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.