The 1st of September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland triggering World War 2. The German
Luftwaffe - one of the most technologically advanced air forces in the world, proves
instrumental in the German victories across Poland and Western Europe in 1939 and 1940.
However, as the war drags on, the Luftwaffe is eroded in strength and German defeats
at the Battle of Stalingrad and in the Battle of Kursk in 1943 ensure the gradual
decline of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. The failure to maximize production immediately
after the failures in the Soviet Union and North Africa ensures the Luftwaffe's effective defeat
in the period of September 1943 and February 1944. As a result, in 1943 and 1944, aircraft production
is moved to concentration camps in order to alleviate labor shortages and to protect
production from Allied air raids. The two largest aircraft factories in Germany are
located at Mauthausen-Gusen and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps. Aircraft parts are also
manufactured at Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrück and other concentration camps.
In 1944 and 1945, as many as 90,000 concentration prisoners work in the aviation industry,
and equate to about one tenth of the concentration camp population over the winter of 1944–1945.
One man who is behind Luftwaffe aircraft production, armament and supply as well
as use of the slave labour of civilians and prisoners of war for German aircraft
production is a Nazi Field Marshal with Jewish origins Erhard Milch.
Erhard Milch was born on the 30th of March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven then part of the German Empire.
Erhard was a son of son of Anton Milch,
a Jewish pharmacist who served in the Imperial German Navy, and his non-Jewish wife Clara.
In 1910 Milch enlisted in the German Army where one year later he rose to the rank of
lieutenant of the Foot Artillery Regiment. At the beginning of the First World War
which started on the 28th of July 1914, Milch commanded an artillery unit in East Prussia.
In July 1915, he was trained and deployed as an aircraft observer on the Western front,
seeing action on the Somme in 1916 and later in Flanders during 1917.
He was also awarded the Iron Cross First Class and shortly before the end of the war
he was promoted to captain and appointed to command a fighter wing - Jagdgruppe
6 - even though he had never trained as a pilot and could not fly himself.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the
German leaders signed the armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France.
2 years later in 1920, Milch resigned from the military to pursue a career in civil aviation.
With squadron colleague Gotthard Sachsenberg, Milch formed a small airline in Danzig,
today’s Gdańsk, which linked the city to the Baltic States.
In 1926, Milch was named a technical director and board member of the newly-formed airline
Deutsche Luft Hansa, the forerunner of modern German airline Lufthansa,
which served as German flag carrier. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came
into power in Germany in January 1933. On the 27th of April of the same year the Nazis created
the Ministry of Aviation which was in charge of development and production of all aircraft
developed, designed and built in Germany during the existence of the Third Reich,
overseeing all matters concerning both military and civilian designs.
In the newly formed ministry, Erhard Milch took up a position as State Secretary answering
directly to Hermann Göring - the minister. In this capacity, Milch was instrumental in
establishing the Luftwaffe, the air force of Nazi Germany and oversaw the planning and development
of some of the best aircraft of the world like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter-plane that was,
alongside with the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, the backbone of the Luftwaffe's fighter force.
On the 15th of September 1935 the Nazi regime announced two new laws : “The
Reich Citizenship Law” which declared that only Aryans could be citizens of the Reich;
and “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” which forbade marriages
and extramarital sexual relations between Germans and Jews, the employment of German
maids under the age of 45 in Jewish homes and the raising of the German flag by Jews.
These laws informally became known as the Nuremberg Laws or Nuremberg Race Laws because
they were first announced at a Nazi Party rally held in the German city of Nuremberg.
The Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which became the legal basis for the racist anti-Jewish policy
in Germany, because they wanted to put their ideas about race into law. They believed in the
false theory that the world is divided into distinct races that are not equally strong
and valuable. The Nazis considered Germans to be members of the supposedly superior “Aryan” race.
They saw the so-called Aryan German race as the strongest, and most valuable race of all.
According to the Nazis, Jews were not Aryans. They thought Jews belonged to a separate race
that was inferior to all other races. The Nazis believed that the presence of Jews
in Germany threatened the German people and that they had to separate Jews from other
Germans to protect and strengthen Germany. Thirteen additional decrees were added to
the Nuremberg Laws over the next 8 years. These included the first official definition of who
was to be considered a Jew and who an Aryan. Jews with three or four Jewish grandparents
were considered full- blooded Jews. According to the Nuremberg Laws,
Erhard Milch was a “Mischling of the first grade”. Mischling was a pejorative legal
term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan ancestry.
In 1935 doubts about the ethnic origin of Erhard Milch began when rumors circulated
that his father Anton Milch was Jewish. The Gestapo began an investigation but it was
stopped by Hermann Göring, who forced Erhard's mother to sign a document that Anton Milch was
not the true father of Erhard and his 4 siblings but that it was her uncle Karl Brauer. That would
mean that Milch's mother, Clara, committed not only adultery but also incest. Clara’s uncle as
well as husband were deceased at the time when this documentation was put together. When this
“evidence” was presented to Hitler, he accepted it and declared Milch a “100 percent” Aryan.
Those events and the later extension of the "Certificate of German Blood"
were the background to Göring's statement, "I decide who is a Jew in the airforce".
Milch’s case shows that the Nazis did not object to incest,
but Jewish ancestry was indeed a problem.
On the 1st of February 1939, Milch, now with the rank of Generaloberst which was
equivalent to Colonel General, was given the additional job of Inspector-General of
the Luftwaffe frequently attending conferences on behalf of Göring.
World War 2 started on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany
and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country.
During the invasion of Denmark and Norway which was codenamed Operation Weserübung,
Milch commanded Luftflotte 5, which was one of the primary divisions of
the German Luftwaffe in World War II formed in April 1940 for the invasion of Norway.
Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on the 9th of April 1940. Strategically,
Denmark's importance to Germany was as a staging area for operations in Norway.
In Norway, Germany sought to secure naval bases for use against the British fleet
in the North Sea and to guarantee vital iron-ore shipments from neutral Sweden
on which Nazi Germany was dependent. While the invasion of Denmark lasted
less than six hours and was the shortest military campaign conducted by the Germans during the war,
Norway surrendered to Germany only after 2 months on the 10th of June 1940.
In the great wave of promotions that followed the “Fall of France” in June the same year,
Milch was promoted to Field Marshal during Field Marshal Ceremony held
in Berlin in which Adolf Hitler promoted twelve generals to the
rank of “field marshal" on the 19th of July 1940. It was the first occasion in
World War II that Hitler appointed field marshals due to military achievements.
Following the suicide of Colonel General Ernst Udet in November 1941,
Milch succeeded him as Chief of Procurement and Supply and became responsible for all - Luftwaffe
aircraft production, armament and supply. This was a massive organization supervising
over 26 departments and requiring organizational qualities, for which Udet was had not been best
equipped. Udet had neglected the technical development of the Luftwaffe and shortened
the production cycles of new types by releasing them for production before they were ready for
series production. Milch cancelled production of the ineffective and dangerous Heinkel 177
and heavy fighter Messerschmitt Me 210 and put them back in development. The failure of the Me
210's development program meant the Luftwaffe was forced to continue operating the Bf 110 after it
had become outdated, despite mounting losses. In April 1942 Milch was named to the Central
Planning Board along with Albert Speer - Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production,
and Paul Körner - State Secretary of the Four Year Plan, in an effort to coordinate
control over all industrial war production. The same year he received an endowment of 250,000
Reichsmarks from Adolf Hitler with which he could buy himself an estate.
In January 1943, Hitler, who valued Milch's talent for his organizational skill, gave him the task of
providing air supplies to the surrounded units of the 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad,
which had previously been Göring's task. When the Sixth Army was surrounded by
the end of November in Operation Uranus, Göring promised that the Luftwaffe would
be able to deliver a minimum of 300 tons of supplies to the trapped men every day.
On the basis of these assurances, Hitler demanded that there be no retreat; they were
to fight to the last man. Though some airlifts were able to get through, the amount of supplies
delivered never exceeded 120 tons per day. To save the situation, Milch traveled directly
to the front with close associates from the Reich Air Ministry. However, it was too late.
The task turned out to be unattainable: there were too few flying personnel, too few aircraft and,
in particular, no suitable airfields and landing sites within reach of Stalingrad.
Soon after, the German 6th Army, regarded as the best field army in the Wehrmacht,
surrendered between the 31st of January and the 2nd of February 1943.
German casualties were 147,200 killed and wounded and over 91,000 captured including
24 generals and 2,500 officers of lesser rank. At the time of surrender, the Red Army soldiers
were well nourished, full of vigor and dressed in fine winter uniforms. The German soldiers -
ragged, in thin greatcoats over threadbare uniforms, as thin as skeletons - presented
emaciated figures exhausted half to death, with sunken features. Unwashed, with unkempt beards,
they wore comical-looking makeshift snow boots and were wrapped in towels and women’s headscarves.
Weakened by disease, starvation and lack of medical care during the encirclement, they
were sent on foot marches to prisoner camps and later to labor camps all over the Soviet Union.
Some 35,000 were eventually sent on transports, of which
17,000 did not survive. Most died of wounds, disease - particularly typhus,
cold, overwork, mistreatment and malnutrition. Some were kept in the city to help rebuild it.
Only 5,000 to 6,000 would return to Germany after the war.
By this time, Milch had passed the zenith of his career. The ever-increasing Allied
air raids on Reich territory from the summer of 1943 and the associated loss of air sovereignty
ultimately led to a loss of confidence on the part of both Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler.
This loss of power continued when at the beginning of 1944,
after devastating Allied attacks on German cities and armaments targets
during the Allied Big Week from the 20th to 25th of February 1944, Milch had to hand over fighter
production to the Ministry of Armament and War production led by Albert Speer.
From March 1944, Milch, together with Speer, established a Fighter Staff committee - a task
force to increase the production of fighter aircraft, in part by moving the production
facilities underground. In cooperation with the SS, the task force played a key role in
the exploitation of slave labour for the benefit of the German aircraft industry and the Luftwaffe.
Production of German fighter aircraft more than doubled between 1943 and 1944.
The growth, however, consisted in large part of models that were
becoming obsolescent and proved easy prey for Allied aircraft.
The SS provided 64,000 prisoners for 20 separate projects for various
concentration camps including Mittelbau-Dora. Prisoners worked for Junkers, Messerschmitt,
Henschel and BMW, among others. By 1944, 140,000 people were working in Speer's
underground factories which were death-traps. Discipline was brutal, with regular executions.
Such was a case of the Mittelbau-Dora underground factory - there were so many corpses that the
crematorium was overwhelmed. Speer's own staff described the conditions there as "hell".
In 1944 Milch sided with Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister and Heinrich Himmler, the head
of the SS, in attempting to convince Adolf Hitler to remove Göring from command of the Luftwaffe.
However, Hitler refused and Göring retaliated by forcing Milch out of his positions as State
Secretary and Chief of Procurement and Supply on the 20th of June 1944.
In August of the same year Milch was appointed as Speer's deputy,
but was sidelined and achieved little.
In the fall of 1944 he was injured in a car accident and hospitalized for several weeks.
In March 1945, Milch was placed into the “Führer reserve” which was a pool of temporarily
unoccupied high-ranking military officers awaiting new assignments. However, he was never reassigned.
Following Hitler's suicide, Erhard Milch attempted to flee Germany,
but was apprehended by Allied forces on the Baltic coast on the 4th of May 1945.
Upon surrendering, he presented his field-marshals' baton to British Brigadier
Derek Mills-Roberts, who was so disgusted and angered by the atrocities he had seen
when liberating the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that he demanded to know Milch's thoughts
on the terrible sights witnessed. Milch's reply in English was supposedly along the lines of - "these
people are not human beings in the same way as you and me". This so infuriated Mills-Roberts
that he seized the Field Marshal's baton from under Milch's arm and proceeded to brutally beat
Milch over the head with it until it broke, afterwards switching to a champagne bottle.
The following day, Mills-Roberts went to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to apologize for
losing his temper with a senior German prisoner of war, only for Montgomery to cover his head
with his hands in mock self-protection and joke "I hear you've got a thing about Field Marshals",
with nothing more said regarding Mills-Roberts' indiscretion. The incident left Milch,
Nazi field marshal with Jewish origins, with several contusions and a fractured skull.
In the end, justice finally caught up with Milch when he was tried at
the Milch Trial which began on the 2nd of January 1947.
His indictment listed three counts: 1) participation in the planning and
execution of war crimes, namely the subjection of prisoners of war and foreign nationals
to murder, cruel treatment, and forced labor 2) participation in the planning and execution
of war crimes, specifically participation in two medical experiments dealing with the
effects of high-altitude and freezing 3) and crimes against humanity
Milch pleaded "not guilty" on all charges and denied everything.
When he was asked if he had knowledge that there had been mass deportations of Jews to the Eastern
territories and when he first heard about it, he replied “ I cannot give the exact date. Once,
in some way or another, I can no longer remember how, the information did reach me that Jews had
been settled in special ghetto towns in the East. I think it must have been in 1944 or thereabout,
but I cannot guarantee that this date is exact.” When he was asked if he knew that these
mass deportations were, in effect, a preliminary step to mass extermination,
he replied “ No, we were never told that.” When questioned if he had any idea about the
existence of the Auschwitz extermination camp, he replied: “ No. I first heard of
the name much later. I read it in the press after I was captured.”
Considering his position in the Third Reich, this was clearly a lie. And it was not the only one.
In relation to Einsatzkommandos that were employed in the East to carry out large-scale
exterminations of Jews he claimed “ The first I heard of these Einsatzkommandos was here in
prison in Nuremberg. I know nothing at all about the extermination of Jewish citizens”.
One year earlier during the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Milch, then a witness for the prosecution,
had also been also questioned about his Jewish father and Göring's role in the matter by Chief
United States Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson. When Jackson asked Erhard Milch: “Göring made you what
you call a full Aryan; was that it?” Milch replied “I do not think he made me one. I was one.”
Even in the end Milch could not acknowledge that his father was a Jew and he himself was a key
figure in the Nazi Regime which was responsible for the mass murder of six million Jews.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice.
After 39 trial days, with 34 witnesses and 212 written exhibits introduced,
the trial concluded on the 25th of March 1947. On the 17th of April American military tribunal
found Erhard Milch guilty of counts one and three – war crimes and crimes
against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment at Rebdorf Prison, near Munich.
However, in 1951, the sentence was commuted to 15 years and in June 1954, Milch was paroled.
He lived out the remainder of his life as a free man in Düsseldorf.
Milch, the last living Luftwaffe field marshal,
was 79 years old when he died on the 25th of January 1972.
There were no tears shed for Erhard Milch.
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