The life of Erhard Milch is a story of personal and professional betrayal. A man of high intelligence, of great executive ability, he misused these talents to dedicate them to a scheme for conquest and a plan for the enslavement of the world. The 10 years of military service of the defendant from the age of 18 to 28 which took him through the First World War were a perfect preparation for the tasks to come. From 1915 to 1919, Milch was a scout, observer, adjutant and squadron leader in the German Air Force. At the very infancy of military aviation, the defendant began an association which was to last through his entire public career. It was at this time that he learned the needs and the problems of flying men, a knowledge which was to stand him in such good stead in his work as the founder of the Luftwaffe.
The defendant never dissociated himself from the aims and ideals of German militarism. He became one of the silent army of men who remembered, hated, and hoped; but unlike many others, this man did not sit idly by. He did not wait passively for Germany to rise again, he devoted his best efforts towards that end. In 1921, only 1 year after his discharge from the army, we find him working as chief of air operations [flights] in the new business of commercial aviation.
There is no necessity to fill out in detail the successive steps in the defendant’s rise in civilian air transportation—a few broad strokes suffice. The next significant event in his career came in 1925 when he joined the state-sponsored Lufthansa which within 3 years he was to form into the nucleus of a new air force. It is no euphemism that he was called the Father of German Air Transportation.
When Hitler came into power in 1933, Milch acceded to the requests of both Goering and Hitler and assumed the additional duty of State Secretary in the Air Ministry. It was understood from the start, and it was confirmed in 1937, that Milch would succeed Goering as Chief of the German Air Force in the event of the latter’s death or withdrawal. By the time the new Luftwaffe had publicly emerged from such embryos as the Air Sport League, the Air Defense League, and the Flying [Flieger] Hitler Youth, the defendant had become a Generalleutnant (the equivalent of the American major general). The honors which followed: field marshal in the Luftwaffe in 1940, which was gained from 2 months’ participation in the invasion of Norway; Generalluft-Zeugmeister in 1941; member of the Central Planning Board in 1942; Chief of the Jaegerstab in 1944, were proof alike of the evil genius of Erhard Milch and of his complete compatibility with the Nazi ambitions and methods.
This defendant became a member of the Nazi Party in May 1933. His work in the Party was important. He was indeed one of the little group of specialists of whom Mr. Justice Jackson, in his closing address before the International Military Tribunal, aptly said:
“It is doubtful whether the Nazi master plan could have succeeded without their specialized intelligence which they so willingly put at its command. They (speaking of Goering, Keitel, Jodl, and the rest) did so with knowledge of its announced aims and methods and continued their services after practice had confirmed the direction in which they were tending. Their superiority to the average run of Nazi mediocrity is not their excuse. It is their condemnation.”[[66]]
Various Germans allowed themselves to be absorbed into the Nazi Party for a variety of reasons. Depression, financial and business betterment, ambition, discouragement with the previous political situation, and human weakness in the face of terrorism, all played their part in the recruitment of the Nazi machine. There were few cases in which a man made as clear, as deliberate, and as discreditable a choice of Nazism as did Milch.
The high esteem in which the defendant was held by Hitler and his position within the inner circle of Nazi militarists can be seen from the fact that he was one of a party of fourteen of Hitler’s highest and most trusted officers who attended a conference in the new Reich Chancellory on 23 May 1939, at which Hitler made known to his military chiefs his plans and objectives. (L-79.)
All in all, two points stand out in even a quick survey of Milch’s career: First, he never accepted the defeat of Germany in the First World War; his life between the wars was devoted to the work of placing Germany in a position to challenge the world in the matter of air supremacy; and second, he was a man who was unlikely to allow either difficulty or honor to stand in the way of the accomplishment of his purpose—the objectives of the Nazi Party. If these characteristics are borne in mind, much of the defendant’s fanaticism and the unbelievable savagery with which he adhered to the Nazi plan for conquest at the expense of all values of human decency may be seen as the natural consequences of the acts of a man with his criminal philosophy.
We have then, at the outbreak of the war this man, already within the inner circle, already devoted to the Nazi scheme of things and quite essential to their fulfillment, with a record of organization and with the work of preparation behind him—poised with his companions for the kill. We see the air armadas, which were the labor of his love, helping to shatter Poland within 18 days, helping to reduce the Lowlands to smoking ruins within a few days’ time, assisting in the subjugation of the French military machine and in driving the British from the continent in a period of a few weeks. We see the hordes of the Fatherland racing on and on with the air arm always overhead, preparing the way, until Germany had overrun a territory from the Normandy Coast to Moscow, and from the North Sea to El Alamein.