Going down WW II rabbit holes in search of minor characters in my alt-hist series, I keep running into stories too fantastic for fiction.
Beate Uhse (later Beate Rothermund-Uhse, 1919-2001) was born October 25, 1919 as Beate Köstlin on a large farm outside Cranz, East Prussia (today Selenogradsk in the Russian exclave around Kaliningrad/Königsberg). Her father was a gentleman farmer, her mother a physician — one of the first five women in Germany to graduate as an MD. She was a tomboy growing up, engaging in sailing and other sports, and at age 15 became regional champion in javelin throwing for Hessia. At age 16 she spent a year in England as an au-pair to improve her English.
She had meanwhile gotten the “flying bug” and eventually, in 1937, wore down her father and was allowed to take flying lessons, getting her license at age 18. As she was clearly a natural flyer, she then proceeded to an advanced license, then to aerobatics training. She indeed flew as a stunt double in German movies, in part because she was short enough to “hide” from the camera in front of the actor, flying the plane while he pretended to do so.
She won, or showed among the first three, in several flying contests: on one occasion she placed second after Dr. Melitta Schiller (later Melitta Gräfin von Stauffenberg, sister-in-law of the Operation Valkyrie protagonist). [As Melitta is a secondary character in Operation Flash, this is how I bumped into Beate.]
Her instructor, Hans-Jürgen Uhse, kept proposing marriage and she eventually agreed. The couple had one son; the father was killed in a mid-air crash in 1944. [She would later remarry and have two more children with her second husband.]
During the later part of the war, she would ferry planes (Messerschmidt 109 and 110, Focke-Wulf 190, and Junkers 87 “Stuka” dive bombers[*]), from aircraft factories to Luftwaffe airfields; eventually she was given the Luftwaffe rank of Hauptmann [Captain, literally “Head Man”]. She came repeatedly under Allied attack, but always escaped thanks to her aerobatic skills. She even was checked out on the Me-262 jet fighter near the end of the war.
During the Battle of Berlin, she escaped at the controls of a small passenger plane, and eventually ended up in Flensburg on the Danish border. There she settled with her young son after a brief stay as a POW of the British army.
Unable to make a living flying under Allied occupation, she turned to black market sales of agricultural products. While making deliveries to her customers, she heard her fellow women unburden: husbands would come home from POW camps, they would eagerly become intimate, and… nine months later would be faced with trying to raise a baby in a half-bombed-out Germany. She quickly compiled a brochure about birth control — particularly what is known as “the rhythm method” in the USA and as the Ogino-Knaus method (or “periodic abstinence”) in Europe — and sold it for 50 pfennig (half a Mark). In short order, she sold tens of thousands, and used the money as starting capital for a mail-order business focusing on “marital health” books and products. Within two years, she needed 14 employees.
In 1962 she started her first “brick and mortar” store, still in Flensburg. By the time I regularly flew into and through Germany for work, you could see her “adult” stores at airports and large train stations. I did not bother to check what was inside, but I know Germans are nearly as up-front about such matters as the Dutch, so I can imagine.
Still, she got a lot of early pushback from the more socially conservative segments of Flensburg society: a total of 2,000 (!) complaints were filed against her for “incitement to indecency”, but as ought to be clear from her very unconventional wartime experiences, she had about the fear levels of a Jack Russell Terrier (i.e., none). When a tennis club blackballed her because of her “questionable morals” she simply started her own club.
In 1970, she sponsored the “Love And Peace Festival” on the Baltic Sea island of Fehmarn — notable particularly to Jimi Hendrix fans as the last festival where he performed. [**]
She kept flying into old age: if you don’t understand German, you can still get some idea from the images in this brief documentary clip by the NDR TV channel, “the entrepreneur Beate Uhse”.
A German documentary quotes her as saying the only thing she liked better than love-making was flying. Of course, she bought a private plane the moment she could afford to, and kept flying into old age. At age 75, characteristically, she took up scuba diving.
Having survived cancer, she died in 2001 of complications of pneumonia. As per her last will, there was no memorial service, but a public celebration with country music [UPDATE: yes, the American kind] and meatballs.
Say what you will of her, but she was undeniably a “character”.
[*] “Stuka” is a German-style acronym for STUrzKAmpfflugzeug, dive fighter plane
[**] Jimi Hendrix performed live one more time, on September 16, 1970, at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London, where he guest-jammed for two songs with War, the new band of erstwhile The Animals frontman Eric Burdon.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
So many questions! When you say ‘country music’, do you mean the real thing from the USA. mostly before 1980, or euro folk music, often with accordions? What kind of meatballs? I mean, they’re all great, except the Vietnamese ones (strange, that, otherwise I simply DOTE on Vietnamese food). My lads and I are locally famous for our meatballs. Italian, with breadcrumbs in a marinara – which MUST contain anchovy, Greek, with rice and spinach mixed in and tzaziki, Swedish meat-and-onion meatballs in a cream sauce.
I don’t have details on what was in the “Buletten” (as they are known in German, a corruption of French “boulettes”), but yes, she apparently liked American country music. [American-style country dancing has some following in Europe.]