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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 Parole in 1954 and died in West Germany in 1972.
Author and Holocaust denial 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. The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe. The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch p.VII & p2-3 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.Irving p340. 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 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 aircraft for the Luftwaffe. However, Messerschmitt outmanoeuvred Milch, circumventing the ban and successfully submitting the Bf 109 design under the corporate name Messerschmitt, 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.
Milch cancelled production of the ineffective and dangerous Messerschmitt Me 210 and Heinkel He 177, and put them back in development. Under his direction, the Luftwaffe's aircraft production focused on mass production of the tested and tried models. Output doubled in the summer of 1943 in comparison with the winter of 1941–1942. Adam Tooze wrote "For the first time, the German aircraft industry was able to achieve substantial economies of scale. The resources pumped into the Luftwaffe in 1940–41 were now concentrated in mass assembly". To achieve this level of mass production, the Armaments Ministries and the industry cooperated with the Schutzstaffel to procure forced labour from the Nazi concentration camps. Due to Milch's connections with the SS, the Luftwaffe had an advantage in obtaining forced labour over the other armed forces. To increase the quantity, Milch also made some sacrifices in quality, notable in the case of the Messerschmitt Bf 109. When the United States Army Air Forces began to directly challenge the fighter forces of the Luftwaffe, the cost of Milch's decisions was shown as the handling of the Bf 109 G was so bad that they became, in the words of Tooze, "little more than death traps".
In January 1943, Milch was tasked by Hitler with ensuring the Airlift of the 6th Army, which was Encirclement at the Battle of Stalingrad. Hitler valued Milch's organizational talent and the task required him to travel to the front line for the first time in the war. He found the situation to be impossible: there were too few aircrew, too little fuel and, in particular, no suitable Aerodrome or landing sites within reach of Volgograd. By this time, Milch had passed the peak of his career with the increasingly intense Allied air raids on German territory from the summer of 1943 onward, and the resulting loss of air supremacy ultimately led to a loss of confidence from Göring and Hitler.
On 10 August 1943, Milch finally addressed Germany's lack of a truly "four-engined" heavy bomber to carry out raids against the United Kingdom. He endorsed Arado Flugzeugwerke to be the subcontractor for the Heinkel He 177B separately engined heavy bomber design. Only three flyable were completed by early 1944. From March 1944, Milch, together with Speer, oversaw the activities of the Jägerstab ("Fighter Staff"), a governmental task force whose aim was 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 forced labour for the benefit of the German aircraft industry and the Luftwaffe.
When the agitation among the legions of foreign workers in his factories threatened production, Milch was able to refer to his association with Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler:
I spoke to Himmler recently about this, and told him his main task must be to see to the protection of German industry if unrest breaks out among this foreign scum.If, for instance, there is a mutiny at X, an officer with a couple of men, or a lieutenant with thirty troops, must appear in the factory and let fly with their machine-guns into the mob. The object is to lay out as many people as possible, if mutinies break out. This is the order I have issued, even if the people are our own foreign workers.
Every tenth man is to be picked out, and every tenth man will be shot in front of the rest.
(1974). 9780316432382, Little, Brown. ISBN 9780316432382
Milch's loss of power within the Aviation Ministry intensified when, in early 1944, Milch was forced to hand over fighter production, the bulk of German air armament, to the Jägerstab after the devastating Big Week on German cities and military targets.
In June 1944, Milch sided with Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, in attempting to convince Hitler to remove Göring from command of the Luftwaffe. When Hitler refused, Göring retaliated by forcing Milch out of his positions as State Secretary and Generalluftzeugmeister on 20 June, and eventually as Luftwaffe Inspector General in January 1945. From August 1944, Milch worked under Speer in the Rüstungsstab (Armaments Staff) as his deputy, but was sidelined and achieved little. He was injured in a car accident in the fall of 1944 and hospitalized for several weeks. Finally placed into the Führerreserve in March 1945, he was not reassigned for the remainder of the war.
A few days later Mills-Roberts went to the British HQ and, upon entering the commander's tent, Montgomery is said to have covered his head with his hands, quipping "I hear you've got a thing about Field Marshals". Mills-Roberts apologised for his actions but no further action was taken against him.
Milch was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Rebdorf Prison near Munich. Unlike the vast majority of other Nazi war criminals who were tried under U.S. military law, Milch was not immediately sent to Landsberg Prison to serve his sentence, but was eventually transferred to Landsberg. Milch's sentence was clemency to 15 years imprisonment in 1951, and he was Parole in June 1954. He lived out the remainder of his life in Düsseldorf, where he died in 1972 as the last living Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe.
American actor Robert Vaughn portrayed Milch in the 1982 television film, Inside the Third Reich.
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