Is that really it? Failed by their own standards?

Hanna Reitsch (March 29, 1912 in Hirschberg, Silesia - August 24, 1979 in Frankfurt am Main) was the most famous German test pilot.

Hanna was born the daughter of an ophthalmologist and was in training to become a medical doctor in 1932 when she left that field to pursue a career as a test pilot. In the 1930s she became famous, setting many glider, aerobatic and endurance records, being the first woman to cross the Alps in a glider. Several of her gliding records stand to this day.

In 1937 she was posted to the Luftwaffe testing center at Rechlin by Ernst Udet. While under direct command of Karl Franke she soon became a major test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and Dornier Do 17 projects, as well as one of the few to fly the new Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the world's first fully controllable helicopter. Her flying and her photogenic qualities made her a star of the Nazi party, always looking for publicity, and in 1938 she flew the Fa 61 every night inside the "Deutschlandhalle" at the Berlin Motor Show.

Early guidance and stabilization problems of the V-1 Flying Bomb were finally resolved by a daring test flight by Reitsch in a V-1 modified for manned operation. The V-1 was dropped from a Heinkel He 111 bomber. The data she brought back after fighting the unwieldy V-1 down to a successful landing enabled the engineers to devise the stabilization system.

After the war German citizens were forbidden from flying, except, after a few years, in gliders. In 1952 Reitsch won third place in the world gliding championship in Spain (and was the only woman who competed). She continued to break records including the women's altitude record (6848 metres) and became German champion in 1955.

She was interviewed and photographed several times in the early 1970's in Germany by US investigative photo journalist Ron Laytner, the only print media person to do so. At the end of her last interview Hanna Reitsch told Laytner, "And what have we now in Germany? A land of bankers and car-makers. Even our great army has gone soft. Soldiers wear beards and question orders.

“I am not ashamed to say I believed in National Socialism. I still wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me. But today in all Germany you can’t find a single person who voted Adolf Hitler into power.

Then she uttered the words that for so long kept her out of the history books: “Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don’t explain the real guilt we share – that we lost.”

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Reitsch