Did the Nazis Kill German Test Pilot Melitta von Stauffenberg?

Norbourn A. Thomas was a high school senior three weeks shy of his 18th birthday when he witnessed Japan attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His U.S. Army colonel father was stationed on Oahu, and just after their deeply religious Catholic family of five returned from early Mass that sunny Sunday morning, Japanese airplanes strafed near their house at Schofield Barracks. After gathering spent shell casings that fell from the attacking aircraft, “Norbie,” as his family called him, decided to become a fighter pilot. 

Three years and four months later, flying a mission over Bavaria in a camera-equipped F-6D reconnaissance model of the North American P-51 Mustang, First Lieutenant Norbourn A. Thomas became a central figure in a World War II air combat whodunit that German historians have debated for nearly 80 years. The mystery: Who shot down Melitta, Countess von Stauffenberg? The countess was an uncommonly talented aeronautical engineer, aviator, and a hero of the Third Reich. Had she been shot down by an Allied airplane? Or had her own government murdered her in retaliation for her brother-in-law’s role in an attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler?

Born Melitta Schiller in 1903, Melitta von Stauffenberg was 42 years old when she died. In the 1920s, she was one of the first German women to earn an engineering degree in flight mechanics and technology from the Technical University of Munich. In the ensuing decades, she earned every possible German pilot license, from gliders to multi-engine aircraft. She won flying competitions and performed an aerobatic display in a Heinkel He 70 Blitz monoplane at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. As a civilian engineer, she did fundamental research on propellers and radio-control technology. She also developed the habit of piloting her own flight tests—a rarity among engineers even today.

Schiller became Melitta, Countess von Stauffenberg with her 1937 marriage to professor of ancient history Alexander, Count von Stauffenberg, whom she met at a colleague’s wedding. Alexander and his twin Berthold were the older brothers of Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg, who on July 20, 1944, planted a bomb meant to kill Hitler in the well-known but failed Valkyrie coup attempt.

Five years before Valkyrie, as World War II began, the Luftwaffe conscripted Melitta to work on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber. Her mostly secret work was deemed so valuable that after Nazi racial lineage investigators discovered her Christian-convert father’s parents were Jewish, Luftwaffe leaders persuaded Hitler in 1941 to declare her “German-blooded” and thus exempt from the regime’s Nuremberg race laws.

Like many others secretly opposed to Hitler and his totalitarian regime, yet unable or unwilling to flee Germany, Melitta went along to get along. She lived and worked among the Luftwaffe pilots her technologies were meant to help. At Berlin-Gatow Airfield on the north shore of a large lake on the west side of Berlin known as the Wannsee, she had an office at the Luftkriegsakademie der Luftwaffe (the Air Warfare Academy of the Air Force) and a small apartment on base. 

Melitta flew for the Luftwaffe not only because she was trapped by her identity but also because her aircraft canopy offered a bubble of immunity from thinking about what she knew or heard about the Nazi regime’s crimes. She could keep her head in the sand by literally keeping it in the clouds, as she did for four years. During World War II, she flew more than 2,500 physically grueling and risky nosedives in tests of Stukas. For this dangerous work, Melitta became the fourth woman during that war awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and the Airman Badge with Diamonds and Rubies, a military decoration for bravery. 

“Melitta’s exceptional skills allowed her to make significant aeronautical engineering contributions to the Luftwaffe and thus keep herself and her family safe in such a dangerous and unforgiving political environment,” says Dorothy Cochrane, the National Air and Space Museum’s curator for general aviation. “It is at least to the Luftwaffe’s credit that they rewarded her remarkable test flights and engineering expertise.”

The Plot to Kill Hitler

Evidence suggests that during a Sunday picnic outing at the Wannsee on May 21, 1944, Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg told his sister-in-law Melitta about Valkyrie—his plan to assassinate Hitler.

Claus had learned shortly before the picnic that he would soon be named to a staff position requiring him to attend meetings with Hitler. A longtime foe of the regime, Claus had decided to kill the dictator by leaving a bomb at a meeting, either at Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden in the Alps or at his Eastern Front military headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair). Claus asked if Melitta would be willing to use one of the aircraft she flew to feign an emergency landing, pick him up, and fly him to Berlin after he planted the bomb. “If I am called, I will be there,” Melitta reportedly told her friend Paul von Handel. “I have no fear of death.”

In the end, Claus was able to instead use a Wehrmacht general’s airplane to get back to Berlin after planting the bomb at the Wolfsschanze, but the coup failed. Claus and his brother Berthold, also a coup participant, were quickly executed. The Gestapo then arrested Melitta’s husband Alexander, other innocent Stauffenbergs, and family members of other real or suspected coup plotters under a Nazi policy called Sippenhaft. The term literally means “clan liability” but can be understood as “blood guilt.” It was a “crime” punished without specific charges, arrest warrants, trials, and promise of release. 

Melitta was also arrested, but by summer 1944 she was the director of her own test center for special flight equipment (Versuchsstelle für Flugsondergerät), and the Luftwaffe was keen to have her finish designing and testing a night landing system for fighters. Such a system was urgently needed because German pilots who flew against night raids by British bombers were being lost less to enemy fire than to accidents trying to land on blacked-out airfields. The Luftwaffe got Melitta released after six weeks. 

She immediately began flying nighttime tests of her landing system, which used a special optical cockpit sight and an array of red and green lights on the ground to guide pilots. Meanwhile, she spent her days trying to help keep her husband and other Sippenhaft prisoners alive by taking them food, medicine, clothes, and warm bedding. That was an extraordinary challenge, because SS chief Heinrich Himmler had the Stauffenbergs and dozens of other prisoners shuttled in secret from one prison camp to another. 

But with help from a sympathetic Gestapo agent, Melitta repeatedly found out where her husband and other relatives were being held and flew to them with life-saving supplies—including meat from rabbits she hunted and shot near her airfield. Melitta usually arrived with supplies in her test center’s Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, a Wehrmacht liaison airplane with phenomenal short takeoff and landing capabilities.

On April 8, 1945, with the Third Reich crumbling (Hitler would kill himself just three weeks later), Melitta dared a desperate daylight flight to try to free Alexander and escape with him to Switzerland. Her airplane this time was a two-seat Bücker Bü 181 Bestmann trainer. She had obtained the Bestmann from a Luftwaffe air base using a bogus order after a five-day search for Alexander that nearly killed her. Her Fieseler Storch had flipped onto its back during an attempted night landing in a farm field near Buchenwald, and another Bücker 181 she used had been crippled during a strafing attack by American P-51s.

Shortly after 7:30 am on the Sunday of April 8, 1945, residents of the east Bavarian village of Strasskirchen were shocked to see a small green airplane with military markings come buzzing along about 30 feet off the ground through skies that had been crisscrossed for days by U.S. fighters and fighter-bombers. Flying at treetop level to reduce her risk of being spotted, Melitta was using railroad tracks that ran southeast from Regensburg to Passau to navigate to Schönberg, a town 25 miles north of Passau, where she knew Alexander and others were being held in a school the SS had commandeered.

But as Melitta flew over Strasskirchen, a fighter aircraft roared out of the sky behind her, fired machine gun bursts at her little airplane, and zoomed away. Eyewitnesses saw her Bücker 181 crash in a farm field slightly more than a mile east of Strasskirchen.

Locals who rushed to the scene found the airplane in pieces and Melitta injured but alive and in shock. When they found her identity card and learned the pilot was a Stauffenberg—a name reviled in those days as the "traitor family” by many Germans—rumors quickly spread that the Gestapo had dispatched the fighter that shot her down. She had been defecting with plans for the wonder weapon Hitler had long promised would win the war, some said. Others heard she carried secret documents about the Valkyrie coup plot. 

The rumors intensified when, within an hour of her crash, Wehrmacht troops surrounded the site and dispersed bystanders. Their commander refused to let a civilian doctor see her, and when a military ambulance delivered her to the hospital in nearby Straubing a couple of hours after her crash, she was dead.

Who Shot Down Melitta, Countess von Stauffenberg?

About the only thing eyewitnesses agreed upon was that Melitta’s airplane was shot down by a German Messerschmitt Bf 109. 

But later accounts cast doubt on the story. Notably, German historian Gerhard Bracke wrote in his 1990 biography of Melitta that “with probability bordering on certainty,” the Bücker 181 had actually been downed by a U.S. P-51 Mustang flown by First Lieutenant Norbourn Thomas, the colonel’s son inspired to be a fighter pilot by the Pearl Harbor attack. 

“Following the path of individuals through the archival record is spotty at the best of times,” says Roger Connor, an aeronautics curator at the National Air and Space Museum. “For someone whose story sits at the intersections of warring powers, the task can be overwhelming. The final days of the European war were especially chaotic.”   

Bracke had based his conclusion on a list of aerial victories compiled by the U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency, which shows that on the same day Melitta was shot down near Strasskirchen, Lieutenant Thomas—who died in combat in the Korean War five years later—claimed credit for downing a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter at about the same time (7:40 am) at Regensburg, which is 35 miles north of Strasskirchen. Bracke reasoned that for a fighter pilot flying fast over unfamiliar territory, “Regensburg” could mean anywhere within dozens of miles of the city. Also, while American pilots downed many Fw 190s over Germany during the war, neither Bracke nor local Strasskirchen historian Helmut Erwert could find any evidence that an Fw 190 was ever shot down near Regensburg. 

Bracke and Erwert reasoned that Thomas, flying at high speed as he dove on Melitta, mistook her boxy Bücker 181 trainer for an Fw 190. The German historians concluded that eyewitnesses on the ground misidentified Thomas’ P-51 as a Bf 109 because the German fighter was more familiar to the townsfolk. 

“Aerial combat is confusing even under the best of circumstances,” notes Alex Spencer, the National Air and Space Museum’s curator for British and European military aircraft. “Aircraft are easily misidentified, and the Bü 181 has a similar silhouette or outline to an Fw 190. Even if Thomas properly identified the aircraft as a Bü 181, it would be more impressive to make a claim for an Fw 190, one of the premier German fighters of the war, rather than for an unarmed light trainer or liaison aircraft.”

Still, one potential piece of evidence had not been examined. The research agency’s listing of Thomas’ claim included the abbreviation “19TAC68; RecFlash: J (3),” which Bracke surmised must be additional documentation of the incident. “Finding this evidence could be the final solution to our history question, but no archive has yet been able to provide the evidence in text or picture,” Bracke wrote in his book.

I became interested in the mystery of Melitta von Stauffenberg’s death during a glorious year I spent as Verville Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum, where I finished writing my book Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (Henry Holt & Company, 2014). As a German speaker, I struck up a friendship that year with the Museum’s European aviation curator at the time, German-born Evelyn Crellin, who loaned me Bracke’s book on Melitta von Stauffenberg. As a longtime investigative journalist, when I read Bracke’s reference to missing documentation that might shed more light on whether Thomas shot down Melitta von Stauffenberg, I thought I could take Bracke’s research further—and couldn’t resist trying. When I did, I got a shock.

Inquiries to the Air Force Historical Research Agency finally yielded the text of the “RecFlash” that the German historians couldn’t find. An abbreviation meaning “reconnaissance flash,” the RecFlash was an after-action report to the 10th Photo Reconnaissance Group from Thomas’ unit, the 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron. Also known as the 15th TAC R, the squadron flew a camera-carrying P-51 designated the F-6.

“15th TAC R pilots provided critical support to the Allied armies advancing on the ground by surveying and photographing the terrain and enemy defenses, troop concentrations, supply dumps, and other sites,” says Russell Lee, chair of the aeronautics department at the National Air and Space Museum. “Tactical reconnaissance also revealed important targets for air strikes by Allied fighters and medium and heavy bombers.”

Other reconnaissance units flew camera-equipped models of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning—the F-5—which were unarmed. The F-6 Mustang, however, carried the same .50-caliber machine guns as regular P-51s. 

15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron pilots often needed the guns, for they flew not in groups but in pairs: a flight lead who took photographs and a wingman to watch for enemy fighters. They were often attacked—“bounced,” pilots called it— by large formations of German fighter aircraft. But 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron pilots were eager to dogfight, and by war’s end they had racked up a high score of enemy fighters: 71 confirmed kills, 12 probable, and 10 enemy aircraft damaged. By April 8, 1945, Norbourn Thomas had one and a half kills to his credit and had been shot down once himself.

When 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron pilots returned from missions, they were debriefed, usually by ground liaison officers. Their debriefers sent mission reports to the 10th Photo Reconnaissance Group and on to the Third Army. The RecFlash for Thomas’ mission on April 8 was such a report, and its description of Thomas’ claim to have downed an Fw 190 was clear and definitive.

The RecFlash reported that Thomas and a wingman—“Lt. Shively”—took off early that Sunday morning from the 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron’s latest base, a grass field lacking hangars a few miles outside Mainz, Germany. Their mission was visual reconnaissance of railroad tracks leading from Würzburg southeast through Ditzingen, Nuremberg, and Regensburg to Passau. At 7:40 am, at roughly 4,500 feet above ground level (a normal reconnaissance altitude for the F-6), they were bounced by an Fw 190, the RecFlash said.

The RecFlash described a quick aerial battle. Shively, the wingman, first spotted the Fw 190 as it came at them out of clouds from directly behind them. Shively radioed Thomas, who called “break to right.” As the American pilots broke right, the Fw 190 “dived for deck.” Thomas then told Shively that he was going to follow the Fw 190, “then completed his right break into a 360 degrees and followed Fw 190 down to approx. 3,000 ft.” At that point, the RecFlash said, Thomas “opened fired with two 2 sec. bursts at approx. 200 yds. Closing to 50 yds.” 

Thomas saw his bullets strike the enemy airplane’s fuselage around the cockpit and saw one puff of white smoke come from it. As Thomas pulled up and away, he saw Shively “closing and firing” and “observed FW-190 hit the ground” at 7:45 am. Thomas and Shively then completed their mission and flew back to base. 

This RecFlash report was a significant piece of evidence because it suggested the German historians got the story wrong. Melitta’s airplane couldn’t have been the aircraft described in the RecFlash. Recall that she was flying 30 feet off the ground, while the RecFlash said Thomas and Shively were attacked from behind and at an altitude of 6,000 feet. If that was so, someone else must have shot down Melitta, I reasoned

Still, something wasn’t right. An eyewitness account of Melitta’s crippled descent said she “turned a little to the left and then spun into a field about 1.5 to 2 km away.” That description tracks with the RecFlash, which reported the Fw 190 had “started to skid and began glide to the left” after it was hit.

The two accounts were too similar to ignore, so I dug deeper. My research led me to Robert Shively, who had flown as the wingman for Thomas on the day Melitta was shot down. When I found him in Arizona, Shively was 95 years old—15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron’s last surviving pilot. 

Shively said he clearly remembered Thomas shooting down an Fw 190 on April 8, 1945. “When the Germans were bailing out of Italy, they had a corridor that they were using to fly the Stukas out, and we were kind of Stuka-hunting that day,” he recalled, noting that gull-wing Ju 87s were notoriously easy prey. “We saw this airplane, and we said, ‘Oh, we got a Stuka.’ We get over there and we find out it’s a fighter. I don’t know whether the guy saw us or not. I’m behind Thomas by about a couple hundred yards by this time. We were not flying in any kind of a close formation. So, he got a shot in there and nailed this guy.”

But then came the real surprise. I sent Shively a copy of the RecFlash so that he could confirm the details. After reading it, he called me on the phone sounding flabbergasted. “This is an absolute fabrication!” he said. Reading aloud the RecFlash description of how an Fw 190 bounced Shively and Thomas from behind at an altitude of several thousand feet and how he had circled and fired on the Fw 190 himself, Shively laughed derisively. “I flew 72 missions,” he said. “I never had a single one of them in which an enemy aircraft approached me.”

Shively then described what actually happened that morning decades ago: He and Thomas had dropped to an extremely low altitude to do their "Stuka hunting.” 

“There’d been several victories recorded,” Shively said. “So we just thought, since we’re going to be in that area, let’s take a look. And that’s why we were down that low. We were down on the deck. I mean, I was flying probably 100, 150 feet above the ground.” Shively added that flying so low was contrary to standard tactics. “We should be 4,000 feet above the terrain,” he said.

As they flew at a low altitude, Thomas called Shively on the radio and “said something along the lines of ‘I’ve got a 190 in front of me,’ ” Shively said. “I was about probably a mile away from him. It didn’t take me long to catch up. And I did not see him fire. He’d already fired by the time I got to him. And we just flew over the damage, or the debris field, from the crash. I just got a brief glimpse of the wreckage I could see down there. I couldn’t make anything out of it.” 

“This account of the enemy coming in on us was absolutely fabricated,” he said, then added: “I can’t believe that Thomas would—why would he do something like that?” 

And then he thought of an answer. 

By that time in the war, Major General Otto P. Weyland, commander of the XIXth Tactical Air Command, whose units included the 10th Photo Reconnaissance Group, was upset that reconnaissance pilots were dogfighting so much to rack up kills. In his 2003 book, Patton’s Eyes in the Sky: USAAF Combat Reconnaissance Missions North-West Europe 1944–1945, aviation author Tom Ivie wrote: “In the opinion of General Weyland and his staff, these aerial combats jeopardized the primary mission of reconnaissance and were to be stopped immediately.” Weyland issued a directive “that no reconnaissance pilot under his command would fire at any German aircraft unless it was in the process of attacking the reconnaissance flight or friendly forces on the ground.” 

Shively said pilots had been threatened with court-martial if they violated the order. As such, Thomas or perhaps whoever filed the RecFlash had a strong motive to report that Thomas and Shively had been “bounced” rather than admit they were hunting for Stukas at low altitude.

“He probably just told this story to avoid that penalty from on high,” said Shively. “That’s the only reason I can think of.”

Or perhaps someone else modified the account to protect Thomas and Shively from Weyland’s wrath. (Robert Shively passed away not long after I spoke with him. I am deeply grateful to him for his military service and his assistance in writing this historical account.)

And with that, I believe—as Bracke had previously written—we can conclude “with probability bordering on certainty” that First Lieutenant Norbourn Thomas shot down Melitta von Stauffenberg. By happenstance tinged with kismet, she met her fate when an Allied P-51 went hunting for a Stuka dive-bomber—the very same aircraft she had test-flown more than 2,000 times in service to the Luftwaffe. 

---

Richard Whittle is the author of Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (Henry Holt & Company, 2014) and The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey (Simon & Schuster, 2010). He is a research associate and former Verville Fellow with the National Air and Space Museum.

---

This article is from the Summer 2024 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.