman Goering the Emperor of the Air

Herman Goering was a celebrated fighter pilot, "Ace" who took down twenty-two enemy airplanes  in the First World War. He was the successor of Manfred von Richthofen "the Red Baron", perhaps the greatest pilot ever, who fell in battle after being credited with taking down of about 300 of Allied airplanes. The Richthofen Squadron was called the "Flying Circus" and was an elite unit of the German Air Force and Army.

The clause in the Versailles Agreements in which the Germans were required to hand over to the Allies all the advanced D-7 poker planes with which Goering fought, was a major factor in the German protest against the agreement. Goering ordered his pilots to take all of the squadron's planes and destroy them.

He met Hitler in 1922. Hitler immediately noticed Goering's value as a famous commander and pilot. Goering was impressed by Hitler's political skills. A fruitful collaboration began between them, which lasted until the defeat of the Nazis. It was a partnership and a personal friendship.

For Goering the ambitious Hitler was an extraordinary political opportunity. As a young man with a relatively junior rank he could not fit into a high rank in any of the other parties. The ideas of the Nazi party matched his views. What was left for him was to shift this party course so that it would fit in with his plans to advance aviation and to lead the party and Germany in this way.

In 1932 Goering became President of the German Parliament. He also served as the political ambassador of the Nazis. Involved and best known of all, he became the number one electoral asset, the most popular figure in Germany. He linked the Nazi Party to the leaders of the conservative parties, who wanted nothing to do with Hitler.

In 1933, when the first Nazi-led government was formed, Goering was appointed to hold three ministerial portfolios: Prussia's interior minister - in this capacity he brought about the unification of all German federal police into one force under Himmler's command. Minister of Aviation - a position that was tailor-made for him and pointed out the importance of the issue. Minister of the Environment - Goering was the first Minister of the Environment in the world. He was an ardent supporter of the subject, which was one of the most important in the platform of the neo-pagan Nazi party.

In 1934, Goering actually took over the Nazi party on "Night of the Long Knives," in which Ernest Roham and his men, who were his friends with whom he had built a popular large militia, were murdered. The Nazi party finally became a jealous dictatorship, dominated by the black color of SS clothes. The world was shocked, but moved on to the agenda.

In 1935 Goering strated the rapid establishment of the new Air Force. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were: if the Allies discovered that the Germans were developing fighter airplanes they had the right to attack. But Goering's charismatic personality played a key role in convincing the entire world that no evil would happen. The British were silent when he announced that he was going to develop a large air force. The German Air Force quickly became the central player of international politics and later brought the Nazis victories without bloodshed. At the same time, the airforce was used for the purpose of identifying the Nazi movement with the most modern and spectacular military branch.

In parliament that year, Goering passed the Nuremberg Laws. The laws forbade marriage or extramarital relations between Jews and citizens of the Reich of German descent. The decision was unanimous. Goering has signed all of these laws as Speaker of Parliament.

In 1936, the Rhine area was conquered, mainly through an air force demonstration. Goering was also appointed to the very important position of Commissioner of the Four-Year Economic Plan. In fact he became the head of the German economy. Nazism began as a struggle of the lower classes, but soon made Germany ruled by a small group of industrialists with huge factories. Goering made a crucial contribution to this. His original intention was slightly different, to nationalize the industry.

Goering took advantage of this role: He ransfered unlimited budgets to the aviation sector. He  nationalize factories in a systematic program, particularly in the occupied countries. He established an economic empire under his control and name, centered on all the steel production of the Reich. His factories began employing forced laborers. 

Goering, who had economic thinking, was against any waste. He therefore opposed the elimination of the skilled labor force in the occupied lands, in which countless factories operated. His economic trademark was maximum use of resources. His orders to the SS were always combined with a warning: "Do not waste anything of what is usable''.

In 1938, after "Kristallnacht", Goering enthusiastically created the legal system for the theft of Jewish property, a model that Eichmann later used in Vienna. Goering ordered that all resources in the occupied lands be confiscated and that the population be left with only the minimum necessary for subsistence. He thought of looting as the normal way of waging war. This approach shaped the final solution. The sorting of the Jews for life and death was done on the basis of the economic calculation of their usefulness. From the bodies of the murdered everything that was valuable was taken.

In 1939, World War II broke out, in fast wars the Germans conquered Poland, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium and France. The Nazi Air Force was the deciding factor in these victories. Following the victories in the air, the mobile ground forces and the "assault units" of the SS at their head, advanced rapidly, killing systematicly all the Jews and others who were on their way.

In 1940 the battle for Britain began and the German Air Force lost about a third of its power in a stubborn and continuous attack on the island, which was protected by air defense radar, a method that Goering underestimated the information about. The airforce has not recovered from this damage.

One week after the beginning of the invasion of Russia, on June 29, 1941, Hitler officially appointed Goering as his successor. These were the heydays of him and of Nazi regime in general. A month later, on July 31, 1941, on the eve of the date  of Tisha B'Av in the Jewish calendar, Goering signed the "Final Solution" order.

Many people, ideas and events in Nazi Germany pushed directly and indirectly for the final solution. In the end, it was an initiated and calculated decision by Goering, the most powerful man in the Reich. This was in the capacity of his position as "the commissioner of Jewish Affairs''. As early as May 1941, he issued an order banning the emigration of Jews from the Reich.

During the spring of 1941 Goering lost a lot of prestige and status, as a result of various and cumulative failures: On May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess took off for his solo flight to England, thus beginning an endless saga of defection and betrayal. The flight was a huge blow to Goering's prestige, also because it took place at the end of the Battle of Britain, in which he lost a third of his airplanes. At the end of May 1941 another problem was discovered which cast a heavy shadow over all his plans. Ernest Udet, a close friend of him from the Flying Circus, was appointed by him, although lacking administrative skills, to be in charge of the fighting airplanes production. Udet and his friends have turned the Air Force's armament plan into chaos. He forged reports on the manufacturing and presented numbers that were much higher than reality. In all, Goering was suddenly missing about 3,000 aircraft, compared to his original design. This is according to the following calculation: about 1500 as a result of Udet's fabrications, about 1,200 that he lost in the battle over Britain and about 300 that he lost in the battle over Crete that ended in those days. He had just over 2,000 aircraft left, ahead of the war in Russia and the continuation of the war in other fronts. In addition, following the omissions of Udet, who committed suicide, he lost control of the aviation industry, which was handed over to Albert Spir, the Minister of Armament.

The entanglement into which Goering had to go had to be resolved immediately. He was an action man, with an iron will. He knew that he was starting to lose control. He had to take a decisive counter-action. Why then, he thought, not to act against the Jews. Goering thought that in this way he would create a renewed dynamic, in which the totality of the ups and downs would be balanced. He will compensate for the loss of the airplanes with the extermination of Jews, precisely according to Nietzsche's vertical dialectics. He thought that in way he would continue to hold on to everything.

On the evening of Tisha B'Av, July 31, 1941, Goering sent a letter to Reinhard Heydrich instructing him to begin preparations for a solution to the problem of European Jewry. This was the main order for the complete extermination of the Jews. It was a fateful moment, which marked a decisive turn in the fate of the Jewish people, who experienced throughout history the heights of calamity on this fateful date. The order created a chain reaction in the Nazi domination hierarchy. At the Vanza conference, a few months later, Heydrich planned the practical steps for its implementation.

The order, which symbolizes the peak of humiliation, did not help Gering re-establish himself. In 1942 his status finally waned, after failing to fulfill his promise of air supplies to the besieged Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Hitler increasingly took over the various fields of aviation, from the development of wonder weapons to the management of air defense. Goering found himself outside the circle he had established. He lost control of his drug addiction and spent a lot of time in his estate with the private nature reserve. He became notorious for looting art works for his private collection. His official status remained the same, as Hitler continued to rely on his coolness in times of crisis and saw in him the person he would have wanted by his side at such a time.

The senior status of Goering in the Nazi regime is undisputed. Yet he is often seen as a secondary figure to Hitler. This is not the case and he was the actual leader of Nazi Germany most of the time. Given the importance of militarism in Germany, Goering, the party's most senior officer, actually dictated many events. He sought, with the help of other young pilot officers who belonged to his circle, such as Hess and Heydrich, to become Hitler's successor. He strengthened his political status through his connections with the nobility and the capitalists. His status in the eyes of the far right front of the party was reinforced by his extreme antisemitic measures, culminating in the final solution order.