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Erhard Milch
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Erhard Milch
Erhard Milch (30 March 1892 – 25 January 1972) was a German Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe who oversaw its founding and development during the rearmament of Germany and most of World War II. Milch served as State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation from May 1933 to June 1944 and as Inspector General of the Luftwaffe from February 1939 to January 1945.
Milch was an early member of the Luftstreitkräfte during World War I and worked as an airline director in the German civil aviation industry after the war. Milch was appointed deputy of Hermann Göring in the Aviation Ministry in 1933, heading the organisation and development of the Luftwaffe from 1936. Milch led Nazi Germany's aircraft production and supply from 1941, adopting a policy of mass production, and utilising the forced labour of foreign workers under inhumane conditions to supply the Luftwaffe. Milch was removed from his important Aviation Ministry positions after supporting a failed attempt to remove Göring in June 1944 and sidelined until his capture by Allied forces in May 1945.
Milch was tried at the Milch Trial in 1947, convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his exploitation of forced labour for the Luftwaffe, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Milch's sentence was commuted to 15 years by John J. McCloy, the U. S. High Commissioner for Germany, in 1951. Milch was paroled in 1954 and died in West Germany in 1972.
Erhard Milch was born on 30 March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, the son of Anton Milch, a pharmacist in the Imperial German Navy, and his wife Clara Wilhelmine (née Vetter). Anton had converted from Judaism which made Milch a Mischling (mixed-race) under the Nuremberg Laws. However, he would not have been considered Jewish according to Jewish orthodoxy (or halakha), which states that a person’s Jewish status is passed down through the mother. The Gestapo began to investigate Milch's alleged Jewish heritage in 1935 after rumours began to circulate. The investigation was halted by Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, who produced an affidavit by Milch's mother stating that his biological father was her uncle, Karl Brauer, meaning he was a product of incest but not a Mischling. Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate though his legal paternity was never changed. 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 air force".
Author and Holocaust denier David Irving claimed in his book The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch that Milch asked him not to reveal the truth about his parentage, so although Irving states that Erhard's father was not Anton Milch and concentrates on his wealthy great-uncle Karl Brauer (who died in 1906), he does not actually name Brauer as his father. However, Irving, who claimed to have had access to the Field Marshal's private diary and papers, says the rumours about Milch's parentage began to spread in the autumn of 1933, and that Erhard Milch personally obtained a signed statement by his putative father Anton that he was not the father of Clara's children. Furthermore, Irving claimed that Clara Milch had already written to her son-in-law Fritz Herrmann in March 1933 explaining the circumstances of her marriage, and that Göring had initiated his own investigation that identified his real father. During the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Milch was again questioned about his alleged Jewish father and Göring's role in the matter by Chief United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson.
Milch enlisted in the Imperial German Army in 1910, where he rose to the rank of Leutnant and commanded an artillery unit in East Prussia at the beginning of World War I. In September 1914, he saw action against the Imperial Russian Army on the River Deime and in February 1915 on the Angerapp Line. In July 1915, he was transferred to the Fliegertruppe and trained as an aerial observer on the Western Front, seeing action on the Somme in 1916 (through the period of it becoming the Luftstreitkräfte in October that year) and later in Flanders during 1917. After a spell as a company commander in the trenches in the spring and summer of 1918, in the waning days of the war, he was promoted to Hauptmann and appointed to command a fighter wing, Jagdgruppe 6, even though he had never trained as a pilot and could not fly himself.
Milch resigned from the Reichswehr in 1920 to pursue a career in civil aviation as a result of Germany being forbidden from maintaining an air force in the Treaty of Versailles. Milch formed a small airline Lloyd Luftdienst, under the banner of Norddeutscher Lloyd's union of regional German airlines, with squadron colleague Gotthard Sachsenberg in Danzig. The airline linked Danzig to the Baltic States. In 1923, Milch became the managing director of its successor company. From there, Milch and Sachsenberg went to work for rival Junkers Luftverkehr, where Milch was appointed a managing director in 1925. Milch was named a managing director (one of three) of the newly-formed airline Deutsche Luft Hansa in 1926. Milch joined the Nazi Party (membership number 123,885) on 1 April 1929, but his membership was not officially acknowledged until March 1933, because Adolf Hitler deemed it desirable to keep the fact hidden for political reasons.
On 5 May 1933, Milch took up a position as State Secretary of the newly formed Reich Ministry of Aviation (RLM), answering directly to Göring. In this capacity, he was instrumental in establishing the Luftwaffe, the air force of Nazi Germany. Milch quickly used his position to settle personal scores with other aviation industry personalities, including Hugo Junkers and Willy Messerschmitt. Specifically, Milch banned Messerschmitt from submitting a design in the competition for a new fighter aircraft for the Luftwaffe. However, Messerschmitt outmanoeuvred Milch, circumventing the ban and successfully submitting the Bf 109 design under the corporate name Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, which proved to be the winner. Messerschmitt maintained its leading position within the German aircraft industry until the failure of the Me 210 aircraft. Even after that, Milch did not depose him, but put him in an inferior position.
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Erhard Milch
Erhard Milch (30 March 1892 – 25 January 1972) was a German Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe who oversaw its founding and development during the rearmament of Germany and most of World War II. Milch served as State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation from May 1933 to June 1944 and as Inspector General of the Luftwaffe from February 1939 to January 1945.
Milch was an early member of the Luftstreitkräfte during World War I and worked as an airline director in the German civil aviation industry after the war. Milch was appointed deputy of Hermann Göring in the Aviation Ministry in 1933, heading the organisation and development of the Luftwaffe from 1936. Milch led Nazi Germany's aircraft production and supply from 1941, adopting a policy of mass production, and utilising the forced labour of foreign workers under inhumane conditions to supply the Luftwaffe. Milch was removed from his important Aviation Ministry positions after supporting a failed attempt to remove Göring in June 1944 and sidelined until his capture by Allied forces in May 1945.
Milch was tried at the Milch Trial in 1947, convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his exploitation of forced labour for the Luftwaffe, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Milch's sentence was commuted to 15 years by John J. McCloy, the U. S. High Commissioner for Germany, in 1951. Milch was paroled in 1954 and died in West Germany in 1972.
Erhard Milch was born on 30 March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, the son of Anton Milch, a pharmacist in the Imperial German Navy, and his wife Clara Wilhelmine (née Vetter). Anton had converted from Judaism which made Milch a Mischling (mixed-race) under the Nuremberg Laws. However, he would not have been considered Jewish according to Jewish orthodoxy (or halakha), which states that a person’s Jewish status is passed down through the mother. The Gestapo began to investigate Milch's alleged Jewish heritage in 1935 after rumours began to circulate. The investigation was halted by Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, who produced an affidavit by Milch's mother stating that his biological father was her uncle, Karl Brauer, meaning he was a product of incest but not a Mischling. Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate though his legal paternity was never changed. 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 air force".
Author and Holocaust denier David Irving claimed in his book The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch that Milch asked him not to reveal the truth about his parentage, so although Irving states that Erhard's father was not Anton Milch and concentrates on his wealthy great-uncle Karl Brauer (who died in 1906), he does not actually name Brauer as his father. However, Irving, who claimed to have had access to the Field Marshal's private diary and papers, says the rumours about Milch's parentage began to spread in the autumn of 1933, and that Erhard Milch personally obtained a signed statement by his putative father Anton that he was not the father of Clara's children. Furthermore, Irving claimed that Clara Milch had already written to her son-in-law Fritz Herrmann in March 1933 explaining the circumstances of her marriage, and that Göring had initiated his own investigation that identified his real father. During the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Milch was again questioned about his alleged Jewish father and Göring's role in the matter by Chief United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson.
Milch enlisted in the Imperial German Army in 1910, where he rose to the rank of Leutnant and commanded an artillery unit in East Prussia at the beginning of World War I. In September 1914, he saw action against the Imperial Russian Army on the River Deime and in February 1915 on the Angerapp Line. In July 1915, he was transferred to the Fliegertruppe and trained as an aerial observer on the Western Front, seeing action on the Somme in 1916 (through the period of it becoming the Luftstreitkräfte in October that year) and later in Flanders during 1917. After a spell as a company commander in the trenches in the spring and summer of 1918, in the waning days of the war, he was promoted to Hauptmann and appointed to command a fighter wing, Jagdgruppe 6, even though he had never trained as a pilot and could not fly himself.
Milch resigned from the Reichswehr in 1920 to pursue a career in civil aviation as a result of Germany being forbidden from maintaining an air force in the Treaty of Versailles. Milch formed a small airline Lloyd Luftdienst, under the banner of Norddeutscher Lloyd's union of regional German airlines, with squadron colleague Gotthard Sachsenberg in Danzig. The airline linked Danzig to the Baltic States. In 1923, Milch became the managing director of its successor company. From there, Milch and Sachsenberg went to work for rival Junkers Luftverkehr, where Milch was appointed a managing director in 1925. Milch was named a managing director (one of three) of the newly-formed airline Deutsche Luft Hansa in 1926. Milch joined the Nazi Party (membership number 123,885) on 1 April 1929, but his membership was not officially acknowledged until March 1933, because Adolf Hitler deemed it desirable to keep the fact hidden for political reasons.
On 5 May 1933, Milch took up a position as State Secretary of the newly formed Reich Ministry of Aviation (RLM), answering directly to Göring. In this capacity, he was instrumental in establishing the Luftwaffe, the air force of Nazi Germany. Milch quickly used his position to settle personal scores with other aviation industry personalities, including Hugo Junkers and Willy Messerschmitt. Specifically, Milch banned Messerschmitt from submitting a design in the competition for a new fighter aircraft for the Luftwaffe. However, Messerschmitt outmanoeuvred Milch, circumventing the ban and successfully submitting the Bf 109 design under the corporate name Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, which proved to be the winner. Messerschmitt maintained its leading position within the German aircraft industry until the failure of the Me 210 aircraft. Even after that, Milch did not depose him, but put him in an inferior position.
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