Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (3 page)

In 1933, Hermann Goering held a multitude of offices. In addition to being Reich commissioner of aviation and Hitler’s chief deputy, he was president of the Reichstag and minister of the interior of Prussia, and would soon be prime minister of Prussia, Reich forest master (
Reichsforestmeister
), Reich game warden (
Reichsjaegermeister
), and chief plenipotentiary of Hitler’s Four Year (economic) Plan. Hitler was planning to call an election for March 5. Therefore, prior to that, Goering had to purge the Berlin and Prussian police forces of their anti-Nazi elements and replace them with people he could depend on. He had neither the time nor inclination to concern himself with the day-to-day building of the Luftwaffe. This he left to his deputy, the state secretary for aviation.

The best-qualified man for this post was Helmut Wilberg, at that time a major general. A highly capable and technically proficient General Staff officer, Wilberg had been a military pilot since 1910. He had been adjutant in the Inspectorate of Flight Troops prior to the First World War. During the conflict he had commanded the 2nd Flying Detachment, had been the chief aviation staff officer to Field Marshal von Mackensen’s headquarters, and had been commander of flying units attached to the First and Fourth armies. He emerged from the war with a whole laundry list of medals, including the Knights Cross of the Hohenzollern House Order with Swords, the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd Classes, the Bavarian Military Order of Merit with Swords, the Mecklenburg Military Cross of Merit (2nd Class), the Mecklenburg Military Cross for Distinguished War Service (2nd Class), the Austro-Hungarian Military Cross of Merit (3rd Class), plus Turkish and Bulgarian decorations. From 1920 to 1929 he was chief of the Air Organization and Training Office in the Truppenamt, before doing troop duty as commander of the Prussian 18th Infantry Regiment. Now he was inspector of ordnance (arms) in the Defense Ministry.
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Unfortunately he had one disqualifying characteristic: he was Jewish.

Hermann Goering did not share the anti-Semitism that characterized most of the rest of Hitler’s followers. In private he commented that Jews were much like other people, just “a bit smarter,” and they had their good and bad, like any other group. Hitler’s anti-Semitic outbursts usually left Goering depressed for hours.
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Unfortunately, Wilberg’s background was too Jewish for even Hermann Goering to be able to hide. He continued to protect Wilberg, however, and even promoted him to general of flyers (
General der Flieger
), but appointing him state secretary was out of the question.
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Instead, he turned to Erhard Milch, the director of Lufthansa.

Perhaps the most enigmatic character to come out of the Third Reich was Erhard Milch, who was deputy commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe in its earlier days and who, even more than Goering, deserves credit for its initial construction. Milch was in many ways difficult to categorize: he was arrogant, yet sensitive; selfish, yet patriotic. Looked down on by his peers as a civilian, he nevertheless became a field marshal and was the second-ranking man in the Luftwaffe for much of his career. Most strangely, he was a Nazi whom Hitler personally decorated with the coveted Gold Party Badge, even though Milch’s father was a Jew.
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This meant that Erhard Milch himself was half Jewish under Hitler’s racial laws and should have been sitting in a concentration camp according to the rules of the Third Reich, instead of at Goering’s right hand.

Milch was born on March 30, 1892, in Wilhelmshaven, on Germany’s northwestern coast, the son of naval pharmacist Anton Milch.
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Milch, which means “milk” in German, was considered a Jewish name by the Nazis. The Nazi racial investigators later produced photographs of tombstones in Jewish cemeteries, complete with the Star of David, bearing the name Milch. Indeed, one of Milch’s brothers became a Jew.
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There is, however, no evidence that Erhard himself seriously embraced any religion except belief in the Kaiser and, later, his own personal ambition.

Anton Milch left the navy in the 1890s and established his own chemist’s business in Gelsenkirchen, a town in the Ruhr. His wife left him in the 1900s and returned to her native Berlin, taking her children with her. Erhard graduated from the Joachimsthal public school in Berlin in January 1910, and promptly volunteered for active duty with the Imperial Navy. His application for that branch was turned down because of his Jewish ancestry,
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so he joined the 1st Foot Artillery Regiment at Koenigsberg instead. After eight months’ training, he was sent to the Anklam Military Academy. He graduated first out of 120 cadets and received his commission as a second lieutenant on August 18, 1911.
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Second Lieutenant Milch returned to duty with the 1st Foot Artillery in the latter part of 1911. He took a course (probably in gunnery) at the famous Jueterbog Artillery School in 1913 and was engaged in gunnery practice with his unit in West Prussia when World War I broke out.
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Milch was a battalion adjutant in the 1st Foot Artillery when it helped repulse the Russian invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Later he fought in the bitterly won German victory at Weeden on the eastern front, before being detailed to the 204th Artillery Reconnaissance Battalion on the western front in July 1915. He was promoted to first lieutenant on August 18, 1915.
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Erhard Milch spent most of the next two years as an aerial observer on the western front. His aircraft was an unarmed Albatross B, operating between Metz and Verdun—a very hazardous job indeed. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Milch survived the hell that was Verdun, the Somme, and other bloody battles of World War I. In June 1917, he was transferred to Lille as deputy commander of the 5th Air Detachment, where he had better aircraft and less danger. Selected as a candidate for the General Staff in 1918, he was briefly given command of the 9th Company, 41st Infantry Regiment, near Arras. This Memel unit had already suffered heavy losses against the British, but Milch missed the bitterest of the fighting. After two months of frontline experience, he returned to the air service as an intelligence officer in July, 1918. He was promoted to captain in August,
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but the war ended before he could be transferred to the War Academy for General Staff training.

Milch’s last assignment in the 1914–18 war was commanding officer, 6th Fighter Squadron, a post he held even though he could not fly himself. A few weeks later, the kaiser abdicated, the Second Reich collapsed, and Erhard Milch’s world fell apart. He returned to Germany, embittered by defeat. He reported to XVII Corps Headquarters at Danzig, where he spent several weeks dissolving left-wing soldiers’ councils and engaging in disarmament work, activities which were hardly calculated to improve his attitude. Then, in April 1919, he became commander of the 412th Volunteer Flying Squadron, which Irving described as “a motley collection of patriots, soldiers and mercenaries.”
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This unit was dissolved under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and Milch himself left the military service on January 31, 1920.
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There is no reason to believe that Milch was not absolutely sincere in his idealistic belief in Imperial Germany. Its destruction, however, caused a fundamental change in him: idealism in Erhard Milch was extinguished forever. From this period on, Milch became more and more the slave of his own ruthless ambition.

It is unclear whether or not Milch applied for one of the 4,000 officers’ slots allowed Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, but if he did, he was not accepted. Young Milch did not immediately take off his uniform, however, but joined the East Prussian Freikorps instead. He was soon invited to form a police air unit at Koenigsberg, which he did. He promptly moved his new command from the East Prussian capital to the former zeppelin airfield at Seerapen, away from the revolutionary influences then sweeping the cities. Much to his surprise, he was actually expected to perform police duties with his paramilitary force. His unit was assigned to put down a wave of burglary in the port area of Koenigsberg. After one of his men was killed by a criminal, Milch ordered his men to shoot prowlers on sight and shoot to kill. They did. The burglaries soon ended.
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The Allies forced Germany to dissolve her police air squadrons in March 1921, so Milch, now almost twenty-nine, left the constabulary and entered the civilian job market for the first time. He landed a position with Lloyd Ostflug (Lloyd Eastern Airlines) as head of their Danzig office. Lloyd was owned by Professor Hugo Junkers and Gotthard Sachsenberg, a former naval aviator. Soon Milch became business manager of the Danzig Air Mail Service, a subsidiary of the Junkers-Sachsenberg operation. Milch, however, was still haunted by the Treaty of Versailles. The French forced the mail service to close, and Milch was out of business for seven months. He was finally reemployed as an executive with Junkers Airways, Limited, in May 1922.
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The former captain rose rapidly in the Junkers organization and, before long, was director of its central administration. He successfully expanded Junkers’ operations by skillfully negotiating a financial arrangement with the Polish national airlines. Junkers was soon flying to Warsaw, Lemberg, and Krakow. Eventually the young executive had aircraft flying to Bucharest, Rumania, South America, and the United States. Milch went to America himself and visited the Ford plant at Detroit and other concerns. He was impressed by what he saw and was virtually the only high-ranking Nazi to appreciate the industrial potential of the United States. He also understood the folly of Hitler’s declaration of war against the U.S. in December 1941, but this is getting ahead of our story.

In late 1925, the Weimar Republic dictated that Germany’s two major airlines—Junkers Airways and Aero-Lloyd—must merge into a single, national airway. To the astonishment of almost everybody, Milch was named one of the three directors of the new super-airline, and he was the only director to come from the Junkers firm. Later he froze out the other two directors, Otto Merkel and Martin Wronsky, and, on September 5, 1929, became commercial director (chief executive officer) of Lufthansa, the German national airline. He was thirty-six years old.

Under the energetic and ruthless Milch, Lufthansa established regular passenger service with Paris (1926), Marseilles (1927), and Spain (1927). Eurasia, a Lufthansa system, started flying to China in 1930, four years after another Lufthansa auxiliary line was established in South America. By 1933 regular Lufthansa commercial and passenger flights were landing in Rome, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia.
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Meanwhile, Hitler’s political revolution was taking shape in Germany, and Milch, very much aware of his Jewish ancestry and the threat it posed to him if Hitler won power, was not slow to ingratiate himself with the future Fuehrer and his lieutenants. He first met Hitler in 1930 and was quickly impressed with Hitler’s grasp of aviation and aerial warfare and with his overall program, with its attractive combination of nationalism and socialism.
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By 1932, Lufthansa aircraft were placed at Hitler’s disposal free of charge for his election campaigns. Lufthansa (i.e., Milch) was also depositing 1,000 Reichsmarks a month into the personal account of Reichstag President Hermann Goering, who spoke out loudly in favor of Lufthansa interests and appropriations in the German national legislative body.
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Milch’s help in the Nazi party’s “time of struggle” was not forgotten. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Milch became the Nazis’ first secretary of state for aviation.

Milch did not really want to accept a formal position with the government at first, perhaps fearing that Hitler would be unable to consolidate his power. When Hermann Goering offered him the post of state secretary of Prussia in late 1932, Milch turned it down. Indeed, it took a personal appeal from Hitler to convince Milch to accept the job as state secretary for aviation. Initially, however, there was no Aviation Ministry. Goering’s official title was Reich commissioner of aviation, and Milch was named his deputy.
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Not sharing Hitler’s prejudices, Goering used to say: “I am the one to determine who in the Luftwaffe is a Jew and who is not!” Milch’s background, however, could not be ignored entirely, so Goering invented an elaborate cover story for his new deputy. An “investigation” revealed that Milch’s mother had carried on an adulterous affair with Baron Hermann von Bier, a minor aristocrat, for years. Frau Milch, a pure-blood “Aryan,” signed an official document to this effect, and Erhard’s birth certificate was reissued with von Bier listed as his father. Goering then closed the file, strongly forbidding any further investigation of Milch’s racial background. That ended the matter, for official purposes anyway. Thereafter, there were few men in Nazi Germany who were more verbally anti-Jewish than Erhard Milch. Even so, the whispers about Milch’s ancestry continued until the end of the Third Reich.
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