The critical space according to Paul Virilio

Global urban geographical decentralization, which is a major phenomenon nowadays, has led to the creation of huge cities and an endless, legal and illegal suburban expansion that extends across entire countries. The State of Israel, in particular, has long since became, due to its small size, population density, and lack of governance in the area of ​​regional planning, a single suburban city. This situation is changing the definition of sovereignty. It marks the end of the uniqueness of the place, which characterizes the old political stage and the historic city, and its replacement by the principle of immediacy, the unity of time, which is a politics of intensity and interactivity, of a technical set-up. Systems architecture has finally replaced the historic architecture and urbanism system.

The ubiquitous, immediate presence is being followed by the replacement of the traditional agenda, which was based on the solar cycle,  with accelerated technological agenda, realized by the electronic and digital media. The accelerated agenda is pushing past habits of populating space. The stable regional and urban planning of the space has long been replaced by a general lack of restraint, under social enslavement to accelerated technology. Accelerated technology accompanies humans on their daily journey by high-speed means of transportation, aircraft, cars and trains. These means of transportation greatly eroded the importance of the traditional urban space. Humans have become transfer players in the geographic space, where they are constantly mobile.

A third reason for the disintegration of traditional space is modern weapons, the operation of which is characterized by automatic remote decision-making at lightning speed. A heavy critical mass has been created, heralding a catastrophe of the dismantled historic city, of the traditional urbanization, as well as of the state.

Because the cohesive spatial layout was lost in favor of an invisible morphological configuration, a committed personal, interactive isolation was created. An atomization of the individual was created. In this accelerated process, the individual is awaiting return to the homeland, but has no escape from life in the suburbs.

The endless urban expansion marches along with the inner urban collapse. Both together eradicated the distinction between urban population and colonial settlement. They obscure national citizenship, the very obligation to grant significant political citizenship to populations under authority. Separating colonialism from state citizenship is completely impractical, given these urban processes. The sense of enclosure in the kibernetic space is common to all sectors.

Both sides live on the scale of individual survival. Each of the two types of citizenship has, in practice, rights and obligations that equal their status. The "colonial" citizen is exempt from military service and other civilian duties. He is able to build his private home on state land without obtaining building permits, not paying taxes, marrying several women and more. The "state" subject is obligated to obey every law, mild or severe, and the authorities take every opportunity to impose authority on him. Both types of citizens enjoy free basic social and health insurance. The economic ties between them are numerous and diverse.

The traditional extroverted international colonialism, which was characterized by the occupation of territories far from the homeland, has now become an internalized colonialism, dominated by global technology and media corporations. The traditional city collapsed into itself and crumbled. The centers of major cities around the world have become slums.

The immediate interactivity of the technologies has led to the decline in the value of the local human workforce. It gives priority to multinational monopolistic centralism. This is an ideology that denies the rule of national freedom movements. It creates opposing niches for the pursuit of self-management. It corresponds to a minimum country claim presented by economists. This claim enables the creation of technologies that do not require full employment and a real and practical presence of employees.

The pursuit of sovereignty today is a symptom of a simultaneous search for momentum. It is an acceleration that characterizes all separation movements, that exists between all contemporary urban classes, regardless of their national identity. The aspiration for political isolation is of extraordinary dimensions, and includes all sectors of the population. The anti-establishment ecological movement has long exhibited its enormous dimensions, for example in the North American survival movements. Survival movements can also serve as a touchstone for their absurd chances as a counterculture.

Today the spatial disruption has become the disruption of time. Transience has become a key concept in employment. Technical unemployment, temporary employment, dispersal of the wage burden, fragmentation of the labor system, fragmentation of residence, fragmentation of the family, and so on, have become the distinctive hallmark of life today. In addition, a culture of online social networking has been created, based on similar principles.

The traditional family and community, which were the building blocks of national identity, have disappeared. They fell apart following the modern lifestyle. This disintegration also has negative consequences for the status of citizenship, as it allows for disobedience to state institutions, such as through a tax revolt and a lack of governance. There is no real civic center, almost no valuable political center. The real weapon is first and foremost the position, array and direction of the forces present in the current systemic deployment, which tends to completely neutralize the ties between the citizens, the neighborhood unit.

As a result, the development of terrorism today is limited. Terrorism has nothing to do with substansive actions today. In fact, the various national terrorist movements have never had anything to do with opposition to the collapse of traditional urban systems. They expressed a utopian connection to the homeland, while the land of their longings had long since became a suburb. 

Traditional terrorist bodies are today  inefficient and irrelevant, in the reality of mega cities, which are spreading and collapsing simultaneously and uncontrollably. First, they arose to present a false utopian vision of the homeland, but not to deal with the urban issue as reality requires, by way of presenting an independent alternative to urban renewal. Second, they operate in a crumbling society, because the family and the traditional community, which are the source of classically organized resistance, no longer exist for all the inhabitants of the mega cities. Third, they operate in an outdated strategy, of conventional weapons, while the key today is the technological weapon, based on speed.

Military technological progress, which nowadays dictates political decision-making, is characterized by ballistic missiles. Everything is known today in very short durations, a few minutes and sometimes even less. The first response doctrine argues that in order to achieve the target, the nuclear missiles must be launched before those of the enemy have left the ground. These characteristics are similar to those of unmanned aerial vehicles, which are currently the most common weapons in the war against terror.

In order to be able to express themselves, the various political resistance bodies must adopt quick quantum thinking like lightning, based on time and not on space, and act according to commutes between center and fringe, in the territory in which they are located. Speed also requires action in attacks instead of defense. This is at the risk of losing self-identity, which is typical for quantum decision makers. They also run the risk of lack of public support, engaged in time management in a technological and informative race, and baseless political promises, in an urban environment that has lost its original identity.

The article was written based on Paul Virilio's book "The Critical Space".

Style and Content in Paul Virilio's Works

Quotes on Paul Virilio, the French Post- Modernist thinker, from the book: The Virilio Reader,  editor James Der Derian:

Preview: Reading Paul Virilio's writings is an oral reading. It is well understood only when read. This is because the word being heard has the ability, because of the time needed to be spoken, to pause on the visual image for the appropriate period of time to decipher it, while producing and creating the appropriate mental stimulus for deciphering, something which is impossible when the eye experiences constantly changing images in silent reading, or as in the everyday reality in general. In this respect, Virilio is like other Post Modern French thinkers, including Gaston Bacheler, who also create difficulties in understanding them without getting into their shoes. Thus, any reading of a summary or article of their writings is worthless. Read the source first to understand what it is all about, like reading a song.

Paul Virilio character impression was of  of a proud yet somewhat shy man, with none of  the character that marks many of the nouveaux philosophes. He was popular and received many invitations to speak, and accepted only few.  Born in 1932, as a child his first encounter with the speed of the war machine came at the outset of the Second World War, listening to the radio in his hometown of Nantes, hearing that the Germans had reached it, and then, almost simultaneously, hearing the sound of tanks outside his window. It was his first brush with Blitzkrieg. Aerial bombardments also left a deep impression, as they destroyed the city completely. He was drafted to fight in France's war with Algeria, before taking up a career practicing and teaching urban architecture. In between he learned the art of stained-glass making.  His official bios usually begin with his tenure as professor (1969), general director (1975), and president (1990) of the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture.

Beside his contributions to the philosophy of technology and society he wrote numerous shorter pieces on film, art, architecture, and current diplomatic-military affairs.

Virilio represents the power of will, intellect, and belief over the technological predestinations of late modernity. Virilio believes that accidents play a double game, as both disaster and diagnostic of the human condition. They can serve as a powerful agnostic wrench in the works of the new techno-deities. 

Virilio's gift for original and often un anticipated transition from seemingly commonplace discussions to profound, at times transcendent, critical syntheses, requires a particular attentiveness to the interplay of the topical and rhetorical. He is able, in part, to accomplish these transitions - which might best be described as accidental syntheses – by virtue of the specific sensibilities of the French language and culture not easily reproduced in other lenguages. 

What is for some panache, others will consider indulgent. At times these unwieldy sentences appear to be nothing more than an expedient means for imparting raw information. In other instances the task of reading him involved recognizing moments in which a shift in registers occurs from what at first appears only to be informational, to what finally amounts, in a quasi haphazard fashion - by virtue of a sheer glut, a vertiginous welter of references - to one of those unique accidental syntheses. 

The task may then best be described as sensing, approximating, or even guessing in a manner which strives for a certain rapport.

Internet browsing, hypertext and other computer-related stuff, goes well with Paul Virilio's theories about the impact of speed on the western world as we know it. Climbing up across Searching in the Internet tree, one will find the complete collapse of distance accompanied by a radical attenuation of identity. Lost sight, as well as the original site of the "Person'' are characteristic to browsing. He - or she are thinned out, disappearing into the infosphere, seven degrees removed from everything. Something that one moment had been so close, seemingly so significant, had become nothing at all.

Virilio is not the first to discern this dark side to an Enlightenment which had, for the most part, contracted a new happy, progressive marriage of self, reason, and technology. Earlier warnings about the possible perils of technologies of reproduction have been powerfully and persuasively voiced. 

First on just about every list would be Walter Benjamin. Writing in Germany in the 1930s, he observed how mechanically reproduced art, especially film, would become useful for Fascism, for the rendering of politics into aesthetics, with the advantage of mobilizing the masses for war without endangering traditional property relations. In the essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he anticipates Virilio's linking of technologies of acceleration and war in citing an early analyst and advocate of speed, the Futurist, Filippo Marinetti.

Second is Guy Debord, leader of the Situationniste movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, author of the short but highly influential, Society of the Spectacle. Surveying the spread of spectacle, the fetishization of the image, and the rise of a consumer society, he anticipated the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in May of 1968 in France. 

Third, there is Michel Foucault's extra-disciplinary genealogies of politiwas techniques of control arising from pan-opticism. Displaying no anxiety of influence, Virilio takes Foucault's pan-opticon model to an extraterrestrial level of discipline and control, offering a microanalysis of how new technologies of oversight and organizations of control, innovated by strategic alliances of the military, industrial, and scienti communities, have made the crossover into civilian and political sectors create a global administration of fear. 

All of these critical thinkers and others have provided key insights into the political and social implications of the advent of new technologies of reproduction. Yet they seem out of date, stuck in place, when compared to the restless yet, in all its timefullness, strangely rustless conceit of Virilio, that the proliferation of highspeed, realtime, cinematic, global, computer networked - in a word – virtual systems of how we see, has forever changed how we know. 

In an essay which originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Virilio maps the social consequences: What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information super highways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this nonsituation, is going to usher in a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

In short, virtuality destroys reality. On its own, perhaps not a great loss; but Virilio has his eye where others do not, on the collateral damage done to the ethos of reality, the highly vulnerable public space where individuals responsively interact. For Virilio, the interconnectivity of virtual systems is not ushering in a new day for democracy but a new order of telepresence; high-paced interconnectivity is becoming, technically and literally, a substitute for the slower-paced intersubjectivity of traditional political systems. He sees the self as a kind of virtually targeted ground-zero; once voided, concentric circles of political fallout spread, leaving in the vitrified rubble.

reading Virilio will, inevitably, leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but also the style of Virilio. In a typical Virilio sentence, which often elongates a full paragraph, the concepts can spew out. Many get recycled in later books. Some, benefiting from a new empirical settings, stand out like polished gems. But almost all of them them provide radically different takes on the social implications of technological forces, liberating their analysis from the customary.

a very important and central claim of his books is ''Critical Space'': The exo-colonialism of the industrial, imperial period has become introverted – internally, by the de-industrialization and pauperization of the urban center, and externally by the rise of an intensive transnational capital and transpolitical megalopoles. Mega cities are in   a post-industrial endo-colonization. 

Virilio was arguing from the perspective of a post-Einsteinian relativity, that not only seemed to play fast and loose with analoging, but also seemed to violate some of the basic laws of physics. The inadequacy of language to describe results and the field of quantum mechanics in general, confirmed with Virilio's point of view. The reader might have to suffer some conceptual gymnastics to get it. Yet, for every one of Virilio's oblique concepts or extravagant theoretical claims, there are others which slice right through the sludge that is served up as political analysis.

By this quality alone, there is no question that he belongs in the company of Benjamin and Adorno, Debord and Baudrillard, Foucault and Deleuze, Barthes and Derrida, for taking our understanding of the discursive relationship of technology, society, and politics to a higher plane of political as well as critical consciousness. After the millennium turn he stands out from the critical crowd, as a conceptual innovator and intellectual provocateur, the one who goes to the edge and sees beyond the traditional maps of modernity. 

Reading Paul Virilio - ''Copy-Paste'' on Global Level

Quotes of Paul Virilio, the French Post  Modernist thinker, from the book: The Virilio Reader,  editor James Der Derian:

In our situations of televisual experience, we are living in nothing less than the sphere of Einstein's relativity, which wasn't at all the case at the time that he wrote it since that was a world of trolley cars, and at most, the rocket. But today we live in a space of relativity and non-separability. Our image of time is an image of instantaneity and ubiquity. And there's a stunning general lack of understanding of speed, a lack of awareness of the essence of speed ... And this passage from an extensive to an intensive time will have considerable impact on all the various aspects of the conditions of our society: it leads to a radical reorganization both of our social mores and of our image of the world. 

In his first book, The Insecurity of Territory, Virilio introduces concepts of deterritorialization, nomadism, and the suicidal state. Deleuze and Guatarri pick up and brilliantly elaborate in their mos cant work, ''A Thousand Plateaus." Virilio draws on Benjamin's fear aestheticized politics, but takes it further, showing how politics, no longer willing, no longer able to maintain representational distinctions betweeen the real, the visual, and the virtual, disappears into the aesthetic (The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 1980). This disappearance is facilitated by the melding of military, cinematic and techno-scientific “logistics of perception" (War and Cinema, 1984).

Virilio had already given notice of the data coup d'etat that had shifted the aim of battle from capturing to captivating the enemy through the media complex (The Art of the Motor, 1993). And while environmentalists try to arouse a world consciousness by warning of a possible ecological desertification of the planet, Virilio is one dimension beyond, prophesying the chronological desertification of world time, global time, by the negative synergy of the integral accident (Open Sky, 1995).

Cinema interested me enormously for its kinematic roots, the dromological... It goes without saying that after relative speed (the railroad, aviation) there was inevitably absolute speed, the transition to the limit of electromagnetic waves. In fact, cinema interested me as a stage, up to the point of the advent of electromagnetic speed. I was interested in cinema as “cinematisme,” that is the putting into movement of images. We are approaching the limit that is the speed of light. This is a significant historical event.

Of course. It changes with the logistics of perception. The logistics of perception began by encompassing immediate perception, which is to say that of elevated sites, of the tower, of the telescope. War is waged from high points. The logistics of perception was from the start the geographic logistics of domination from an elevated site. Thus the “field of battle” which is also a “field of perception” – a theater of operation – will develop on the level of perception of the tower, of the fortified castle or on the level of perception of the bombardier. Such is the Second World War and the bombings over Europe.

The battlefield is at first local, then it becomes worldwide and finally global; which is to say expanded to the level of orbit with the invention of video and with reconnaissance satellites. Thus we have a development of the battlefield corresponding to the development of the field of perception made possible by technical advancements, successively through the technologies of geometrical optics: that of the telescope, of wave-optics, of electro-optics; that of the electromagnetic transmission of a signal in video; and, of course, computer graphics, that is to say the new multimedia.

Henceforth the battlefield is global. It is no longer "worldwide” [mondialisée] in the sense of the First or Second World Wars. It is global in the sense of the planet. For every war implicates the “rotundity" [rotondité] of the earth, the sphere, the geosphere.

There have been three industrial revolutions. The first important revolution on the technical plane is that of transportation, which favors an equipping of the territory with railroads, airports, highways, electric lines, cables, etc. It has a geopolitical element. The second revolution which is almost concomitant, is the transmissions revolution, including Marconi, Edison, radio, television. From this point on, technology is set loose. The third revolution,  we are on the verge of, is the revolution of transplanting technologies of telecommunication in favor of nano-technology, the possibility of micro technology to the point of introducing it into the human body. the futurists wished for: to sustain the human body through and not just through "chemistry''. 

I think that the infosphere – the sphere of information - is going to impose itself on the geosphere. We are going to be living in a reduced world. The capacity of interactivity is going to reduce the world, real space to nearly nothing. Therefore, in the near future, people will have a feeling of being enclosed in a small, confined, environment. In fact, there is already a speed pollution which reduces the world to nothing. Just as Foucault spoke of this feeling among the imprisoned, I believe that there will be for future generations a feeling of confinement in the world, of incarceration which will certainly be at the limit of tolerability, by virtue of the speed of information. If I were to give a last image, interactivity is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere.

Since the first takeoff of a bomber during the First World War, through the introduction of airborne troops, up to the first stratospheric rocket, the projectile and the vehicle have formed a coalescence that cybernetics will purify by getting rid of the human factor in weapon systems (through robotization).

The economy of war, which up to now has always tended to transform the human landscape into a “defensive redoubt” through the congruence of fortifications, tends now to reduce arms disparities by transforming military objects into projectiles.

In fact, in the modern arsenal, everything moves faster and faster; differences between one means and another fade away. A homogenizing process is under way in the contemporary military structure, even inside the three arms specifications: ground, sea, and air is diminishing in the wake of an aeronautical coalescence, which clearly reduces the specificity of the land forces. But this homogenizing movement of combat techniques and instruments of warfare is coupled to one last movement. This is, with the "weapon-vehicle” contraction and the cybernetization of the system, the volumetric reduction of military objects: miniaturization.

As can be seen, military space is today undergoing a radical transformation. The “conquest of space” by military and scientific personnel is no longer, as it once was, the conquest of the human habitat but the discovery of an original continuum that has only a distant link to geographical reality. From now on, the warrior moves at once in the infinitely small space of nuclear physics and in the infinitely huge outer space. The reduction of warring objects and the exponential increase in their performances bring to the military establishment that omniscience and that omnipresence it has from the beginning wished to acquire.

Speed has always been the advantage and the privilege of the hunter and the warrior. Racing and pursuit are the heart of all combat. There is thus a hierarchy of speeds to be found in the history of societies, for to possess the earth, to hold terrain, is also to possess the best means to scan it in order to protect and to defend it. Real-estate property is linked, directly or indirectly, to the faculty of its penetration and, just as something changes value in being taken from one region into another, a place changes quality according to the facility with which it can be crossed. 

The energy crisis develops in crisis energy, which means the split between reality - the materialness of the human habitat - and unreality - the immaterialness of a power that is founded only on the violence of energy and on the evercxpanding extension of its field. From now on the military establishment will defend not so much the “national” territory so much as that of energy, the area of violence. 

Busby Berkeley - Dance Until The Dawn - 1931

Busby Berkeley

Born in 1895 into a show business family, William Berkeley Enos entered the Mohegan Lake Military Academy when he was 12 and graduated in 1914. 

He volunteered to serve in the American Army during World War I and while there, in the role of Artillery Officer, he organised military parades in France and later, Germany.

Shortly before the armistice, he attended a course in aerial surveillance. 

After the war, he began a career as an actor, before moving towards musical show production on Broadway, where he earned his reputation as a choreographer. 

In 1930, the producer Samuel Goldwyn invited him to participate in Thornton Freedland’s Whoopee! Two years later, Berkeley signed a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., after which he worked at the frenetic production rate of five films a year, until he joined MGM in 1939. 

Berkeley’s meticulously planned rehearsals enabled him to film remarkably long and spectacular sequences of shots, mobilising a large group of anonymous dancers inside sumptuous settings. 

Berkeley mistrusted editing and filmed the sequences with one camera. 

Able to rise into the air and move about, Berkeley’s solitary and mechanical eye took pleasure in overturning conventional perspective: vertical images became his signature shot, assuming a particular symbolic and dialectic role in his film-work. 

In addition, these vertical views display in all their splendour the ‘ornaments’ that Berkeley carefully produced.

from: Mark Dorrian. Seeing from Above (p. 167). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

 here’s a beginner’s guide to Busby Berkeley.

Airopaidia (1786) — the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion

Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) is a remarkable insight into the early days of ballooning. Coming in at almost 400 pages the book is a wonderfully detailed account of Baldwin's one day in the air over Chester in 1785. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempts to describe his experience not only verbally but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape (see images below). Together these illustrative plates can be seen as the first ever "real" overhead aerial views.

Why Egypt Is Building a New Capital City

 

The Iranian Phoenix

 

The Russian bear

The Chinese Rooster

 

Ethiopian Lion

 

Human mosaic in motion - Walk on Sukkot in Jerusalem

Human mosaic in motion: A walk on Sukkot in Jerusalem. From Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall and from there to the entertainment complex of the old train station.

Human Face Silhouette of South America

 

Swimming Diving and Sunset in Bat Galim

 

Human mosaic in motion - Walk on Sukkot in Jerusalem

A walk on Sukkot in Jerusalem. 

From Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall and from there to the entertainment complex of the old train station.

Human mosaic in motion - Closing a Circle on Sukkot in Jerusalem - part 1 of 4 - from the Jaffa Gate to the Western Wall

Journey to Ikaria

A trip to Greece, from Athens Airport to the islands of Mykonos and Ikaria, with songs from the composition ''To Axion Esti''.

 

 

Gaisha Shape of Japan

Holocaust and Aviation - Part C, Chapter 21 - The Gliding Sport

Gliding is the gateway for the aviation world. In order to fly an airplane one must first know how to fly a glider, which is much easier and cheaper to. A glider flight is also the closest to birds flight. Gliding experience relies on the strength of wind. It therefore requires repeated trails, without promise of success, due to the uncertainty of weather conditions. The experience of gliding in a glider is very similar to surfing in the sea on a surfboard. Both attract the same kind of population of brave young people, but to some extent also destitute, un institutionalized. The large public interest in Germany in the sport, during the Weimar Republic period, added a competitive, professional and nationalist dimension to it. Hitler resembled gliding young people. He could get on a political "air wave" and "glide" on it.

The imaginary fall - the feeling of terror, paralysis and loss of control, is a familiar phenomenon among flight trainees. In the sky, the trainee sometimes finds himself in a sudden panic because of the fear of falling. He is fixed, in his body and mind, in one blind flight path, without the ability to deviate from it. As a result, he very quickly loses control of the aircraft and crashes to his death. All this to the astonishment of his flight guide and the spectators from the ground. They do not understand why he did not resort to a basic maneuver of acceleration, elevation and turn, which would have saved his life. According to Gaston Bachelar, the experience of the imaginary fall is an initial truth of the dynamic imagination. But it does not exist in the aerial imagination as an invitation for travel. For the most part it is a journey into the void, the pit of utter emptiness, the endless fall, the dive like a stone into the abyss where there is nothing. It is known in psychology as "Vertigo". It's a primitive fear. It is found as a constant component in fears of various kinds, such as in the fear of the dark. It's the fear of being completely unprotected, completely exposed. We fear the approach of this fear and try to stay away from it as much as possible. But the attitude to the fear of falling can be defined as an attitude of hate-love. The subconscious is drawn to this basic life experience. But as a result of the lack of mental strength, there are not enough words to describe it. Man is therefore unable to use the fear of falling per se, but rather as a source of inspiration for images of ascent only. As a result of the shortage of the images of the fall, its human and poetic imagery and expression are of an extreme ascent. The imagination imagine in abundance heights but not depths. The psychological fall, in its simple and dynamic form, is the dialectical game of fall and victory. It is the courage associated with standing and uprightness, the desire to live against weight, to live  vertically in the sense of healthy rising, height growth and proud head-raising. Sometimes, to further revive the images of the ascent, there are those who enrich them through occasional images of the fall. In Germany, before the Nazis came to power, the fighter pilots who fell in World War I were mentioned along with the glider pilots who fell as part of the sporting pursuit. Hitler added anti-Semitism to this.

Otto Lilienthal - Gliding is one of the first documented experiences in human culture. From the dawn of civilizations man has tried to imitate the flight of birds, by building wings made by his hands. The legend in Greek mythology about Daedalus and Icarus is one testimony of many kinds. Almost every culture in the world has similar legends or historic tales. Hence the immense importance of the enterprise of Otto Lilienthal, the German Jew who, at the end of the 19th century, was the first man to succeed in partially imitating bird flight by gliding. He built gliders with stiff, bird-shaped wings, harnessed himself to them and jumped from a hill tens of meters high, which he set up himself. He made hundreds of attempts, which he documented in photographs. The photographs, in the early days of photography, were widely circulated in the press and they made him one of the most famous people in the world. He was able to gradually improve the gliding results. The gliders he built hovered only hundreds of feet away, in a straight line and for a few seconds. Despite this it was an unprecedented achievement. The Wright brothers used his research to build the world's first motorized aircraft. Lilienthal fell to his death while flying in his glider, in 1896. He is known for a number of sayings he composed. One is: "Designing a plane is nothing, building it is something, but flying it is everything''. A second statement is about the risks of flight: "Sacrifice is required''. The nationalist Germans used his sayings to promote the achievements of aviation in their country.

Oskar Ursinus - Oskar Ursinus [1877-1952] is known in Germany as "the father of gliding". Following his great interest in the then modern technology of motorized flight he began, in 1908, to publish articles on aviation. In 1909 he organized an amateurs group to promote the flight without an engine. After building a self-designed glider, the group embarked on flight trials. In 1912 they set a record of close to two minutes in the air and a record distance of close to one kilometer. Amateurs and technology institutes have organized additional gliding clubs throughout Germany. As the models improved and with them the records, the public interest in the subject expanded. The outbreak of World War I led to a freeze on gliding research. Germany focused on building military airplanes. Ursinus joined the army, to design military aircraft. A week after being posted in a factory, he presented a plan for a heavy bomber, the largest and most innovative of its kind. The prototype was operationally tested on the Russian front, in early 1915. After proving its effectiveness on the battlefield, more with more powerful engines were ordered. In all, several hundred were built, with the constant development of more advanced models. The bomber was used in a variety of operational missions. He terrorized all fronts, including successful strategic bombings over Britain. It was the first airplane in the world to be used for this purpose. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, all the bombers were destroyed at the end of the war. But Ursinus did not take part in the revolt against this move, as he thought the German airplanes were bad. He argued that the warplanes were too heavy and powerful to effectively study the aerodynamics of flight. Their awkwardness created a major problem of motivation for the air crews. It was this lack of flight experience that caused Germany's military defeat. Aviation in the pre-war era was inspired by aerodynamics purity. It could demand idealism and self-sacrifice, in the name of the spirit of ascent that Gaston Bechelar described. In contrast, the service in the air force during the war was in awkward airplanes with no good gliding capabilities, complicated machines which tended to fall swiftly, while requiring mostly obedience to authority from the crews, resulting in constant shortage of pilots. He believed that in order to increase motivation for a pilot career, Germany has to design better airplanes. This will attract young people because the trainees will identify with the birds flight characteristics. They will become better men, pilots and citizens. He saw the new circumstances as an opportunity to return to the field of gliding. In order to master advanced aerodynamics, aviation engineers must return to gliding. Germany could engage in the development of gliders, because it was not restricted in the Versailles Treaty. Ursinus organized a first yearly gliding competition in 1920. Ten years later this competition became an international event. Germany became the world center for gliders research and production. Gliding became a major factor in the development of aviation during Weimar Germany. Ursinus' contribution to the Nazis rise to power was immense. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He happily agreed to Nazi gradual oversight and nationalization of the sport of gliding, as it was accompanied by massive financial support from the regime. His many students were among the founders of the Luftwaffe and the Nazi aviation industry. He continued his research until the end of World War II. Later on he watched the gradual revival of the gliding sport in Germany, while receiving much respect for his life long work.

Gliding in Germany during the years 1918-1933 - The flat-topped summit of mount Wasserkuppe, in the Rhone Mountains range in central Germany, is the site where Oscar Ursinus chose to make his first gliding flights. Ursinus organized the first gliding camp on mount Wasserkuppe in 1920. The format was similar to an alternative festival outdoors, lasting several weeks, during the summer. Several groups of gliders, from gliding clubs throughout Germany, gathered in the camp to fly gliders they had built. Thus began a snowball that had accumulated immense dimensions. Only four gliders were found eligible for flight in the summer of 1920. The longest flight lasted less than a minute. A successful conclusion of the event, through a new glider that broke a world record, led to a second event in the summer of 1921. More than double the number of participants were recorded and new records were broken. In August 1922, one of the gliders flew in Wasserkuppe for more than two hours. Most of the gliders were built by students of technological institutes from all over Germany. Despite their young age, they were mostly veteran pilots from World War I. The international aviation community has begun to pay attention to what is happening. The German government also began to support the activity. The German press was enthusiastic. It called the pilots "Birdmen''. Many journalists climbed to the mountain summit. On their return they claimed that the gliding event had restored their faith in Germany. There were young pilots who broke world records, even though "they came from nowhere and with nothing''. Four years after the defeat, the Germans again acted and won. Gliding has become, for this reason, nothing less than a "national duty''. The national pride as a result also carried on the thousands of participants in Wasserkuppe, who initially came for science and sports purposes. After the connection between gliding and German nationalism was shaped, history was rewritten. What Ursinos described as a return to aerodynamics research soon became a legacy of a nationalist visionary enterprise. This is especially after France invaded and occupied the Ruhr region in West Germany in January 1923. For the third event, in the summer of 1923, 53 gliders were registered. The summit of the mountain turned from a tent camp into a small town. The clumsy models of the early years became gliders of advanced design, designated for  a production line. A world record was set for more than 3 hours  in the air. The highlight of the season was the inauguration of a memorial site, established by the Veterans German Pilots Association, in honor of the fellows who fell in the war. More than 30,000 visitors came, including many from the German social elite. Government officials announced that a memorial service would be held at the site each year. They stated that the German nation must conquer the skies "for the sake of all mankind''. In the summer of 1926 a significant breakthrough occurred in the mountain, with the discovery of thermals, which are vertically rising hot air currents, allowing birds, by circling and ascending in them, to soar to heights without investing a lot of energy. The discovery occurred by accident, when a pilot suddenly entered into a thermal. He found himself hovering to heights and distances not yet known until then. The discovery made the sport of gliding much more meaningful. The gliders pilots glided for many hours above storm clouds, for distances of hundreds of miles, backed by advanced meteorology. They passed over metropolitan areas and crossed national borders. The new destinations they reached were in Czechoslovakia, France and Poland. At that years, motorized aircraft had limited performance. Gliders surpassed them in terms of range, altitude and flight duration. They could also have greater carrying capacity, as they were constructed of lightweight materials. So gliding was perceived as the third part in a triangle that also included airplanes and airships. Most of the influential figures in the German aviation world, regularly visited Wasserkuppe. They did so for the sake of gettting impressions, social encounters and flights in the latest models. A tradition has developed, on which new generations have grown. The glorious days of the "Flying Circus" were a source of inspiration. Pilots and spectators shared the feeling: "We are here to upset the Allies''.

Gliding in Germany between the Weimar Republic and Nazi regime - on one typical day in August 1931, there were about 20,000 visitors on the summit of mount Wasserkuppe. That year there were close to 40 gliding schools across Germany. The gliding industry has become the gatekeeper of German aviation and the temporary executor of its ambitions. The number of gliders built each year has increased from tens to several hundreds. The gliding associations had tens of thousands of members, most of them young people aged 18-26. They attended summer camps of gliding, where special folklore developed. The opportunity to engage in a semi-military sport fascinated many young people. From this also developed a rebellion against the Allies, accompanied by strong patriotic feelings. gliding has become more than just a sport. It served a national purpose. Members of the gliding clubs began to wear uniforms. They openly participated in nationalist and pro-Nazi demonstrations. The nationalist movement adopted them, but the socialist left liked them too. Along with many people in the Weimar Republic, they loathed the decadent lifestyle of the period. The teams of the gliding camps were a sample of the population, bridging the various classes. The glider became a medium and a message: the aerodynamic appearance of the glider expressed accurate mathematical calculations of weight and stability, while also highly valued for its elegant shape and graceful movement in the air. it became a style model. Their pilots were, for the political left, a new breed of laborers. Opponents of the Weimar Republic, from both the left and the right, saw themselves as servants of a new Germany. Gliding summed up for them the world in which they lived, in which Germany was both glorified and endangered. The effort of left and right politics was to create a new model of human being, who will combine technology and patriotism. The gliding teams were soldiers of the first line. Gliding prepared them for the challenges of technology: they learned to work with wood, metal, fabrics and other materials. They acquired knowledge in meteorology, aerodynamics, engineering and more. They specialized in many new professions and created professional work teams. Many of them subsequently began careers in all civilian and military aviation sectors. But most of them saw Nazism, not Communism, as the ideology by which aviation society will be established. They applied their experience to the underground re-establishment of Germany's military might. After the rise of the Nazis to power, mount Wasserkuppe  became a center of German military nationalism.

Gliding in Germany during the years 1933-1939 - In the July 1932 elections, more than 50% of the voters at the Wasserkuppe polls put the Nazi party ballot paper. Much higher than the national average of 37%. The Nazis took the first steps in shaping civilian air consciousness immediately after coming to power, during the period of "ideological coordination" in the spring of 1933. Aviation was intended to serve Germany's mission. In conclusion, it was only the Nazi state that oversaw all activities in this area. Ministry of Aviation established. It was headed by Herman Goering. He declared: "We will become a nation of pilots''. He reorganized the various aviation sporting bodies into one framework, named the "German Aviation  Sports Association". Another, much larger framework, was the "Reich Air Defense System". It included all the organizations of the air defense volunteers. The Nazis manned the managements of the aircraft manufacturing factories and the civil airlines. Schools required diverse aviation studies, integrating them into as many other subjects as possible. Many streets in Germany were named after fighter pilots who fell in the war. The Nazification of the gliding clubs was carried out as if by itself. There was no objection whatsoever. Goering budget abundantly the gliding clubs, with the aim of training a new generation of Nazis. Beginning in 1934, participants in the camps at Wasserkuppe wore uniforms and operated on a Nazi military agenda. In 1935 the sporting character was excluded from the competitions. They were redefined as a "military demonstration." Goering stated that the gliding teams are ''workers and students, artisans and professors, who repeatedly pull together the gliders with the rope up the mountain and this is the essence of National Socialism ... The whole nation is fighting as one man for one goal: the greatness of Germany''. The gliding superstars of the Weimar Republic had no more room. The new Aviation Association has started awarding medals to teams only. The Nazi authorities worked to rewrite the achievements of individuals. Until 1937, the Nazis completed their political control of aviation, under the slogan: "First a Nazi and then a pilot''. Mount Wasserkuppe  had become an official training base of the Luftwaffe. Large buildings were built, to meet the growing demands of the Third Reich. Ironically, in the center of the buildings is the "Hall of Fame", a magnificent mausoleum in memory of Otto Lilienthal, for all the pilots who lost their lives during flight. The building was inaugurated about a month before the outbreak of World War II.

Gliding during the World War II, 1939-1945 - Transporting fighters with their equipment using freight gliders was developed by the Germans in the late 1930s. Large gliders were built, capable of carrying dozens of armed soldiers, or light vehicles and cannons. At the same time, the Airborne Forces army was established, with trained soldiers brigades for operating extensively on the battlefield, immediately after landing in gliders and parachuting from the airplanes who pulled the gliders. At the beginning of World War II, the Wehrmacht carried out successful small-scale gliding operations, with elite commandos, in Norway, the Netherlands and France. The success encouraged the Germans to carry out the conquest of the island of Crete, in May 1941, through a massive invasion by airborne forces. It was the first time in history that a major military campaign had been carried out in this way. The lack of experience in transporting the forces harmed the Germans heavily. On the other hand, the Allies had deciphered orders in the German enigma code for the first time. The invading Germans encountered heavy resistance from small forces, which included local guerrilla forces. The Allies surrendered, after about ten days of fighting, while inflicting heavy losses on the Germans. The result had a significant impact on the course of events of World War II, as the Germans re-examined the doctrine of airborne forces. In light of the losses, Hitler stopped further such operations. He abolished the massive use planned for the airborne units in the forthcoming campaign in the Soviet Union. For his deputy, Herman Goering, what happened in Crete was added to the list of more bad news, which undermined his political status. On the eve of the invasion to the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he was left with thousands of airplanes less than he originally planned and completely without airborne forces, which could become a major base of political power for him. On the eve of Tisha B'Av 1941, he wrote the order to Reinhard Heydrich to begin the "Final Solution'', by which the Jews from all over Europe were ''transported'' directly to the gas chambers.

Holocaust and Aviation - Part C, Chapter 20 - The Flying Circus

For many, the term "ace" is best remembered from World War I. The aces were senior pilots in each country who shot down at least 5 planes in air battles. Their governments nurtured them for the sake of raising morale and the citizens adored them for their courage, perseverance, and talent. The press immortalized them as knights of the skies.

In no country has the ace figure been more popular than in Germany. At the beginning of the war, most of the army's resources, with the enthusiastic support of the public, were invested in the development of the zeppelin. During the war, after the airplane's advantages as a weapon became clear, the German government had to divert public attention from the zeppelins and used aces for this purpose. They were described in the media as modern knights, who embodied the ideal of the German warrior. The highest military decoration, "For the Merit", was awarded to many of them. At their death a royal funeral was held for them. The public admired them, in part because most of them were from the middle-class. They starred in movie diaries and in the press. Some have even won a popular biographical book.

The possibility of receiving the title "ace" was a strong incentive for pilots. After receiving the coveted title, the additional medals and prestige pushed them to pursue a pilot career. The downside was that many of them died, during air battles or in airplanes crashes that were very common in those days. This is because the planes were unreliable and in addition the flight experience was little. It was necessary to turn them into mythological figures not only in the eyes of the public, but also in the eyes of themselves, so that they could routinely deal with the death that awaited them soon.

The "Flying Circus" was a fighter airplanes squadron set up by the German army to deal with Allied air superiority at the war's end. It is probably the most famous fighter squadron in history. Its commander, Manfred Richthofen, the "Red Baron", is one of the most famous pilots in history. There is no aviation enthusiast in the world who does not know the name and over the years his memory has intensified. He and his friends have become a major icon in aviation history.

Few know that the flying circus was the incubator in which the leaders of the Nazi regime and the Nazi worldview grew up. This is where the big bang occured. It created the chain reaction that led directly to World War II and the Holocaust of European Jews. Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering, was Richhofen's successor as the commander. Goering and his friends did not accept the surrender agreement signed by their government in November 1918. Surrender was out of the question, for those who the war propaganda cultivated as Supermen. In his farewell speech to his friends, Goering assured them that "our day will return''. They smashed their airplanes, even though the surrender agreement ordered to transfer them to the Allies.

Several movies, adapted to guide viewers on certain topics, were commissioned by the Nazi state before the outbreak of World War II. The most important in this category was the aviation film "For the Merit" (1938), created by Carl Ritter, the government's senior filmmaker, who was also a celebrated fighter pilot in the First World War. The film was  establishing cultural event. In fact, it officially rewrote all of German history from the end of World War I until Hitler came to power, in a way that conformed to Nazi ideology. 

The film deals with a group of former fighter pilots, who according to clear biographical and historical characteristics are from the Flying Circus. They are headed by the squadron commander, whose character is modeled on the biography of Herman Goering. The first half of the film has many air battles. In the second half, after the war, he leads his men to revolt against the ruling regime and Democrat Weimar republic, whom he publicly despises, mainly due to its attitude towards the discharged soldiers. Out of the hardships of existence, the pilots join the small Nazi party. Their struggle succeed and Hitler comes to power. At the end of the film we see the new German Air Force, which they have become its commanders.

The film depicts civil politics as a continuation of the war in other ways and scenes of violations of the law are presented in it as inevitable, due to the rule of the corrupt left. The film was described as "the purest Nazi film". At its premiere in Berlin in December 1938, Hitler, Goering and Goebbels watched it, with Carl Ritter by their side. Outside the cinema hall stood a guard of honor of veterans. Apart from the great political, box office and artistic success, the film was also recommended for viewing by youth, and millions of young people watched it as part of the compulsory screenings held for "Hitler's Youth".

The marginal Nazi party accepted into its ranks, with the addition of Hermann Goering, the figure of the military man who was perhaps the most perominent in Germany, despite his young age and rank. He brought with him his friends, led by Ernest Udet and established with them the Luftwaffe, which was the mainstay of the Nazi army. Rudolf Hess, a pilot in the flying circus towards the end of the war, became Hitler's second deputy and tried, by secret flight, to bring about a peace agreement between England and Germany without the knowledge of the Nazi leadership. Arthur Greiser, a squadron commander in the German navy who apparently joined the Flying Circus in its last days, was a jealous Nazi whose war conduct as mayor of Danzig in Poland caused the outbreak of World War II. During the war he was the governor of the Lodz region and created the models for the Nazi occupation and expropriation policy and for the extermination of the Jews in the entire Third Reich. The younger Reinhard Heydrich, the planner of the final solution, combined his career as deputy commander of the SS with that of a fighter pilot. Chapters in the book "Holocaust and Aviation" are dedicated to everyone. Another chapter in the book deals with the great influence of the sport of gliding, in Germany after the First World War, on the revival of nationalism and the awakening of Nazism. Senior members of gliding clubs were pilots and aircrew members from the First World War. They became the backbone of the Luftwaffe after its establishment.

The entire Nazi regime was run according to the patterns formed in the Flying Circus. Adolf Hitler was shaped as a young patriot in the spirit of military propaganda that glorified the knights of the sky. He must have sought the proximity of the pilots when he began political activity. He understood the potential and political significance they could provide. He made the Nazi Party publicly identified with aviation. He gave huge budgets for the re-establishment of the German aviation industry and air force, while challenging the Versailles Agreements. The figure of the forged pilot as the popular Nietzschean Superman became the Aryan human model. The simple and effective but ruthless warfare tactics of the Flying Circus became the tactics of Nazi politics and the fast war method used by the Nazi army.

The flight is automatically perceived in the subconscious in a positive way. Therefore everyone who flies is automatically perceived as a positive, brave, communicative person, with a broad worldview. Adolf Hitler conducted his campaign as a mythical magician, mediating between the aerial and earthly mediums, between the glorious pilots and the common people. He rtraveled from city to city by airplane. In each speech he emphasized the conspiracy theory that Germany surrendered not on the battlefield, but through the fault of politicians. The airplane on which he flew became meaningful in itself. The medium became a message. Thus Hitler won the election and came to power democratically. Lenny Riefenstahl has perpetuated the immense popularity of Hitler's flights in her "Triumph of the Will" film, which opens with long minutes in which the shadow of his airplane is seen constantly passing over German soil. Through the "air order" the Nazi management culture was outlined, replacing the celestial eye of God with an eye-shutting dictatorship.

The clear symbol of mythical totalitarian modernism in Nazi Germany was the airplane. At the forefront of propaganda and popular culture were motion pictures, which were the favorite medium of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels the propaganda minister. They closely monitored their making. UFA, the nationalized film studios corporation, produced many Nazi-style aviation films, with a high degree of redesign of reality. The airplane has been incorporated, thanks to its prominent harmonic contours, as a mythical icon in cinema from its beginning. It became the main symbol in Carl Ritter's films. 

Ritter, who was also a flight instructor, developed the subject of aviation in expanding circles. Various aircraft models starred in his first films, along with their air crews. In the second circle, his films featured the large, professional and diverse ground crews who work at the airfields. In the third circle is the civilian front in the cities, in which the loved ones of the air crews live together with all the civilians, all recruited for air defense efforts. In an even wider circle are the fronts on the various borders of Germany. In the widest circle is the whole world, which is the full German living space. It was revealed to the public through exotic films about pilots who are a combination of explorers and adventurers. In this way, a perfect format was found for building a new Germany.

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.