1. Erhard Milch was a German Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe who oversaw its founding and development during the rearmament of Germany and most of World War II.
39 Facts About Erhard Milch
1. 2.
Erhard Milch was an early member of the Luftstreitkrafte during World War I and worked as an airline director in the German civil aviation industry after the war.
3.
Erhard Milch was appointed deputy of Hermann Goring in the Aviation Ministry in 1933, heading the organisation and development of the Luftwaffe from 1936.
4.
Erhard 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.
5.
Erhard Milch was removed from his important Aviation Ministry positions after supporting a failed attempt to remove Goring in June 1944 and sidelined until his capture by Allied forces in May 1945.
6.
Erhard Milch was tried at the Erhard 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.
7.
Erhard Milch was paroled in 1954 and died in West Germany in 1972.
8.
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.
9.
The investigation was halted by Hermann Goring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, who produced an affidavit by Erhard Milch's mother stating that his biological father was her uncle, Karl Brauer, meaning he was a product of incest but not a Mischling.
10.
Erhard Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate though his legal paternity was never changed.
11.
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.
12.
Furthermore, Irving claimed that Clara Erhard Milch had already written to her son-in-law Fritz Herrmann in March 1933 explaining the circumstances of her marriage, and that Goring had initiated his own investigation that identified his real father.
13.
Erhard 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.
14.
Erhard 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.
15.
In 1923, Erhard Milch became the managing director of its successor company.
16.
Erhard Milch was named a managing director of the newly-formed airline Deutsche Luft Hansa in 1926.
17.
Erhard Milch joined the Nazi Party 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.
18.
On 5 May 1933, Erhard Milch took up a position as State Secretary of the newly formed Reich Ministry of Aviation, answering directly to Goring.
19.
Erhard Milch quickly used his position to settle personal scores with other aviation industry personalities, including Hugo Junkers and Willy Messerschmitt.
20.
Specifically, Erhard Milch banned Messerschmitt from submitting a design in the competition for a new fighter aircraft for the Luftwaffe.
21.
However, Messerschmitt outmanoeuvred Erhard Milch, circumventing the ban and successfully submitting the Bf 109 design under the corporate name Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, which proved to be the winner.
22.
Erhard Milch cancelled production of the ineffective and dangerous Messerschmitt Me 210 and Heinkel He 177, and put them back in development.
23.
In January 1943, Erhard Milch was tasked by Hitler with ensuring the air supply of the 6th Army, which was encircled at the Battle of Stalingrad.
24.
Erhard Milch found the situation to be impossible: there were too few aircrew, too little fuel and, in particular, no suitable airfields or landing sites within reach of Stalingrad.
25.
On 10 August 1943, Erhard Milch finally addressed Germany's lack of a truly "four-engined" heavy bomber to carry out raids against the United Kingdom.
26.
Erhard Milch endorsed Arado Flugzeugwerke to be the subcontractor for the Heinkel Erhard Milch 177B separately engined heavy bomber design.
27.
In June 1944, Erhard Milch sided with Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, in attempting to convince Hitler to remove Goring from command of the Luftwaffe.
28.
From August 1944, Erhard Milch worked under Speer in the Rustungsstab as his deputy, but was sidelined and achieved little.
29.
Erhard Milch was injured in a car accident in the fall of 1944 and hospitalized for several weeks.
30.
On 4 May 1945, Erhard Milch was apprehended by the British No 6 Commando on the Baltic Sea coast and taken to the unit's command post of Brigadier Derek Mills-Roberts in Neustadt in Holstein, a man who was known to have a short temper.
31.
When Erhard Milch arrived, Mills-Roberts was said to be still seething from the suffering and atrocities he had seen during the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
32.
Erhard Milch then grabbed a champagne bottle and continued, fracturing Milch's skull.
33.
Erhard Milch was then sent to a holding camp for Nazi prisoners at Luneburg near the field HQ of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
34.
Erhard Milch was tried as a war criminal in 1947 by a United States Military Tribunal in Nuremberg for his widespread use of forced labour in the Luftwaffe's production.
35.
Erhard Milch's defence was represented by his brother Werner Milch.
36.
Erhard Milch was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Rebdorf Prison near Munich.
37.
Unlike the vast majority of other Nazi war criminals who were tried under US military law, Erhard Milch was not immediately sent to Landsberg Prison to serve his sentence, but was eventually transferred to Landsberg.
38.
Erhard Milch's sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment in 1951, and he was paroled in June 1954.
39.
Erhard Milch lived out the remainder of his life in Dusseldorf, where he died in 1972 as the last living Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe.