About this item
Biographers' Club Prize-winner Clare Mulley's The Women Who Flew for Hitler -- a dual biography of Nazi Germany's most highly decorated women pilots.Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented, courageous, and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and 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, vivacious, and distinctly Aryan, while the darker, more self-effacing Melitta came from an aristocratic Prussian family. Both were driven by deeply held convictions about honor and patriotism; but ultimately, 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 attempt to assassinate the Fhrer. Their interwoven lives provide vivid insight into Nazi Germany and its attitudes toward women, class, and race.Acclaimed biographer Clare Mulley gets under the skin of these two distinctive and unconventional women, giving a full -- and as yet largely unknown -- account of their contrasting yet strangely parallel lives, against a changing backdrop of the 1936 Olympics, the Eastern Front, the Berlin Air Club, and Hitler's bunker. Told with brio and great narrative flair, The Women Who Flew for Hitler is an extraordinary true story, with all the excitement and color of the best fiction.
About the Author
CLARE MULLEY is the award-winning author of two biographies:
- 'THE SPY WHO LOVED' tells the extraordinary story of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, Britain's first female special agent of the Second World War, and was published to great critical acclaim in 2012 in the UK, 2013 in the USA.
- 'THE WOMAN WHO SAVED THE CHILDREN', is a biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of Save the Children and perhaps unlikely champion of children's rights, and won the British Daily Mail Biographers' Club prize. Then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called it 'a truly brilliant book'. Clare is still a Campaigns Ambassador for Save the Children, and all royalties from the book go to the charity's international programme work.
Having had three very lively daughters, Clare is now working (when she gets the chance) on a third biography, also set in WWII. Clare is a seasoned public speaker, regularly appears on radio and occasionally writes and blogs for various websites, and British publications. www.claremulley.com
