Table Of ContentDavid Irving
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE
Luftwaffe
The Life of
Field Marshal Erhard Milch
F
FOCAL POINT
Copyright © by David Irving
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CONTENTS
Introduction.........................................................................vi
Acknowledgements...............................................................ix
Air Power Conserved
Death of a Rich Uncle, Death of a Rich Aunt......................
The Luftwaffe Reborn..........................................................
More Bluff than Blood.........................................................
World War Too Soon
The Rainmaker.....................................................................
A Question of Time............................................................
‘If Eight Million Go Mad . . .’.............................................
A New Campaign................................................................
Exit a Hero..........................................................................
The Augean Stables
New Broom.........................................................................
No Such Word As ‘Impossible’..........................................
The Dead Racehorse...........................................................
None So Blind.....................................................................
Special Mission: Stalingrad
‘Panama!’............................................................................
Total War............................................................................
The Year of the Clenched Teeth
Terror Raids........................................................................
‘As Though an Angel’s Pushing’........................................
A Wreath Upon Our Coffin...............................................
Defence of the Reich..........................................................
Life-or-Death Questions....................................................
‘Who Needs Messerschmitt?’..............................................
‘Crashed in Flames’
Fighter Staff........................................................................
Breaking-Point....................................................................
Judgement at Nuremberg
In Allied Hands...................................................................
On Trial for His Life...........................................................
Epilogue: A Disclosure........................................................
Bibliography........................................................................
Notes and Sources...............................................................
Index...................................................................................
ILLUSTRATIONS
Included in this electronic version
Erhard Milch before (Milch Collection), page
Milch with Hitler in (National Archives, Washington), page
Göring rebuilds the Lutwaffe (sketch by Ernst Udet), page
Milch photographs battlefield hotspots (sketch by Ernst Udet), page
Milch with Göring and Colonel ‘Beppo’ Schmid (Milch Collection), page
Ernst Udet (Milch Collection), page
The results of the RAF attack on Hamburg in July (German High
Command), page
Göring, Milch and Jeschonnek (Milch Collection), page
The Nuremberg trials (National Archives, Washington), page
Included in the print edition only
Frau Clara Milch (Milch Collection)
Erhard Milch’s father (Milch Collection)
Stockpiled engines and fuselages at Lübeck airfield in (Milch Collection)
The Directors of Lufthansa (Milch Collection)
The first Lufthansa flight from Vienna to Berlin (Milch Collection)
Milch inspects Luftwaffe guard of honour, (Milch Collection)
Prototypes of the four-engined Dornier and the Junkers (Hanfried Schliephake)
Visiting the British RAF, October (Milch Collection)
Wooden airfield at Trondheim, Norway (Milch Collection)
A page from Milch’s diary (Milch Collection)
With Speer and Professor Porsche (Milch Collection)
The Junkers and the Focke-Wulf (Hanfried Schliephake)
Göring and Hitler at Rechlin airfield, (Milch Collection)
Milch standing in for Göring at a Nazi rally (Milch Collection)
The Heinkel and the Daimler-Benz coupled-engines (Imperial
War Museum)
The Messerschmitt jet (Hanfried Schliephake)
The Arado (Imperial War Museum and Hans Schliephake)
The V- flying-bomb, the Dornier fighter-bomber and the Junkers (Imperial
War Museum and Hans Schliephake)
INTRODUCTION
or more field marshals created by Hitler three, and one grand-
admiral, are still alive. Most of the others were killed in action, committed sui-
cide, or were hanged by Hitler or their captors. To have written a biography of
Milch, least famous of the survivors, requires some explanation. When I visited
them, most of his contemporaries were surprised to learn that he was still alive.
In the last years of his life he closeted himself behind an anonymous front door
in suburban Düsseldorf, looked after by a niece, writing reports for a foreign
aviation company of international repute. I was intrigued by the man when I
first met him five years ago. Erhard Milch, Hermann Göring’s deputy his
benefactor in time of poverty, his adversary in time of influence, his defender
in time of trial proved to be the repository of a thousand anecdotes of the
war and its slow prelude.
He was the senior of the surviving field marshals, and the highest-ranking
of the surviving Luftwaffe officers. The Luftwaffe was a force which he, more
than any other German, created. But more than that: the dapper, florid busi-
nessman sitting upright in the stiff armchair next to me, preparing to narrate
the three score years and ten of his life so far, had already created for himself a
niche in history, quite outside the world of politics, by the time Adolf Hitler
first entered the Reich Chancery in . It was Milch whose administrative
cunning and personal dynamism fashioned the German Lufthansa airline from
its beginnings in local companies into an international concern, while at the
same time secretly providing and nourishing the industrial roots from which a
future Luftwaffe would spring.
This much is known. And yet the real story starts even earlier. During the
First World War, Milch is to be seen with his hand camera, photographing Al-
lied trenches from a German biplane; and if the wheel of time is allowed to spin,
we catch a fleeting glimpse of the ex-Captain Milch, now commanding officer of
a police air squadron in East Prussia, ordering a machine-gun to be turned on
rioting strikers in Königsberg. He describes it as though it were yesterday.
Then, supporting himself on a walking stick, for he has sciatica, he walks stiffly
across the drawing-room to an antique cupboard and returns with a yellowing
sheaf of documents the reports he wrote and some newspapers from
Königsberg, a city name long vanished from the map of Europe.
When next I visited him I found he had retrieved from a local safe de-
posit a stained and heavy suitcase, which he unfastened to reveal some fifty dia-
ries and notebooks. I leafed through one at random and found a young artillery
officer trudging in streaming rain through the carnage of a midnight battlefield
of the Russian front during the First World War. The language was simple, but
written with great feeling for the suffering of the common soldier.
It is clear that Milch was no Prussian officer archetype himself. His con-
versation was studded with scornful remarks about the Prussian generals whose
obstinacy and lack of vision caused the Hitler Reich’s downfall, for he did not
camouflage his enduring admiration of the Führer. He was a field marshal but
never a true officer, if his First World War service be overlooked. From being
managing director of Lufthansa he became managing director of the secret
Luftwaffe. Only the rank and the uniform were new; the job was virtually the
same. But it was the rank and uniform that antagonized his Prussian adversar-
ies; and his competence infuriated them. The campaign they fought against
him, with all the intrigues and tenacity the German general staff could muster,
lasted the full eleven years from his appointment until his disgrace in .
When this biography was published in West Germany the controversy was re-
newed, with able commanders like General Student hastening to the attack and
others, equally able, coming to his defence. Milch ruefully quoted Friedrich
Schiller’s lines on Wallenstein: ‘Torn by the hatred and favour of each faction,
his name merges unsteadily with the past.’ (‘Von der Parteien Gunst und Hass
verwirrt, schwankt sein Charakterbild in der Geschichte.’)
Now that his personal papers and official records are open to inspection,
we can reassess the role he played. The widow of another Luftwaffe field mar-
shal, von Richthofen, has written to me:
Now I have read the biography, I must say I am simply appalled at
the intriguing and bickering that went on between the ministries,
while every airman was doing his utmost at the front and I myself
lost a son as a combat pilot. The accomplishments that were Milch’s,
and the opposition he had to overcome! I have wept bitter tears
reading your biography the tears of an impassioned soldier’s
daughter, of a soldier’s wife, and of a soldier’s mother. I have been
shaken to the core.
My conversations with the field marshal for this book lasted four years.
Subsequently he read and commented on the fifteen-hundred-page draft that I
produced. The changes he suggested may interest the reader curious about
Milch’s character. Once he invited me to delete Göring’s unflattering descrip-
tion of a minister at the time of the Röhm massacre (‘pale as a sicked-up pea’),
on the grounds that the man is now dead. (He was hanged at Nuremberg.)
Again, a diary note where Göring disclosed a physical debility was removed at
Milch’s request, with regard to the widow’s feelings. Nor was he devoid of sen-
timent himself: he was deeply upset when he read the chapter terminating in
the suicide of Ernst Udet, his closest friend, and learned for the first time the
hurtful anti-Semitic epitaph scrawled by Udet before he pulled the trigger. On
occasions Milch argued powerfully for the moderation of critical passages
founded on my reading of the primary sources of the time. Occasionally he told
me a version of an episode he had clearly related so often that it had begun to
live a separate, and often charming, existence of its own, almost wholly detached
from the substance of what had really happened. I hope my knowledge of the
man has enabled me to detect and prune these offshoots in good time.
Under the agreement whereby the field marshal surrendered his diaries,
notebooks and papers for my use, he retained a right to veto one passage. It is
proper that I should state that he insisted on only one occasion, when I was un-
able to convince him to allow me to publish the whole truth about his real fa-
ther (and in particular his identity), which I had meanwhile worked out for
myself despite his wholly honourable effort to obscure it; he asked me not to
disclose more than I have written in the narrative that follows, and although he
has since died I am still bound by the undertaking I gave him in his lifetime.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
to whom this author is personally indebted is long, but
first of all his gratitude must be expressed to Field Marshal Milch, who made
available his papers for the first time, and read and commented on the manu-
script at every stage; and to his family, who bore with the author’s many visits
with great patience. But the author wishes to make it plain that he alone is re-
sponsible for the statements made and the views expressed in this book, and
that they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Field Marshal Milch unless
expressly stated.
Mention must also be made of Dr O. Puchner of the Staatsarchiv in Nur-
emberg, and of Dr Friedrich Bergold, the field marshal’s erstwhile defence law-
yer, for their assistance in providing much of the material on which the latter
chapters were based. Professor Walther Hubatsch, Messrs Basil Collier, Albert
Speer, Fritz Seiler and many others patiently read parts of the draft and sug-
gested improvements; Gunner Archie Miller, who took Milch prisoner, de-
scribed from his diary the capture and the looting that followed by other sol-
diers; Major E. W. Rushton, of the Marine Commandos, described at length the
events at Neustadt as OC of the unit responsible for mopping up in May ,
and confirmed that Milch was ‘clobbered’ by the Commandos (not Major
Rushton) when taken prisoner.
Among the many others who assisted by granting interviews, writing let-
ters, or reading the manuscript, gratitude is owing to Major-General Hermann
Aldinger; engineer G. B. Alpers; Colonel Nicolaus von Below; Dr Willi A. Boel-
cke; engineer Maximilian Bohlan; Mr Ernst Englander; Mr Richard Falke; Sir
Roy Fedden; engineer Karl Frydag; Frau Irmingard Geist; Rear-Admiral
Eberhard Godt; Mr Jacob Hennenberg, a former Jewish forced-labourer em-
ployed on Milch’s estate near Breslau, who wrote unexpectedly to the author
from Cleveland, Ohio, in defence of the field marshal; Mr Fritz Herrmann;
General Walther Hertel; Frau Edith Hesselbarth; Mr Otto Horcher; Dr G.
Hümmelchen; Professor Heinz Kalk; director Rakan Kokothaki; lawyer Dr Otto
Kranzbühler; Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk; Colonel Viktor von Lossberg;
lawyer Dr Werner Milch; Mr Fritz Nebel; Professor Lionel S. Penrose; Colonel
Edgar Petersen; General Wolfgang Pickert; the late Dr Hjalmar Schacht; Major-
General Friedrich Carl Schlichting; Mr Hanfried Schliephake; Professor F. See-
wald; General Otto Skorzeny; Professor Telford Taylor; Group-Captain Peter
Townsend; the Rt Hon Lord Trevethin and Oaksey, who as Lord Lawrence
presided over the Nuremberg trials; Lieutenant-General Wolfgang Vorwald;
test pilot Erich Warsitz; Frau Karin Weigel, secretary to General Koller; Major-
General Karl-Eduard Wilke; and Mr Hans Karl von Winterfeld.
