General Field Marshall Erhard Milch: From Luftwaffe to War Criminal

No fewer than 21 generals, seven admirals, and one field-marshal of Jewish descent served with Adolf Hitler’s consent in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Hitler actually personally exempted them from his Racial Laws often signing official “German-Blood-Declarations” (Deutschblütigkeitserkl?rungen) for them officially “Aryanizing” them or, as I like to say, giving them the kosher stamp of Aryanhood approval. Hitler did so mainly because they looked “Aryan” (that is, had blue eyes and blond hair), had good military records, had rendered Germany a unique service, or had come from distinguished families.

           Erhard Milch was a political animal and cared only about himself and his career. He was an opportunist and rarely worried about those he had to step on in order to climb the ladder of success. As a result, he had no problem becoming a Nazi Party member, and his actions also showed that he believed in many things the Nazis espoused. He was indeed an incredible organizer of the Luftwaffe, but also a nasty person and a hardcore Nazi.

           Erhard Alfred Richard Oskar Milch, born on 30 March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, became a powerful man in the Third Reich. According to historian James Corum, Milch “ran the Luftwaffe and was its most powerful figure for personnel and planning issues, production and even strategy.”

           After completing high school in 1910, he enlisted in the army as an officer candidate in the First Heavy Artillery Regiment in K?nigsberg, East Prussia, and was promoted to lieutenant a year later. During World War I, he served as a battalion aide on the Russian front. Although he liked the artillery, he transferred in 1915 to the Imperial Air Service and became a pilot. The Army would award him the Iron Cross First Class (somewhat akin to the Silver Star in the U.S. Armed Forces) for a courageous reconnaissance flight he conducted during the battle of Verdun in 1916. By the end of the war, he rose up through the ranks and onto the General Staff, obtained the rank of major, and conducted many of the coordinated attacks using artillery batteries and fighter plane squadrons in combined-arms attacks during the last year of the war (the beginning of Blitzkrieg).

           After WWI, he worked for Lufthansa and rose up through the ranks of this organization developing it into a first-class civilian airline. During this time, he became very friendly with Adolf Hitler and Hermann G?ring and believed the Nazi Party was the key to Germany getting back its military, gaining full independence, and shedding the manacles of the hated Versailles Treaty of 1919. The Nazis issued him a Nazi Party membership card in 1929 that was only officialized in 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933.

           When Hitler seized power, he knew he needed Milch to build out his Luftwaffe. By now, everyone who had worked with Milch recognized he was brilliant when it came to logistics and organization. He knew how supply chains should be run, how technology should be developed and how large operations should be organized. As a result, Hitler had a private meeting with him and told him: “Now look, I haven’t known you for very long, but you’re a man who knows his job, and we have few in the Party who know as much as you about the air. That’s why the choice has fallen on you. You must take the job. It’s not a question of the Party, as you seem to think—it’s a question of Germany and Germany needs you.”

           Milch took the job, but there was the problem of his ancestry. Milch noted on 1 November 1933 in his diary that G?ring had made sure “everything was now in order” with his background check—his Jewish father would not stand in his way of building up a strong air force for the Third Reich.

           How did the Nazis and Milch get around him having a Jewish father? Field-Marshal Milch’s method of securing his “Aryanization” was the most famous case of a Mischling falsifying a parent’s identity in order to gain exemption from the racial laws. After sitting down with his mother, Clara née Vetter, and talking with her about their issue, they came up with a plan. She would give her son-in-law, Fritz Heinrich Hermann, police president of Hagen and later an SS general, an affidavit stating her uncle Carl Wilhelm Br?uer had fathered her six children, rather than her Jewish husband, Anton. Her uncle and her husband were deceased at the time this documentation was put together. She claimed her parents knew about the relationship and had prohibited her from marry Uncle Carl because of the close bloodlines and that her Jewish husband knew about the relationship. When this “evidence” was presented to Hitler, he accepted it and declared Milch a “100 percent” Aryan. During this time, evidence also arose that Milch’s mother was also Jewish, but the Nazi research into the mater turned out to be inconclusive although historian Robert Wistrich did find out that she was Jewish. If this was the case, Milch was not “50 percent” Jewish, but “100 percent” Jewish. If that had become part of the official record, Milch’s position would have been precarious among the Nazi elite to say the least.

           Ironically, the Nazis did not object to incest, but Jewish ancestry was indeed a problem. Milch’s mother sacrificed her reputation, as well as her husband’s, to protect her children. Without her lie, Milch might have lost his career and, along with it, his ability to protect his youngest daughter, Helga, who had Down’s syndrome, from Hitler’s euthanasia program. This program, called Aktion T4, murdered at least 100,000 disabled people (most of whom were mentally handicapped), among them, Aloisia Veit, Hitler’s own cousin. Milch’s mother’s affidavit also allowed her daughter to remain married to an SS General, and her other son, Werner, to rise up through the ranks of the Wehrmacht as a paratrooper, later earning the Ritterkreuz while fighting the Russians.

           With his Jewish problem taken care of, Milch went to work building up the Luftwaffe. With his credible connections militarily, politically and economically, he built the Luftwaffe into one of the most modern Air Forces in the world in just three years, overseeing the planning and development of some of the best aircraft of the world like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter-plane, the Junker Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber and the Heinkel He 111 medium bomber. Hitler claimed in 1936 that “there are two names linked with the birth of our Luftwaffe,” G?ring’s and Milch’s.

           When war erupted on the European scene, Milch helped oversee the successful invasion of Poland and did a phenomenal job of taking after-action reports about his machines, just like he had done during the Spanish Civil War with his Condor Legion, thereby modifying and improving all his airplanes. Moreover, he continued to learn about the training of his pilots and took a keen interest in how to perfect the training of his “knights of the air.” By 1940, German pilots were the best trained in the world, with the possible exception of the Japanese carrier naval pilots. In April 1940, when Germany invaded Norway and encountered several logistical nightmares, Milch was brought in and saved the day at several sectors of the overall battle for this Scandinavian country. Without securing Norway, Hitler could not have invaded France one month later. For his brilliant logistical accomplishments, Hitler awarded Milch the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross (the Ritterkreuz)—somewhat akin to the U.S. Medal of Honor.

           During the next two years of war, Milch continued to see his Luftwaffe mount one success after another and Hitler would award him with a bonus prize of ?? 250,000 (Reichsmarks) (equivalent in 1942 to $625,000 or in 2020, $10,000,000) on his 50th birthday for all the services he had given to the Third Reich.

           When the war turned against Germany, Hitler often would turn to Milch for help. When Stalingrad was going poorly for Germany in January 1943, Hitler brought in Milch to save the day, but it was too little too late. Milch was not able to work his magic like he had done in Norway in 1940. However, the effective defense against Allied bombers seen in 1943 and 1944 was largely due to Milch’s skills as an organizer and production manager. He also oversaw the successful V-1 program, or in modern parlance, the first cruise missile ever to be developed.

           However, for all of Milch’s successes, one of his major military flaws was that he failed to see that Hitler would be fighting the entire world by 1942. The wars with Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia were engagements Milch had planned for and helped win—short, fast, shocking attacks that brought quick victories. However, when Germany decided to take on the Soviet Union and the United States, his could not modify his organization to meet Hitler’s demands for a global war. Few people, if any, could keep up with Hitler’s requests for more men, more guns and more airplanes.

           Nonetheless, for all his accomplishments, Milch ranked seventh among Hitler’s subordinates by February 1944. After the unsuccessful bomb plot to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944, Milch was one of the first men to write Hitler a letter of congratulations: “I cannot begin to express my heartfelt joy that a merciful Providence has protected you from this cowardly murder attempt and preserved you for the German Volk and its Wehrmacht.” Perhaps Milch really believed what he said, or perhaps he was trying to protect himself, knowing that the events on 20 July made the situation for Mischlinge (“partial Jews”) more precarious.

           Milch survived the war and was brought before the Second Nuremberg Trials. When asked about the Holocaust at the trial he denied all knowledge of it. However, documentation surfaced that he knew about the brutal human experiments that went on in Dachau. He liked the research gathered there to help his pilots! He also knew about slave labor being used at Auschwitz, so he clearly was lying when he claimed he did not know about the Holocaust. As historian James Corum rightly notes, these facts “alone makes Milch a genuine war criminal.” In 1947, at the conclusion of his trial in Nuremberg, the Allies sentenced Milch to life in prison. However, the sentence was reduced and, in 1954, he was discharged. He then returned to Lufthansa in particular, and the German air industry in general, and worked there until his death in 1972.

           As an incredibly gifted organizer, Milch helped the Luftwaffe develop into the menacing force that it became by 1939. Although he had a Jewish father, he did not let this get in the way of obtaining the power he so desperately craved within the Third Reich. He viewed his ancestry as a tiny speed bump in the race to the top of Hitler’s regime. He believed in Hitler and his goals of the Fatherland and did everything he could to make sure Germany would win the war. He made a Faustian trade-off and had no regrets. Unfortunately, there were many like him at the top of the Wehrmacht and government. And if they did not support the regime like Milch, they were “forced to echo it and suppress their own thoughts” according to historian Liddell Hart. As philosopher Immanuel Kant rightly noted, “War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.”

For more information on these topics, see “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” https://www.amazon.com/dp/0700611789/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=and “The Rabbi Saved by Hitler’s Soldiers” https://www.amazon.com/Rabbi-Saved-Hitlers-Soldiers-Schneersohn/dp/0700622616/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3LI249FLDMYW1&dchild=1&keywords=rabbi+saved+by+hitler%27s+soldiers&qid=1597334279&s=books&sprefix=Rabbi+sav%2Cstripbooks%2C190&sr=1-1