Milch. No account of the Luftwaffe, its victories or its failures, would be complete without devoting some words to this strange personality.
Erhard Milch did not create the Luftwaffe (that was the role of General Hans von Seeckt and dated from his memo of 1923), but Milch wet-nursed the infant air force, and dominated it right up to the end.
Milch was born in March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, where Milch senior was an apothecary of the Imperial German Navy. ‘Loyalty to the Kaiser and loyalty to my country were the only political doctrines I received either as an officer or earlier in my parents’ home,’ he told the judge at Nuremberg at his war-crimes trial.
But the dominant influence upon Milch’s life was a secret that troubled him throughout it. So much so that when, near the end of his life, a biographer discovered the truth, Milch suppressed it still. The facts are simple, but, even in this permissive age, bizarre.
Klara, who was to become Milch’s mother, fell in love with her uncle. Such a marriage was forbidden not only by her parents but by Church law too. Eventually she did her parents’ bidding and married another man – Anton Milch – but did so on the strict understanding that he would not father her children. It was a decision endorsed by the discovery that his mother was in an asylum, and incurably insane. And so she agreed to the arranged marriage on condition that her uncle – the man she truly loved – would be the father of her future children. Erhard Milch grew up to know the wealthy man who visited them as ‘uncle’, not realising that the visitor was his father.
So carefully did his parents guard their secret that it was not until 1933 that the by then middle-aged Milch discovered the truth behind the mysteries that had haunted his youth. And this was the result of an investigation started by an informer who said that Milch’s father was Jewish. It was an accusation calculated to get him removed from the key job he had in the Nazi regime.
The rumours said that because Anton Milch was Jewish, his mother had invented a story about Erhard’s illegitimate birth in order to get Erhard classified as ‘Aryan’. The rumours continued throughout the war and after it. They were fomented by Milch’s evasive replies at the post-war Nuremberg trials. Milch allowed these stories to circulate all his life, for the only way that he could refute them was by revealing a secret that he was determined to take to his grave.
‘I’ll decide who is Jewish and who is not Jewish,’ Göring told several men who came to him with stories of Milch’s birth. But such replies only convinced the accusers that Göring was a part of the cover-up.
But Göring knew all the facts of Milch’s birth. He had in fact been behind the Gestapo’s investigation of the mystery. It is difficult not to wonder what Göring himself made of the curious fact that his right-hand man had a secret about his mother that was even darker than Göring’s own.
Milch was an observer with the German Army Air Service in the First World War. His organisational abilities gave him command of a fighter squadron in spite of the fact that he could not fly an aeroplane! So it was no surprise that Milch proved to be such an able employee in the Junkers organisation. And yet his next change of job took him to the very top levels of commerce. When the German government bullied and cajoled thirty-eight separate airlines into becoming just one subsidised state monopoly, Milch was selected to be one of its bosses. This choice remained ‘inexplicable’ even to Milch: he still couldn’t pilot a plane, had very little business experience and no technical knowledge of aviation or manufacturing.
But Milch learned very quickly. Soon he was paying Hermann Göring – by now an influential Nazi Reichstag deputy – a regular ‘consultancy fee’, and his private papers later revealed the extent to which he was already compiling files of damaging material about his rivals and superiors.
By 1929 Milch was the chief executive of Lufthansa and a secret member of the Nazi Party. His enemies said that his membership was kept secret so that when he falsified Lufthansa accounts (so that the Nazi Party never paid for the aircraft chartered from Lufthansa) no suspicion would attach to him. In 1932 alone, Hitler and other Nazi leaders flew 23,000 miles. Aircraft played a vital part in the Nazi political campaigning. If Milch provided this facility for nothing he certainly earned the rewards he subsequently collected.
Milch became a figure of growing political importance as Lufthansa built airport facilities, organised signal and meteorology networks, and radio beacons for air-corridors. Its personnel were trained in administration, supply and engineering as well as all the mysteries of blind-flying and long-range navigation. Even in its first year, Lufthansa had a night passenger service Berlin–Königsberg to connect with Moscow, and was sending experimental flights far afield. Its G-24s went to Peking and its Dornier Wal flying boats to Brazil. As early as 1930, civil aviation in Germany (measured by passengers or by mileage) was as big as all the British and French civil aviation services combined! All gliding records were, at this time, held by Germany and Austria.
By 1932 (and this was a year before the Nazis came to power) Germany had a claim to be the leader of world aviation. The Graf Zeppelin airship – carrying about sixty people and freight – had circumnavigated the world, been on long cruises to Egypt, Iceland and the Arctic, and in March 1932, begun a scheduled service between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro. This was to be the only transatlantic air service for another seven years! The experimental twelve-engined Dornier Do X had crossed both the South and North Atlantic and a German pilot in a German plane had made the first east–west crossing of the North Atlantic.
Professor Junkers’s series of all-metal monoplanes had culminated in the classic Junkers Ju 52/3m. By 1932 it was in service on the Berlin–Rome and Berlin–London routes. Lufthansa now connected Berlin with Barcelona, Moscow and Athens, flying a daily average of 30,000 miles.
No country in the world had training facilities to compare with the Deutsche Verkehrsflieger Schule (German Air Transport School), where so many of the Luftwaffe’s pilots learned to fly bombers. To supply candidates for Lufthansa’s training, there were about 50,000 active members of gliding clubs of the Deutsche Luftsportverband. In 1932, the 20-year-old Adolf Galland, already a skilled glider pilot, applied for training as a Lufthansa pilot: of 4,000 applicants, only 18 were accepted. The examinations lasted ten days.
This intense interest in aviation was shared by the general public. The 14-year-old apprentices, working at any aircraft factory, would find glider construction a mandatory part of their apprenticeship, and would not become qualified tradesmen unless they possessed the glider pilot’s licence.
When the Nazis gained power, Erhard Milch was the obvious choice to build in secrecy a new air force. Professor Hugo Junkers had by now become an outspoken critic of the Nazis. He was one of the most powerful individuals in German aviation, and by far the most brilliant. Milch decided that he could gain control of the aviation manufacturing industries by making an example of his one-time benefactor and employer.
Milch sent the police to arrest Junkers. He was accused of many offences, including even treason. Armed with the terrible power of the totalitarian state, Milch broke Junkers. The end of the interrogations came only when Junkers assigned 51 per cent of his various companies to the State. This was not good enough for Milch. He then demanded, and got, chairmanship of the companies for his own nominees. Still not satisfied, Milch put the ailing old man under house arrest, until he gave the State the remainder of his shares. Less than six months afterwards, Hugo Junkers died. Milch sent a delegation of mourners from the Air Ministry, with a suitably inscribed wreath. This so angered Junkers’s family that the men from the ministry returned to Berlin without attending the ceremony, rather than face their wrath.
Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that Milch found in the Nazis, with their despotic regality and regalia, elaborate rallies and displays, something to appeal to the ardent monarchist he had always been.
