Background
Erhard Milch was born in Wilhelmshaven on 30 March 1892, the son of a naval apothecary.
Erhard Milch was born in Wilhelmshaven on 30 March 1892, the son of a naval apothecary.
After serving in World War I in an air force fighter group, Milch joined the Freikorps and in 1920 commanded a Police Air Squadron in East Prussia. From 1920 to 1926 he held various posts with commercial airlines. In 1926 he joined the Lufthansa civil aviation company in Berlin, became a member of its Board of Directors and for the next seven years played a key role in its development.
In 1933 Milch entered the NSDAP and the Luftwaffe, and on 22 February was appointed by Hermann Goering as State Secretary in the Reich Air Ministry, a position he held until the fall of the Third Reich. As Armaments Chief of the air force, Milch entrusted eminent technicians from leading industrial firms with managing the separate areas of armaments production and achieved Goering’s high regard for his executive ability and efficiency. His half-Jewish origin (his mother was a Jewess) did not prevent his rapid promotion, since Goering arranged for his spurious ‘Aryanization' by persuading his mother to sign a legal document that he was not her child.
Appointed Major General in 1934, Lieutenant-General in March 1935 and General in November 1938, Milch commanded the Fifth Air Fleet at the outbreak of World War II. On 19 July 1940 he was one of three air force officers to be promoted to General Field Marshal. In the same year he directed air operations against Norway and received the Knight’s Cross. Inspector-General of the Luftwaffe from the beginning of the war, Milch took over the Technical Directorate of the Air Ministry in 1942 after the death of Ernst Udet. In the same year he was made virtual dictator of transportation in Nazi Germany, along with his close friend and political ally, Albert Speer. Both men tried unsuccessfully to alert Goering and Hitler to the need for radically reducing the manufacture of bombers in favour of increasing fighter-plane production, before it was too late. The reports of Milch's experts on enemy armaments and the dramatic rise in American production curves were dismissed by Goering as Allied propaganda.
On 17 April 1947 Milch was sentenced by the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to life imprisonment as a war criminal. On 31 January 1951 the American High Commissioner commuted his sentence to fifteen years' imprisonment. Milch was eventually amnestied and released on 4 June 1954.
He continued to work as an industrial consultant in Düsseldorf and died at Wuppertal-Barmen on 25 January 1972.