Despite her association with the highest levels of Nazi officialdom, Reitsch was apparently slow to recognize the ruin into which they were leading the country. When she resumed her Me-163 flight test duties following her accident, she was invited to a luncheon with Hermann Göring. During the meal she was appalled to realize that the Reischmarschall was apparently living in a dream world. He believed that the Me-163 was in mass production and would soon deliver the Fatherland from the scourge of the Allied 1,000-plane bombing raids. Worse yet, when Reitsch tried to correct Göring’s misperceptions, he made it clear that he would not listen to any contrary view and abruptly left the room to go and play with his children.

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Reitsch’s return to the Me-163 project, now located at Bad Zwischenahn, was marred by the project director’s refusal to allow her to fly it again. Despite her howls of protest, there was no reversal of this position. She withdrew from the project when her longtime friend Greim approached her with a request to visit him on the Russian Front in an attempt to boost the morale of the troops. During that trip, Reitsch’s understanding of the bloody realities of war was driven home with a brutal vengeance. This new reality fueled her determination to press for the formation of a corps of suicide pilots.

Late in 1943, Reitsch took the opportunity to discuss Operation Self Sacrifice directly with Hitler when she was invited to a ceremony at Berchtesgaden to receive her Iron Cross First Class. He parried her efforts to talk about a suicide bomber plan by launching into a long, rambling monologue about how the new twin-engine Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter would save the day. Reitsch pressed her case and finally gained the Führer’s reluctant permission to go ahead with experimental work only — with the proviso that he must be spared the details.

Operation Self Sacrifice got underway with a plan to use the Me-328B, already in the prototype stage, as a parasitic ‘Sacrificial Fighter.’ Reitsch and other pilots carried out experiments with the Me-328 flying under its own power as well as functioning as a glider to be launched from a Dornier Do-217E twin-engine bomber. These plans were abruptly terminated when an Allied bombing raid wiped out the factory in which the prototype Me-328s were being built. This was probably just as well, since the Me-328 had severe flaws.

The planners then adjusted their sights, hoping to use the V-1 guided glider bomb then entering operational status. Seventy of the V-1s equipped with cockpits for piloted flight were ordered, to be built by Fieseler and designated as the Fi-103 Reichenberg. This manned version of the V-1 proved easy to fly but glided like a brick and was tricky to land on its skid because of its very high landing speed and tendency to ground-loop.

One factor that caused problems with the V-1 as a cruise missile was related to vibrations imparted to the airframe by its power plant. The pulse-jet engine developed thrust through very closely placed machine gun-like explosions, thus the nickname ‘buzz bomb.’ In the course of test flights, Reitsch was able to identify this problem, and she may also have contributed to improving the V-1’s accuracy.

In the Fi-103 test plane, the cockpit was directly in front of the engine intake. It was assumed that in the event of an emergency during test flights, the pilot would be able to open the canopy and bail out. In point of fact, it is more than likely that the exiting pilot could not survive if the engine was running. Two of the seven Fi-103 instructors were killed, and four were injured. Reitsch was the only one of the group to survive the test program without injury.

Reitsch was designated as an instructor of the volunteer pilots in what was called the Leonidas Squadron (formally the 5th Staffel of Kampfgeschwader 200), presumably named after the heroic Spartan general who, in 480 bc, with a cohort of about 1,000 warriors, fought to the death to save the rest of Greece from invading Persians. She encountered numerous difficulties with the project, thanks to the indifference of her high-ranking Nazi friends. The prevailing attitude among them amid the disastrous military situation in late 1944 was that the very idea of suicide pilots was ‘un-German’ and that it went against the grain of the German psyche. The last months of Reitsch’s wartime service involved flying wounded soldiers into hospital airstrips, carrying urgent dispatches by air and surveying air routes into the rubble of Berlin.On April 25, 1945, Greim told Reitsch she must fly with him to Berlin for a meeting with Hitler. As a result of a proposal by Göring to take over leadership of the country, Hitler had ordered Göring arrested, and he intended to appoint Greim the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe.

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