Erhard Milch

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Erhard Milch (1942)

Erhard Milch (born March 30, 1892 in Wilhelmshaven ; † January 25, 1972 in Wuppertal ) was a German Army and Air Force officer ( General Field Marshal from 1940 ) and, during the National Socialist era, State Secretary of the Reich Aviation Ministry (RLM) from 1933 to 1945 , at the same time Inspector General of the Luftwaffe and, after Ernst Udet's suicide from November 1941 to July 1944, General Aircraft Master . In the Nuremberg Milch Trial from January 2 to April 17, 1947, before the American Military Court , Milch was sentenced to life imprisonment as a war criminal. In 1954 he was released.

Life

Empire and First World War

Milch was the son of the Jewish naval officer and chief pharmacist Anton Milch. In February 1910, after having passed his Abitur, he joined the " Linger Foot Artillery Regiment (East Prussian) No. 1" as a flag junior and in 1911 became a lieutenant . He developed an early interest in flying, but he remained a dislocation initially denied, so he moved in September 1914 as adjutant in II. Reserve - Battalion of . Foot Artillery Regiment "von Dieskau" (Silesian) No 6 in the First World war .

From July 1, 1915, he was trained and used as an aircraft observer. Here he was also awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class. In the late autumn of 1916, Milch was first lieutenant and adjutant to the school commander of the Alt-Autz flying school in Courland (and Kurt Tucholsky's direct superior ). Shortly before the end of the First World War, Milch , who had meanwhile been promoted to captain , was given command of "Jagdgruppe 6".

Weimar Republic

After the end of the war, Milch was the leader of the "Voluntary Aviation Department 412" at the Eastern Border Guard until he became the leader of the " Koenigsberg Police Squadron " on January 31, 1920 . After police flying was also prohibited by the Versailles Treaty , Milch quit the police service and became the managing director of u. a. Danziger Luftpost GmbH founded by Hugo Junkers .

Erhard Milch (left) with Theodor Osterkamp in 1934

Milch was then technical director and board member of Deutsche Luft Hansa , founded in 1926, and from 1942 its chairman and president.

time of the nationalsocialism

Pre-war period

Immediately after the seizure of power by the National Socialists milk was from Hermann Goering enlisted and joined the Nazi Party in. As Goering's State Secretary in the 1930s, he was responsible for building up the Air Force, by reactivating it as Colonel, then Major General in 1934 , Lieutenant General in 1935 , General of the Aviators in 1937 , Colonel General and Inspector General of the Air Force in 1938 as representative of the Commander-in-Chief (Goering).

Second World War

On July 19, 1940, he was appointed General Field Marshal and from 1941, as General Aircraft Master, he was the actual head of technical development and arms production in the Air Force. In this function he was also responsible for the negative pressure human experiments of the Luftwaffe from 1942 in the Dachau concentration camp . After the suicide of Ernst Udet , who held the office of general air master in front of Milch, he had to deal with the failures of his predecessor. Udet had neglected the technical development of the Luftwaffe and shortened the production cycles of new types by releasing them for production before they were ready for series production. Examples of this are the He 177 , Me 210 and the Ju 188 projects . In addition to Albert Speer , Milch was the central player in German armaments production, especially air armaments, which he headed as general aviation master until August 1944. In 1942 he received an endowment of 250,000 Reichsmarks from Adolf Hitler .

In January 1943, Milch was instructed by Hitler, by order of the Fuehrer , to ensure the air supply of the trapped units of the 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad . For this purpose, Milch traveled directly to the front with close employees from the Reich Aviation Ministry (RLM). However, the task turned out to be impossible: there were too few flying personnel, too few aircraft and, in particular, no suitable airfields and landing sites within reach of Stalingrad.

At that time, Milch had passed the zenith of his career. The increasingly stronger air raids by the Allies from the summer of 1943 on the Reich territory and the associated loss of air sovereignty ultimately led to a loss of confidence in Göring and Hitler. This loss of power increased when Milch had to hand over hunter production, i.e. the majority of German air armaments, to the so-called Jägerstab - i.e. the Ministry of Armaments - in early 1944 after devastating attacks by the Allies ( Big Week ) on German cities and armaments targets .

In July / August 1944 he was finally ousted when the Reich Ministry of Aviation was restructured and the air armament was taken over by the Ministry of Armaments. Milch himself was appointed as Speer's deputy, but did not appear again until the end of the war.

Questionable Jewish ancestry

Erhard Milch (3rd from right) in 1934

When Göring appointed Milch in 1933 as State Secretary in the Aviation Ministry, envious people spread that Milch's mother was married to a converted Jew. Milch apparently denied that it came from this connection; Goering adopted this version and possibly even had documents manipulated accordingly. Milk was officially certified as a "full Aryan". Milch, who had been named by Goering's defense attorney Otto Stahmer as a witness in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , stated in cross-examination in 1946 that he had been conceived out of wedlock.

General der Flieger Milch, General der Artillerie Keitel , Generaloberst von Brauchitsch , General Admiral Raeder and Commanding General of the XIII. Army Corps Freiherr von Weichs during the "Day of the Wehrmacht" at the Nazi Party Congress , September 1938
Erhard Milch together with Albert Speer (at the wheel), May 1944

Whether Erhard Milch really had Anton Milch as his father and was therefore considered a “ Jewish mixed race ” in the Nazi state under the Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935 , was a matter of dispute for a long time. Milch had told David Irving in 1967 that his mother Clara had an incestuous relationship with her uncle Karl Brauer, who was the actual father of their children. His mother and Anton Milch had confirmed this fact in 1933. Irving took this story into his 1970 biography of Milch, Die Tragödie der Deutschen Luftwaffe . The historian Horst Boog, in turn, followed this account in his 1994 article on milk in the Neue Deutsche Biographie . In view of more recent research results, however, Boog moved away from it a little later and referred to Erhard Milch as the biological son of Anton Milch and Clara Milch, nee. Cousins ​​who together had six children, three sons and three daughters , and the version of origin spread by Milch and Irving as a purely protective claim . The US-American historian Bryan Mark Rigg advocates the thesis that Erhard Milch, along with a significant number of other officers and men, was the highest-ranking “Jewish” (in the sense of National Socialist racial ideology) soldier in the Wehrmacht . The basis of his theses include various interviews conducted in the 1990s and material from the Federal Archives . A critical review of the literature can be found in Kuss .

post war period

Condemnation in the Nuremberg trials

Erhard Milch (left) with his brother Werner Milch , who worked for the defense in the Nuremberg Trial.

Milch was an ardent advocate of National Socialism . The question of whether he had known about human experiments in the Dachau concentration camp could not be clarified during the Nuremberg trials in the so-called milk trial , so that he was acquitted on this point. Milk, however, was partly responsible for the use of forced and foreign labor in the armaments industry of the Third Reich . In the criminal trial before a US military court , his defense counsel included his brother, the lawyer and former Wehrmacht officer Werner Milch . On April 17, 1947, Erhard Milch was sentenced by the court to life imprisonment for promoting forced labor and the exploitation of forced labor in the Nazi aircraft factories.

Pardon and release from custody

On January 31, 1951, the American High Commissioner John Jay McCloy granted a pardon after consultation with an advisory committee and reduced the sentence from life to 15 years. His plea for clemency was based on the imbalance in temperament of Erhard Milch, which was due to an increased overstimulation of the nerves due to a head injury.

On June 28, 1954, Milch was released early from custody at Landsberg correctional facility . He took up residence in the Ruhr area and later found work as an industrial consultant.

He died on January 25, 1972 at the age of 79 and, at his own request, was quietly buried in the central cemetery in Lüneburg .

Honors

literature

  • Horst Boog:  Milk, Erhard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 499-503 ( digitized version ).
  • Horst Boog : Erhard Milch - the architect of the air force . In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring (ed.): The military elite of the Third Reich , Ullstein, Berlin 1995, pp. 349–367.
  • Gerhard Hümmelchen : Field Marshal Erhard Milch. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): Hitler's military elite, Vol. 1. Primus, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 3-89678-083-2 , pp. 171-177.
  • Friedhelm Kröll: The trial against Erhard Milch. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): National Socialism in front of a court. The allied trials of war criminals and soldiers 1943–1952. Fischer, Frankfurt 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 .
  • Lutz Budraß : “Workers can be won from the abundant Jewish population.” The Heinkel factory in Budzyn. In: Dieter Ziegler (Hrsg.): Forced Labor under National Socialism in the Occupied Territories (= Yearbook for Economic History 2004/1). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-05-004035-1 , pp. 41-64.
  • Lutz Budraß: Lawyers are not historians. The trial against Erhard Milch . In: Kim C. Priemel, Alexa Stiller (Ed.): NMT. The Nuremberg military tribunals between history, justice and creation of justice . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-260-8 , pp. 194–229.
  • Adam Tooze : Economics of Destruction. The history of the economy under National Socialism. Siedler, Munich 2007. New edition: Pantheon, Munich 2008, ISBN 3-570-55056-7 .
  • Michael Maué: The estate of Field Marshal Erhard Milch. Verlag Maué, Lüneburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-036990-2 .

Web links

Commons : Erhard Milch  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anita Bunyan: Half-shadows of the Reich March 21, 2003, in: Times Higher Education
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 412.
  3. ↑ see also Ernst Stilla: The air force in the fight for air supremacy. Decisive influencing factors in the defeat of the Luftwaffe in the defensive battle in the West and over Germany in the Second World War with special consideration of the factors “air armament”, “research and development” and “human resources”. Dissertation 2005 (pp. 118–121: The reorganization of air armament under milk ).
  4. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär , Winfried Vogel : Serving and earning. Hitler's gifts to his elites. Frankfurt 1999, ISBN 3-10-086002-0 .
  5. ↑ see also in the Stilla dissertation, chap. III 3 (p. 222 ff.): The vicious circle of the Luftwaffe - cause and effect.
  6. ↑ Friedhelm Kröll: The trial against Erhard Milch. In: Gerd Ueberschär (Ed.): National Socialism in Front of a Court ... Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 89.
  7. ↑ Friedhelm Kröll: The trial against Erhard Milch. In: Gerd Ueberschär (Ed.): National Socialism in Front of a Court ... Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 89.
  8. ↑ IMT. Volume 9/10, pp. 108/109. (Hearing on March 11, 1946).
  9. ↑ Horst Boog: Erhard Milch - The architect of the air force . In: Ronald Smelser, Enrico Syring (ed.): The military elite of the Third Reich , 2nd edition, Ullstein, Berlin 1998, p. 366, 350–352, quoted. 352.
  10. ↑ Bryan M. Rigg: Hitler's Jewish soldiers. Paderborn 2003, ISBN 3-506-70115-0 .
  11. ↑ Erich Kuss: The Breslau family Milch and their Jewish or German descendants. Shaker, Aachen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8440-4727-1 .
  12. ↑ Friedhelm Kröll: The trial against Erhard Milch. In: Gerd Ueberschär (Ed.): National Socialism in Front of a Court ... Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-13589-3 , p. 96.
  13. ↑ Christian Sprang, Matthias Nöllke: From the mouse. Unusual obituaries. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-462-04157-6 , p. 113.
  14. ↑ Mention of the sub-prime minister Erhard Milch in the official gazette of the Royal Government of Stralsund
  15. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa from award dates according to Milch, Erhard (inventory). Retrieved on March 16, 2019 (information in the German Digital Library based on information from the German Federal Archives).
  16. ↑ Klaus D. Patzwall : The Golden Party Badge and its Honorary Awards 1934-1944, Studies of the History of Awards Volume 4 , Verlag Klaus D. Patzwall, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-931533-50-6 , p. 27
  17. ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939-1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 545.
personal data
SURNAME Milk, Erhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Field Marshal General in the Third Reich
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Wilhelmshaven
DATE OF DEATH January 25, 1972
Place of death Wuppertal