Category: Gender studies

The Democrats of Wisconsin

by philg

If Oshkosh is a typical Wisconsin city, we can infer from the signage at the local office of the Democrats that Rainbow Flagism is their #1 concern. Photos from July:

What else did we find downtown? A person reduced to sleeping in a doorway:

I’m wondering if this is evidence for my theory that expressing support for 2SLGBTQQIA+ is popular because one need not reduce one’s personal standard of living in order to assist the purportedly unfortunate. See Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? (In point of fact, we did not hear anyone expressing an anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ point of view during the entire week that we were in Oshkosh.)

This is one of the many luxuries of being a Democrat, I think. One can consider oneself an advocate for the unfortunate while walking past a homeless person on the way to the rainbow flag store.

Separately, here’s an article on the new passion among young educated Democrats in Wisconsin:

Students at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee joined the wave of protests occurring at campuses across the United States to support Palestinian liberation, speak out against Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has killed over 30,000 people and to urge their universities to cut ties with Israel.

Dahlia Saba, a member of UW-Madison’s Students for Justice in Palestine and a first-year graduate student at UW-Madison, said the protest aims to clearly communicate student demands to UW-Madison administrators. Those demands, posted on Instagram, include divestment from Israel, disclosing all investments by the UW Foundation and cutting ties with Israeli institutions.

Saba, who is Palestinian-American, said that she has been paying attention to the “huge injustices perpetrated against the Palestinian people” for much of her life. She said that she has family members who were recently evacuated from Gaza.

Samer Alatout, UW-Madison associate professor, said he was at the protest to support students and celebrate student movements. He said the actions represent a “sea change” and students were claiming a right to have a role in managing and governing the university, including its ethics.

Full post, including comments

Hanna Reitsch after Germany was defeated (including her work with Amnesty International)

by philg

A fourth post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg.

Although both of these women were awarded Iron Crosses by Adolf Hitler, only Hanna was an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism. The aeronautical engineer and disciplined test pilot Melitta survived until just three weeks before the end of the war so we’ll never know what she would have accomplished in the world of civilian aviation. Much of her work was on instruments and systems for flying at night and in bad weather, so she likely would have done valuable work in the Jet Age.

During the war, Hanna had lost her nerve only once. This was during a morale-boosting visit to the Russian Front:

No sooner had she reached the first German ack-ack position than the Russians started a heavy bombardment. ‘Automatically everyone vanished into the ground, while all around us the air whistled and shuddered and crashed,’ she wrote. After their own guns had pounded out their reply, a formation of enemy planes began to bomb the Wehrmacht position. ‘I felt, in my terror, as though I wanted to creep right in on myself,’ Hanna continued. ‘When finally to this inferno were added the most horrible sounds of all, the yells of the wounded, I felt certain that not one of us would emerge alive. Cowering in a hole in the ground, it was in vain that I tried to stop the persistent knocking of my knees.’

(The above suggests that Israel could have brought the Gaza fighting to a swift conclusion if it had used 155mm artillery to attack Hamas-held positions rather than high-tech drones and other precision munitions that have convinced Palestinians that war with the IDF is a manageable lifestyle (in a June 2024 poll, the majority of Palestinians wanted to continue fighting against Israel (Reuters)). The initial death toll among civilians would have been higher, but the long-term death toll might have been lower if the IDF fought intensively enough to motivate Gazans to surrender, release their hostages, and rat out Hamas members.)

Hanna had friends with direct knowledge of the German death camp system and had seen photographs, taken by Russians, of the Majdanek extermination camp (captured in July 1944). The reports and the photos, however, did not change her views regarding the overall merits of the Nazi system. Regarding the concentration camps, the book covers another “breaking the glass ceiling” angle:

Buchenwald covered an immense site, but its hundreds of barracks were overflowing with thousands of starving prisoners. The camp was ‘indescribably filthy’, one Stauffenberg cousin noted, and ‘there was always an air of abject misery and cruelty’. Female SS guards carried sticks and whips with which they frequently beat prisoners, especially if orders – given solely in German – were not obeyed immediately.

While the concentration and extermination camps were being overrun, Hanna was one of the last Germans to spend time with Hitler, flying into Berlin in April 1945 and landing a Fieseler Storch right next to the bunker.

In that instant Hanna decided that, if Greim stayed, she would also ask Hitler for the ultimate privilege of remaining with him. Some accounts even have her grasping Hitler’s hands and begging to be allowed to stay so that her sacrifice might help redeem the honour of the Luftwaffe, tarnished by Göring’s betrayal, and even ‘guarantee’ the honour of her country in the eyes of the world.49 But Hanna may have been motivated by more than blind honour. She had worked hard to support the Nazi regime through propaganda as well as her test work for the Luftwaffe, and there is no doubt that both she and Greim identified with Hitler’s anti-Semitic world view and supported his aggressive, expansionist policies. Hanna ‘adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations’, Traudl Junge, one of the female secretaries in the bunker, later wrote. ‘She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals.’

In another example of how the Israelis might have defeated Hamas, the author notes that even a German-built underground bunker isn’t a practical refuge against sustained shelling.

Over the next few days, the Soviet army pushed through Berlin until they were within artillery range of the Chancellery. Hanna spent much of her time in Greim’s sickroom. Sometimes she dozed on the stretcher that had carried him in, but essentially she was a full-time nurse, washing and disinfecting his wound every hour, and shifting his weight to help reduce the pain. Any sustained sleep was now impossible as the bunker shook, lights flickered and even on the lower floor, fifty feet below ground, mortar fell from the eighteen-inch-thick walls.

Hanna escaped at the end of April 1945, flying as a passenger with Robert Ritter von Greim and his personal pilot. Hanna was captured by the Allies and interrogated by Eric Brown, a British pilot, and Americans interested in Germany’s advanced weapons.

‘Although she was reluctant to admit this,’ [Eric Brown] later wrote, it soon became evident that Hanna had never flown the plane under power, but only ‘to make production test flights from towed glides’.

To Eric it was clear that Hanna’s ‘devotion for Hitler was total devotion’. ‘He represented the Germany that I love,’ she told him. Hanna also denied the Holocaust. When Eric told her that he had been at the liberation of Belsen, and had seen the starving inmates and piles of the dead for himself, ‘she pooh-poohed all this. She didn’t believe it … She didn’t want to believe any of it.’ Such denial was painful for them both, but Eric found that ‘nothing could convince her that the Holocaust took place’. Hanna was, he concluded, a ‘fanatical aviator, fervent German nationalist and ardent Nazi’. Above all, he later wrote, ‘the fanaticism she displayed in her attitude to Hitler, made my blood run cold’.

When the Americans organized a press conference for her to publicly repeat her denunciation of Hitler’s military and strategic leadership, she instead defiantly asserted that she had willingly supported him, and claimed she would do the same again.

The only woman among the leaders awaiting trial, she was soon particularly close to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the regime’s former finance minister. Having enjoyed long conversations ‘about everything’, she told him she could ‘feel your thoughts steadily in me, stronger than any words’. When she learnt that her brother Kurt had survived the war, she proudly wrote to him that for many months she had been ‘sitting behind barbed wire, surrounded by the most worthy German men, leaders in so many fields. The enemy have no idea what riches they are giving me.’

The Americans seemed unsure how to classify Hanna. In December 1945 they had recorded that she was ‘not an ardent Nazi, nor even a Party member’. Other memos listed her optimistically as a potential goodwill ambassador or even ‘possible espionage worker’. Hanna’s celebrity, and close connections with former Luftwaffe staff and others once high up in Nazi circles, made her a potentially valuable asset ‘with the power to influence thousands’. But her stated desire to promote ‘the truth’ was never translated into action. Eventually they decided to keep her under surveillance in an intelligence operation code-named ‘Skylark’. The hope was that she might inadvertently lead them to former members of the Luftwaffe still wanted for trial. Hanna started receiving her ‘highly nationalistic and idealistic’ friends as soon as she was released. To pre-empt criticism, she cast herself as a victim. She ‘had a worse time [in US captivity] than the people in concentration camps!’ the pilot Rudi Storck wrote in a letter that was intercepted.

Hanna knew about this surveillance and even asked US intelligence to give her a new car when her Fiat sports car broke down (we did give her the car!). It’s a little unfair to blame Hanna for thinking that the main thing that the Nazis did wrong was to lose the war:

Among the national surveys that followed in West Germany, one from 1951 found that only 5 per cent of respondents admitted any feeling of guilt concerning the Jews, and only one in three was positive about the assassination plot.

How effective are trained psychologists?

Although acquitted in 1947, [SS officer] Skorzeny had been kept at Darmstadt internment camp to go through what he called ‘the denazification mill’.52 Hanna had been the first person he visited while on parole. Skorzeny escaped the following summer, eventually arriving in Madrid where he founded a Spanish neo-Nazi group.

Hanna’s two-month visit to India in 1959:

She loved the warmth of her reception, gave frequent talks on the spiritual experience of silent flight, and developed proposals for glider training with the Indian air force. She was also thrilled with what she called ‘the lively interest in Hitler and his achievements’ that she claimed to receive ‘all over India’.68 The cherry on the cake came when the ‘wise Indian Prime Minister’, Jawaharlal Nehru, requested she take him soaring. Hanna and Nehru stayed airborne for over two hours, Nehru at times taking the controls. It was a huge PR coup, widely reported across the Indian press. The next morning Hanna received an invitation to lunch with Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi.

She was also warmly received in the U.S.:

In 1961 Hanna returned to the USA at the suggestion of her old friend, the aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who was now working at NASA. She often claimed to have refused post-war work with the American aeronautics programme on the basis that it would have been the ultimate betrayal of her country.† Braun felt differently, and occasionally tried to persuade Hanna to change her mind. ‘We live in times of worldwide problems,’ he had written to her in 1947. ‘If one does not wish to remain on the outside, looking in, one has to take a stand – even if sentimental reasons may stand in the way of coming clean. Do give it some thought!’

While in the States, Hanna also took the opportunity to join glider pilots soaring over the Sierra Nevada, and to meet the ‘Whirly Girls’, an international association of female helicopter pilots. As the first woman to fly such a machine, she found she had the honour of being ‘Whirly Girl Number One’. It was with the Whirly Girls that Hanna was invited to the White House, meeting President Kennedy in the Oval Office. A group photo on the lawn shows her in an enveloping cream coat with matching hat and clutch, standing slightly in front of her taller peers. Her smile is once again dazzling; she felt validated. In interviews she revealed that Kennedy had told her she was a ‘paradigm’, and should ‘never give up on bringing flying closer to people’.

She came back to the U.S. in the 1970s:

She tactfully did not attend the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and does not seem to have commented on the murder of the eleven Israeli athletes. The highlight of that year for her was a return to America, where she was honoured in Arizona, and installed as the first female member of the prestigious international Society of Experimental Test Pilots. She could hardly have been happier, sitting in a hall of 2,000 people, discussing a possible new ‘Hanna Reitsch Cup’ with Baron Hilton. Back in Germany, she was now receiving hundreds of letters and parcels from schoolchildren as well as veterans, and even became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International. ‘There are millions in Germany who love me,’ she claimed, before adding, ‘it is only the German press which has been told to hate me. It is propaganda helped by the government … They are afraid I might say something good about Adolf Hitler. But why not?’

What’s Amnesty International up to lately? Since October 7, 2023, at least, tweeting out a continuous stream of support for one side in the Gaza fighting. Example:

Full post, including comments

Hanna Reitsch flying helicopters and jets

by philg

A second post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg. This supplies some detail about Hanna Reitsch’s pioneer flights in the world’s first practical helicopter.

One day [in September 1937], however, Karl Franke asked Hanna to fly him over to the Focke-Wulf factory at Bremen where he was due to take up one of the world’s first helicopters, the precarious-looking Focke-Wulf Fw 61, for a test flight. Professor Henrich Focke’s pioneering machine had overcome the two fundamental problems facing autogyro and helicopter designers: the asymmetric lift caused by the imbalance of power between the advancing and retreating ‘air-listing screws’, or rotor blades, and the tendency for the helicopter’s body to rotate in the opposite direction to its rotors. The solution was to use two three-bladed rotors, turning in opposite directions, which were fixed up on outriggers, like small scaffolding towers, in place of wings. An open cockpit sat below. It was not an elegant design; some papers described it as looking ‘like a cross between a windmill and a bicycle’, but it worked. According to Hanna, when she landed at Bremen with Karl Franke, Focke wrongly assumed that she was there to give him a second opinion. Seeing that she was ‘brimming with joy’ at the thought of taking the helicopter up, Franke was generous enough not to disabuse the great designer. Franke flew the machine first, as a precaution keeping it tethered to the ground by a few yards of rope. Unfortunately this also trapped him in reflected turbulence, buffeting the helicopter about. Such an anchor did not appeal to Hanna. Before she took her turn she had the rope disconnected and a simple white circle painted on the ground around the machine to guide her. As Hanna later recounted the story, with typical lack of false modesty, ‘within three minutes, I had it’. From now on Franke would argue that, in Germany, Hanna and Udet were the ‘only two people who were divinely gifted flyers’. The Fw 61’s vertical ascent to 300 feet, ‘like an express elevator’, with its noisy mechanical rotors literally pulling the machine up through the air, was completely different from the long tows needed by gliders, or even the shorter runs required to generate lift by engine-powered planes. To Hanna it was like flying in a new dimension. Despite the heavy vibrations that shook the whole airframe as she slowly opened the throttle, the revolutionary control of her position in the airspace at once fascinated and thrilled her, while the machine’s sensitivity and manoeuvrability was ‘intoxicating!’ ‘I thought of the lark,’ she wrote, ‘so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields.’ Hanna had become the first woman in the world to fly a helicopter.

(the above section is extensively referenced)

That February [1938], Germany was showcasing a range of Mercedes-Benz sports cars as well as revealing plans for the forthcoming ‘Volkswagen’ to an international audience at the prestigious Berlin Motor Show. ‘The story of the Berlin exhibition since National Socialism came to power,’ the national press fawned, ‘has been an uninterrupted triumph.’ Hitler wanted to use the 1938 show as more than a trade fair. It was to be a demonstration of German engineering excellence for unprecedented numbers of visitors. For this he needed a star attraction. Hanna was booked to head the programme: she was to be the first person in the world to fly a helicopter inside a building. The theme of the motor show was Germany’s lost colonies: ‘at that time a much ventilated grievance’, Hanna noted. In preparation, the great Deutschlandhalle sports stadium, then the world’s largest arena, had been furnished with palm trees, flamingos, a carpet of sand and, in Hanna’s words, ‘a Negro village and other exotic paraphernalia’. This was the scene she was to rise above in the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 helicopter: a symbol of German power and control. At first Hanna was scheduled to make only the inaugural flight, after which the chief Focke-Wulf pilot, Karl Bode, was to take over. During a demonstration for Luftwaffe generals, however, knowing that the helicopter’s sensitivity meant any slight miscalculation could take him sweeping into the audience, Bode refused to risk rising more than a few feet above the ground. It was safe, but hardly impressive enough for the crowds who would be looking down from the galleries of steeply tiered seating. Then, through no fault of Bode’s, one of the propellers broke. ‘It was dreadful,’ Hanna told Elly. ‘There were splinters from the rotor blade flying around and the flamingos were all creating.’9 Once the blades had been replaced, Hanna took her turn. With typical insouciance, she lifted the helicopter well above the recommended height and hovered in the gods. Göring quickly ordered that she was to make all the motor show flights. Bode never forgave her.

It turns out that the public back then didn’t love watching helicopters any more than they do now:

But when Hanna revved up the rotors [inside the stadium] she was horrified to discover that the machine refused to lift. The reputation of the Reich, her own career and, Hanna must have realized, possibly even her liberty, hung stuttering in the spotlights just a few inches above the floor. Surrounding her, watching every manoeuvre of both machine and pilot through a growing cloud of dirt and sand, were some 8,000 spectators, including many representatives of the international press. Hanna was certain that the problem was caused by the helicopter’s normally aspirated engine being starved of air by the breathing of the vast audience. Painful minutes passed while the technicians debated, but then the great hall’s doors were opened. Hanna and the Deutschland immediately ‘shot up to about twenty feet’ and slowly rotated on the spot. At first ‘the audience followed the flight intently’, but such a controlled display held little drama and the applause grew desultory. At the end of the demonstration Hanna neatly lowered the machine with her head held high, executed a perfectly timed, stiff-armed Nazi salute, and landed safely on her mark. She had practised this countless times for Udet while he sat comfortably ensconced in an armchair, puffing at a cigar.

(Maybe opening the doors reduced the temperature and, therefore, the density altitude?)

I had always thought that Hanna was the world’s first female jet pilot, but the book says that she likely never flew the Me 163 under power. (It’s actually a rocket-powered plane, but that’s close enough.) Her job was to test fly it in glider mode, which was how every flight in the plane ended. Nazi leadership did not want their star female pilot to be killed by the Me 163:

… the famous Me 163b Komet, was powered by extremely combustible twin fuels kept in tanks behind, and on either side of, the pilot’s seat. The fuels were a mixture of methanol alcohol, known as C-Stoff, and a hydrogen peroxide mixture, or T-Stoff. Just a few drops together could cause a violent reaction, so they were automatically injected into the plane’s combustion chamber through nozzles, where they ignited spontaneously producing a temperature of 1,800°C. Several test planes with unspent fuel blew up on touchdown. ‘If it had as much as half a cup of fuel left in its tank,’ one pilot reported, ‘it would blow itself into confetti, and the pilot with it.’ Several simply exploded in the air. Hydrogen peroxide alone was capable of spontaneous combustion when it came into contact with any organic material such as clothing, or a pilot. To protect themselves, test pilots wore specially developed white suits made from acid-resistant material, along with fur-lined boots, gauntlets and a helmet. Nevertheless, at least one pilot would be dissolved alive, after the T-Stoff feed-line became dislodged and the murderous fuels leaked into the cockpit where they seeped through the seams of his protective overalls. ‘His entire right arm had been dissolved by T-Agent. It just simply wasn’t there. There was nothing more left in the sleeve,’ the chief flight engineer reported. ‘The other arm, as well as the head, was nothing more than a mass of soft jelly.’

Hanna wasn’t scared by these deaths and injuries and tried to get into the powered test program. She was seriously injured even without the deadly fuel/engine:

Her Me 163b V5, carrying water ballast in place of fuel, was towed into the air behind a heavy twin-engined Me 110 fighter. But when Hanna came to release the undercarriage, the whole plane started to shudder violently. To make matters worse, her radio connection was also ‘kaput’.83 Red Very lights curving up towards her from below warned her something was seriously wrong. Unable to contact her tow-plane, she saw the observer signalling urgently with a white cloth, and noticed the pilot repeatedly dropping and raising his machine’s undercarriage. Clearly her own undercarriage had failed to jettison.

Hanna could have bailed out, but chose to try to preserve the airplane. She paid for this decision:

Hanna had fractured her skull in four places, broken both cheekbones, split her upper jaw, severely bruised her brain and, as one pilot put it, ‘completely wiped her nose off her face’.87 She had also broken several vertebrae. She was rushed to surgery but, knowing her arrival would cause a sensation, she insisted on travelling by car rather than ambulance, and on walking into the hospital through the quieter back entrance and up a flight of stairs before any members of staff were alerted.

In case you were tempted to complain about your own health woes:

Hanna spent five long months in hospital. After her condition stabilized, a series of pioneering operations included surgery to give her a new nose. Although she would always have a faint scar, and people who met her noted it was ‘evident something had happened there’, the reconstruction work was excellent.

Still suffering from headaches and severe giddiness, her first priority was to recover her sense of balance, without which she knew she could not fly. The summerhouse had a flight of narrow steps running from the ground up to the steep, gabled roof. Hanna climbed them cautiously until she could sit astride the ridge of the roof with her arms firmly clinging to the chimneystack, and look around without losing her balance. After a few weeks her vertigo began to ebb and she risked letting go of the chimney. Within a month, through pure determination, she could ease herself along the entire length of the ridge without feeling giddy. She built up her strength by walking, then hiking, through the forest. Despite setbacks and some despondency, in time she began to climb the pines, branch by branch, ruefully recalling the days of her childhood when ‘no tree had been too high’.

She was cleared to return to flying.

More: Read The Women Who Flew for Hitler.

Full post, including comments

Celebrating Women in Aviation on the First Day of Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture)

by philg

It’s the first day of EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the world’s largest fly-in and general celebration of aviation. In particular, there tends to be a lot of official celebration of women in aviation. Thus, today’s blog post is about the greatest female pilots in history, chronicled in the book The Women Who Flew for Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, who taught herself to fly a helicopter, is already well-known, but the book also covers Melitta von Stauffenberg whose career was actually far more impressive. While Hannah was a great stick-and-rudder pilot, Melitta was one of Germany’s most important aeronautical engineers and a far more disciplined test pilot (the author refers to both women by their first names). As Melitta isn’t as well-known, a few excerpts

In October [shortly after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering Melitta] was interviewed by the head of the aerodynamics department at the prestigious German Research Institute for Aeronautics, better known as DVL,* at Berlin-Adlershof airbase. Having temporarily closed its doors during the war, the institute was now aiming to restore Germany’s international reputation in technology, and was keen to employ the brightest graduates. Invited to watch a test flight, Melitta was deep in conversation when the plane she was there to observe plummeted from the sky to crash only a hundred metres away from her. The entire crew was killed on impact. Although she was shaken, Melitta’s resolve did not falter. The following year, aged twenty-five, she received her diploma and started work at DVL as a flight mechanic and mathematician in experimental aerodynamics research. Her initial brief was the operation of propellers, then known as ‘airscrews’, with particular focus on the sound and drag caused by high altitudes.

Adolf Hitler was an early adopter of aviation and a big proponent of the industry as well as women within it.

‘Hitler wanted the Germans to become a nation of aviators,’ the wife of Hanna’s friend Karl Baur, a Messerschmitt test pilot, later wrote. ‘If there was some kind of celebration in a city, an air show was a must.’

‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’ While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.

Hitler ended up supporting and decorating both of the women whose careers are chronicled in the book and, famously, admitted Hanna Reitsch to his inner circle.

[It is interesting to compare the book’s description of Hitler’s platform to what today’s politicians promise: “[Hitler] promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism.” Is it fair to say that Democrats promise to take cars away, move people into apartments in 15-minute cities, give women money if they don’t get married, and, instead of defending against Bolshevism, to deliver the best aspects of Bolshevism adapted for domestic use.]

Some recent books describe aviators, including German fighter pilots, as anti-Nazi. A Higher Call is one prominent example. Pilots find themselves accidentally wearing swastikas and doing whatever Hitler tells them to do. The Women Who Flew for Hitler points out that German aviators were early enthusiasts for Hitler:

Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’

By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.

If you think that motion sickness will prevent you from achieving greatness in the air:

Hanna quickly proved her capabilities and was accepted by her peers. Most of the flying suits were too large, and she needed cushions to boost her height in the cockpit, but she learned to fly loops, turns and rolls in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44, a two-seat open biplane known as the Stieglitz, or Goldfinch, and carefully concealed her initial sickness by throwing up neatly into one of her gloves.

Americans loved Hanna Reitsch before and after World War II and she loved Americans. Here’s an interesting quote from 1938:

Nevertheless, although she favourably compared the USA to a Europe ‘intellectually overburdened with centuries-old cultural legacy’, she still had some reservations. ‘The American’s uncomplicated acceptance of life-as-it-comes,’ she decided, ‘exposes him to the dangers of absorbing uncritically the opinions served up to him by press and radio.’

While Hanna was celebrated for winning gliding competitions, Melitta was doing a combination of aeronautical engineering and test piloting her own creations:

Melitta’s new assignment was to perfect the aircraft technically, to eliminate as much risk as possible. The main task was to evaluate and improve the targeting devices, and in particular the dive-sights for the two-man Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, with its distinctive gull-wing shape, and the popular four-man Ju 88 dive-bomber developed for larger-scale strategic air war. This involved registering the continuously changing angle of the dive, speed and dropping altitude, all without modern instruments. She also worked on developing dive-visors, ensuring that the autopilot levelled off the aircraft automatically when a bomb had left its cradle so as not to put too much strain on the machine’s airframe, and that the automatic pullout sequence functioned at 6G – the point at which most pilots suffered G-force-induced loss of consciousness.

Every morning Melitta cycled across the airfield from her dorm on her heavy-framed pushbike, before swapping her beret for her leather flying cap, donning her overalls and clambering into a Junkers’ cockpit. She would take her machine up to 4,000 metres before rolling sideways and tearing down again at speeds of up to 350 mph, the engines howling and the surfaces of the plane whistling as the dive angle steepened until it was at least seventy-five to eighty degrees – not far from vertical. As Melitta plunged towards earth, her gloved hands tightly gripping the steering column, the whole frame of her plane would be shaking with the mounting pressure. The vibrations made it difficult to read her instruments accurately, so many of her dives were filmed to provide the detailed information required to enable incremental improvements to the targeting devices. Sometimes she would also release between four and ten cylindrical cement bombs to test her work. At between 150 and 200 metres, just as correction seemed impossible, Melitta would lift her plane’s nose and skim low across the fields before circling back to land. After several such tests over the course of a morning, her colleagues would heave her from her cockpit, unclip her parachute harness and help her out of her flying suit, so that she could return to her engineering role. Over desk and drawing board she would now conduct a precise evaluation of the dives, often working late into the night ‘without making any fuss about it’, her colleagues noted, to calculate the alterations required before testing could begin again.6 Undertaking a few such dives without any of the engineering work had been enough to exhaust Udet some years earlier. Even with automatic dive-brakes, trainee Stuka pilots were often sick, and sometimes plunged into the sea. Yet Melitta might complete fifteen such test dives in one day: a performance unmatched by any pilot in history.

… As an engineer–pilot, Melitta already had all the qualifications needed for a technical general staff officer so she now started work on a PhD. Her new work was focused on the development of a special night-landing device for single-engined night fighters. She was ‘testing landings with fighter planes for unlit, improvised emergency airfields’, and ‘blind-flying’ without any electrical landing systems, Jutta explained.

Melitta ended up doing more than 2,000 test-dives and had a full staff of men working for her. By contrast…

Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off.

The other huge contrast was that Melitta was actually part-Jewish and, though immensely useful to the Nazi war effort, was at best ambivalent about National Socialism. Hanna Reitsch, of course, was an ardent admirer of Hitler before, during, and decades after World War II.

More about this book and these women in a follow-up post…

Melitta:

Hanna:

Full post, including comments

Why isn’t everyone celebrating Marine Le Pen’s victory in France?

by philg

The United Nations assures us that “We need more women leaders to sustain peace and development”:

The evidence is clear: wherever women take part in a peace process, peace lasts longer. In fact, a peace agreement, which includes women, is 35 per cent more likely to last at least 15 years. And without the solid foundation of peace, development is doomed to be unstable and unsustainable.

A recent Secretary-General’s report to the Security Council called women leadership and participation in peacebuilding a “prerequisite for the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” In other words, without women’s participation, we will not achieve lasting peace; and without the stability of peace, we will not achieve sustainable development.

Put forward by the Resolution 1325, the idea that women should be given greater access to leadership roles in peace and security is closely aligned with the aim of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5, on gender equality and women empowerment.

The Science confirms this theory across all domains. “Women leaders make work better. Here’s the science behind how to promote them” (American Psychological Association):

When more women are empowered to lead, everyone benefits. Decades of studies show women leaders help increase productivity, enhance collaboration, inspire organizational dedication, and improve fairness.

Why would any company or country ever select a non-woman as a leader? McKinsey says that diversity leads to huge profits (NVIDIA’s GPU development lab is a rich tapestry of Black and Latinx engineers in a wide array of gender IDs?). Note that, predictably, two white males say that McKinsey’s work in this area is just as beneficial to society as McKinsey’s work with Enron and the opioid pill vendors. “McKinsey’s Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited”:

Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.

More from the United Nations, this time a complaint that only 26 of the world’s countries have implemented McKinsey’s recommendations and selected female heads of state:

Given all of the above, shouldn’t we expect celebratory and congratulatory tweets from the United Nations, UN Women, McKinsey, et al. following Marine Le Pen’s recent electoral victory in France, the world’s 7th largest country by GDP (while working 32 hours/week and taking 8 weeks of vacation per year!)? Instead, the Guardian describes female leadership in France as “unthinkable”. The Washington Post says “Marine Le Pen is now part of France’s mainstream. That should scare us all.”

Separately, no discussion of France is complete without this poster:

Full post, including comments

Queers for Palestine merchandise at Amazon

by philg

Pride is almost over and there won’t be any 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays for an entire week (Nonbinary Awareness Week begins on July 8; International Nonbinary People’s Day is July 14; International Drag Day is July 16 (GLAAD)).

Perhaps is it time for us to purchase our Queers for Palestine merchandise before everything is sold out. The selection was good on June 5:

If you’re spending a month or two walking the Camino de Santiago you could wear this so that your fellow Christian pilgrims didn’t have to wait until the end of the hike to see a Queers for Palestine display (the one below is close to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela and directly on a pilgrimage route; photo from June 23, 2024):

Full post, including comments

Palm Beach County Public Library during this Pride

by philg

We are informed by the New York Times and CNN that Governor Ron DeSantis has banned books that promote the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. Here’s a photo taken this Pride at the local branch of the Palm Beach County Library system:

A couple of close-ups:

A potentially disturbing twist on Love is Love… the Pride books are right next to books regarding human-animal love:

Separately, I found what looks like it might be a great book celebrating women in aviation:

(about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg)

Full post, including comments

Target this Pride

by philg

How is everyone’s Pride Month going?

I visited Target near the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) airport last month. What are they offering this Pride? My favorite item was this doormat, eminently suitable for a hangar door or for an FBO to place at the bottom of airstairs:

Who could possibly argue against the interior of an aircraft or hangar being a “space space”?

Compared to last year in Montana, Target was not promoting Pride wear in kid/toddler sizes. Adult XS was the smallest that I saw.

I noticed quite a few shoppers who appeared to be observant Muslims, e.g., women who were completely covered in accordance with Islamic law and tradition. If Target wants to be respectful to migrants and Muslims, which I am sure that they do, is a big celebration of 2SLBTQQIA+ lifestyle the way to make observant Muslims feel comfortable bringing their children into the store?

Returning to the merchandise… my favorite shirt was the Love is Love shirt, but I don’t see that on the front page of Target’s LGBTQIA+ Shop (not 2SLGBTQQIA+?):

If we dig deeper, though, I think this might be it:

Perfect for walking the golden retriever!

Meanwhile, across the pond Marks and Spencer may be welcoming observant Muslims with the LGBT sandwich (seems to have been introduced in 2019 and it is unclear whether they’ll still selling it in 2024):

I would love to see a 2SLGBTQQIA+ sandwich. What would we need to add?

  • 2S = two slices of bread
  • QQ = Quinoa and Quark (the German cheese/yogurt/whatever)
  • I = Iberico (Spanish ham)
  • A = Arugula (always good to have more greens)
  • + = Black Pepper

Related:

Full post, including comments

Men struggling to find abortion care in Florida

by philg

From the Party of Science… “His Pregnancy Came as a Shock. Florida’s Abortion Law Made It Harder” (TIME):

Jasper never considered he might be pregnant. Despite the nausea, the stomach pain, the fatigue, the possibility never crossed his mind. He was about six months into testosterone therapy, a form of gender-affirming care.

It had taken ages to get his father and stepmother on board—though 18 years old at the time, Jasper lived with and relied on them for support.

Family structure blown up by American family law and customs: check. “gender-affirming care” in first paragraph; check.

(“The USA has the highest proportion [among 16 countries] of children, as much as 50 percent, with any experience of living outside a two-parent family when they turn 15. … in many Western and Eastern European countries it is more common to find that around a fourth or a third of all children have an experience of that kind, at some time during childhood. … The USA stands out as an extreme case… “; journal paper reference in Real World Divorce)

In June 2022, Jasper caught COVID-19 while traveling with his boyfriend’s family, and between the viral symptoms and newfound back soreness, it became, through no fault of his hosts, one of the most miserable vacations he’d ever taken. When he returned to Orlando, Jasper kept waiting for the pain to get better. When it persisted a month later, he visited a doctor who still couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Nobody thought to check for pregnancy.

American medical geniuses can turn a girl into a boy (with a “boyfriend”), but they can’t figure out whether a patient has become a pregnant person.

The right to an abortion was supposed to be sacrosanct in Florida—in 1989, the state’s Supreme Court found that it was protected in their constitution. Until the 15-week ban, which went into effect in July 2022 after the Dobbs decision left abortion restriction to the states, abortions for people up to 24 weeks of pregnancy had been allowed.

It’s a “ban” on abortion care if the limit is 3 weeks longer than in the typical European nation, e.g., Germany. Florida bad and nobody should move there: check.

Jasper didn’t want to tell his family. He’d begun rebuilding his relationship with them, but things felt fragile. And his stepmother, raised Catholic, deeply opposed abortion. If Jasper had to leave Florida, his boyfriend had family in Las Vegas, where abortion was legal up to 24 weeks. They’d have a place to stay, and an excuse for why they were leaving. Running the numbers mentally, he could probably find round-trip tickets for $200.

If the limit is 24 weeks, however, that’s not a “ban”. (Maskachusetts has no limit on abortion care, as long as one doctor thinks it might be helpful to a pregnant person’s mental health. Abortion care is “on-demand” through 24 weeks of a pregnant person’s pregnancy.)

The clinic was still quiet when Jasper arrived for his abortion, but it filled with patients over the course of the morning. Some looked like they were there for birth control, others he deduced were in a similar situation to him. One girl clutched pictures from her ultrasound. Seeing the fear and confusion on her face was like looking in a mirror.

We are informed that transmen are men and also that a man sees a “girl” and it is “like looking in a mirror”?

The abortion was simple: he received a mild sedative, medication to open up his cervix, and a straightforward surgery to remove the fetus. It was a safe, easy procedure—and immensely painful. And then it was over.

Was the fetus interviewed regarding the safety of this procedure?

Over seven days, Jasper had learned he was pregnant, processed the news, scheduled an abortion, and after two visits to a clinic, terminated his pregnancy.

Where can the rest of us get healthcare this quickly? (We are informed that abortion care is healthcare.) That’s my big question.

TIME includes a photo from Fort Pierce, one of my favorite places in Florida. It was there that we went to a barbecue place whose TV was tuned to Duck Dynasty. The kids asked what the show was. I said “It’s about rednecks who sell duck calls to hunters.” Senior Management admonished me for using the term “rednecks” in front of our precious innocents. Everyone else in the restaurant was Black, including the chef and the cashier. The cashier overheard this conversation and chimed in. “Oh, they rednecks,” she said. “They call they-selves rednecks.” This might have been the quickest resolution of a domestic dispute in the history of humanity.

Related: a recent photo of St. Petersburg, Florida in which, hatefully, only one intersection is painted in the sacred rainbow symbols (the 2SLGBTQQIA+ aren’t welcome on other blocks/streets around town?)…

(source: a tweet from the (proud) mayor)

Full post, including comments