The women who flew for Hitler : the true story of Hitler's Valkyries /

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were strikingly attractive, courageous, ambitious women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight - both were pioneering test pilots and both were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different and neither woman had a good word to say for the other. Hanna was middle-class and distinctly Aryan, while Melitta, though from an aristocratic Prussian family, was part-Jewish, and while Hanna tried to save Hitler's life, begging him to let her fly him to safety in April 1945, Melitta covertly supported the most famous assassination attempt on the Fuehrer. Their lives constantly overlapped, offering a vivid insight into Nazi Germany and its attitudes to women, to class and to race. Acclaimed biographer Clare Mulley gets under the skin of these two most distinctive and unconventional women.