Hanna Reitsch died in 1979, the year of the final QUATERMASS, of a heart attack, just as Quatermass himself expires. A British test pilot who knew her, Eric Brown, believed she’d finally taken the suicide pill Hitler gave her. No post-mortem was performed.
Eric Brown was the only Allied pilot to test-fly a Komet with the rocket motor on. “I remember watching the ground crew very carefully before take-off, wondering if they thought they were waving goodbye to me forever or whether they thought this thing was going to return. The noise it made was absolutely thunderous.”
A fluent speaker of German, he also conducted technical interviews with Wernher von Braun before the Nuremberg trials.