By : Martin Simons

Peter Riedel was born in Germany, the second son of Felix Riedel, a Lutheran Pastor in the small village of Dehlitz near Halle in Saxony. As well as his older brother, Felix (Jr), with whom he never got on, he had two sisters, Annchen, older, and Beate, of whom he was very fond, a little younger than himself. He remembered seeing a huge Zeppelin airship flying low over the village school play groundwhen he was young pupil there. His fascination with flying probably began then.

The family was not wealthy. His paternal grandfather had been a successful industrialist but the family fortunes were totally lost during the First World War and the post 1918 economic crisis, with runaway inflation in Germany. His mother's father was an academic theologian who became professor of Theology at the University of Halle.

His father was an unhappy man who had periods of mental illness and spent time in hospital. Under the strain caused by her husband's breakdowns, when Peter was nine years old his mother died by her own hand. The family disintegrated and Peter, who himself never fully recovered from the loss, spent some years with his uncle's family until Felix (Sr) remarried.

Peter at the age of 13 started building a biplane glider, a flimsy wooden framework covered with parchment paper. He attempted to fly it with little success although it did lift him a few feet off the ground when towed with a length of washing line. At fourteen years old and now attending a rather grim, traditional type of boarding school in Aschersleben, he read in the magazine Flugsport that there was to be a gliding meeting on the Wasserkuppe in the Rhoen mountains. Powered aircraft were banned in post war Germany, but gliders were not mentioned in the Versailles treaty.

Peter began to build another biplane, called the PR - 2, and with his father's permission took it, partly completed, to the meeting. He was by far the youngest competitor. With help from experienced older men the PR - 2 was completed, and he began learning to fly it under careful supervision.

He continued at school but managed to get away each summer to the Wasserkuppe meetings and learned to fly, building another glider of his own design, the PR - 3, and flying it. He saw the sport progress from tentative and dangerous flights of a few minutes to soaring and cross country excursions of several hours duration and many kilometres distance.

On leaving school his prospects, in a Germany still in economic depression, were not good but his plight was recognised by the prominent philanthropist Karl Kotzenberg, who had made substantial contributions to the early gliding movement. He saw in Riedel a boy with great talent and determination who deserved to continue his education. With what amounted to a personal scholarship Peter was able to enrol at the Darmstadt Technical University, from which he graduated as an engineer in 1927 and went immediately to train as a commercial pilot at the Brunswick and Ober Schleissheim flying schools.

When he completed his licence in 1928 it was still almost impossible to find employment but he was well qualified to work under the meteorologist Professor Georgii at the Darmstadt Research Institute for Soaring Flight. There he remained for six years. He became one of the leading sailplane pilots of the time. In 1932 he was the eighth pilot in the world to achieve the Silver C badge and in the following year made a world's best distance flight of 229 kilometres. He also won the Wasserkuppe contest and was awarded the Hindenburg Cup. He was one of four outstanding pilots to accompany Georgii on a famous expedition to Latin America in 1934, when the sport of soaring was introduced to Brazil and Argentina. Another of the four was Hanna Reitsch, who became like another sister to him.

Apart from the soaring flights, Peter at this time carried out many research flights for Professor Georgii, using light aeroplanes to explore and measure thermal currents under clouds and, with his colleague Gunther Groenhoff, developed safe methods of launching sailplanes by aero tow. His beloved younger sister, Beate, was learning to fly under his instruction at Darmstadt, but she was killed in a road accident in a car irresponsibly driven by Groenhoff. Groenhoff was not injured in the crash but died a few weeks afterwards in a sailplane.

Peter admitted to having voted for the Nazis in 1933 but although coming close to it then, never actually joined the party. His political doubts increased during the Latin American expedition.

In 1934 Peter at last found work as a pilot for the German national airline, Lufthansa, and flew over 200,000 kilometres in airline service. But he developed an increasing distaste for life in Germany and was strongly drawn back to Latin America. In 1936 he accepted a two year contract to fly for a Colombian airline and left Europe, intending not to return.

In 1937 he was invited by the Soaring Society of America to fly in the National Soaring Contest at Elmira, New York State. He scored more points than any other pilot although could not be declared champion since he was not an US citizen. After the competition he was approached by General Bötticher, the German Military Attaché, and was offered a post as civilian assistant (aeronautics) to the General, in Washington, DC.

After some hesitation he accepted and after some delays and further flying in Colombia, he returned to Germany briefly for some very sketchy training. During this he was approached by agents of the Abwehr and met Admiral Canaris. He had been warned against accepting any offers from such a quarter and refused Canaris' offers. He was installed in the Washington Embassy early in June 1938.

His work in the USA required him to gather intelligence, by legal means and only by legal means, on American air power. He developed highly sophisticated methods of collecting, sorting, filing and interpreting the news he obtained from magazines, newspapers, financial statements and company reports, Congressional debates and other openly published sources. His regular digests were incorporated into Bötticher's reports, which did nothing to dissuade Hitler from his plans.

War broke out in Europe. Riedel found himself enrolled as a commissioned officer in the Luftwaffe, since his position as a civilian was quite anomalous. He then became officially the German Air Attaché.

He met, courted and, despite opposition from Bötticher, married an American girl, Helen Krug, an artist and art teacher from Terre Haute, Indiana. On the honeymoon they were followed closely everywhere, by the FBI, but before the end of the holiday were sitting down to breakfast with the agents.

By this time, Riedel could foresee a massive expansion of the aircraft industry in the USA and his reports reflected this.

After Pearl Harbour in 1941, all the German Embassy staff were interned at White Sulphur Springs in Virginia and eventually returned to Germany in a diplomatic exchange. Helen went with Peter although she spoke little German at this time.

In Germany Riedel found that his reports of the growth of American air power, and his predictions of a vast bombing onslaught, had apparently been ignored. His efforts to get warnings through to the high command were continually frustrated. He was at times in danger of arrest for what was termed defeatism, although he himself saw it only as drawing attention to the grim realities of Germany's situation.

Heinkel employed him as an engineer and offered a job also to Helen. A medical examination revealed that she had contracted tuberculosis. Peter sought to get her out of Germany into a Swiss sanatorium. At this time he did a deal with the Abwehr. Helen was allowed to leave Germany and go to Switzerland, but only on condition that peter would work for the Abwehr. He was sent to Sweden as an air attaché, and there he remained as the war in Europe reached its long-foreseen climax..

Eventually hard news of the atrocities in the concentration camps reached Peter's desk in Sweden.. As well as material from Soviet sources including photographs, there was an article in Time Magazine in September 1944, which became freely available in Swedish stores. On a visit to Berlin Riedel confronted his former friend, Hanna Reitsch, with this evidence. (Her version of the argument they had appears in her autobiography.)

Eventually there was some double or triple dealing involving the Abwehr, the Finnish Military Attaché's office, and the American OSS. An operation directed against the USSR was proposed. Riedel, by now altogether disillusioned with Nazism, compromised himself utterly by communicating directly with the OSS. He was betrayed by a friend and recalled to Berlin, probably for execution. Instead of going back he left the German Embassy and went into hiding in Sweden.

He was able to warn Helen to leave the sanatorium because the Abwehr (Canaris by now himself having been imprisoned as a traitor) threatened to take reprisals on her. She also went into hiding.

The war ended. Riedel was arrested by the Swedish authorities and imprisoned for three months as an illegal immigrant. Helen was able to visit him during this spell in jail. After release he expected to be sent back to Germany but he was not, after all, deported, but nor was he legally able to stay in Sweden. He found himself in effect stateless and fugitive.

He escaped secretly on a small and dilapidated fishing vessel, with a false passport in the name of Nielsen. The idea was to sail with about fifteen other displaced persons to Venezuela, where immigration laws were flexible. Helen returned to the USA using her American passport.

On the boat, one of the refugees was the singer, Helge Rosvänger. After surviving a terrible storm and several engine breakdowns, the boat reached NW Spain, where, to raise money, singing concerts were arranged.

When the boat at last reached French Morocco Riedel was arrested by the French authorities and imprisoned in Casablanca, first as a suspected war criminal in the military jail, but after interrogation he was transferred to the civilian prison to serve a sentence as an illegal immigrant. In jail, once he secured access to writing materials, he began to write his memoirs. He was imprisoned in Casablanca for almost a full year and even after release was not allowed to leave Morocco.

He escaped yet again and sailed across the Atlantic in another small boat, the yacht Gracie Blue. The English captain, Nicholson, was, to say the least, eccentric but the voyage did eventually arrive in Venezuela.

Even here he was not at first allowed on shore but when a nearby ship in the harbour caught fire and blew up, Riedel and Nicholson were injured and taken to hospital. Once on land, he was allowed to stay and there Helen joined him to begin a new life. He obtained work with an engineering firm but did not wish to remain.

Assisted by friends in the gliding movement there, he and Helen went to Canada. He was at first encouraged to believe he would be able to settle there but to his dismay after about two years they were ordered to leave the country. Numerous appeals to various Canadian authorities were unsuccessful.

They found refuge in South Africa. Peter worked as a railway track designer at Windhoek, Helen established a small business selling small hand painted postcards and paintings through a local shop in the town. For a short time Peter worked as an engineer in Pretoria and sought a South African Commercial pilot's licence.

When the Eisenhower administration was elected, he was allowed at last to re-enter the USA legally and settle there. He was employed by TWA in Kansas City and Seattle, and by Pan American Airways in Pakistan and Vietnam. After retiring he visited Australia in 1972 and later spent a year in East Africa as a pilot for the flying doctor service there.

He published many articles, in both English and German, and spent several years writing three large volumes about the history of gliding and soaring in Germany. These, published under the general title, Erelbte Rhoengeschichte, were published during 1977 - 85 by Motorbuch Verlag of Stuttgart.

Helen (whose illness might not have been tuberculosis after all) and Peter at last settled down in Ardmore, Oklahoma. A detailed account of the wartime years is contained in the book, German Air Attaché, published in March 1998 by Airlife, Shrewsbury, England.