At the conclusion of the evidence with respect to the medical experiments upon human beings there will remain no doubt that Erhard Milch was a knowing, willing, and active participant in murder.

Throughout the trial the prosecution will place before the Court a number of statements which will portray him as a man who believed no tears should be shed for the victims of total war when German soldiers every day were making the ultimate sacrifice for the Fatherland. This man was not a hard-headed, single-minded production chief whose only problem was to get things done and whose rash statements were the impetuous remarks of an over-worked executive. Milch will be shown as a man who boasted of his responsibility in the hanging of prisoners of war, who urged that any effort on the part of foreign workers to strike during enemy action should be met with rifle fire, who offered protection to slave supervisors who should mistreat their subjects. We will show that he was not too busy to inform himself fully of everything with which he was officially connected and that over and above this he went out of his way to learn the most minute details of matters with which he was very remotely connected.

And now a brief word about the type of evidence with which the prosecution will prove its case. It must be borne in mind that we are not concerned with a single localized incident or with a series of such incidents. The proof which we must show cannot be brought forth from the daily events of ordered society. It must be drawn from the cold ashes of a broken nation. The documents which will be brought into Court have been taken from all corners of a continent. They have one common feature which elevates them in the hierarchy of evidence to a place above the story of sincere but fallible eyewitnesses. These documents are official German records, some of them records of the defendant’s own organizations. In some cases they bear the defendant’s signature or his handwritten initials. In every case they are authentic records compiled by Germans, accurate because there was no reason for falsification or exaggeration, thorough because of a national fetish for attention to detail, reliable because they were made at times when the German fortunes of war were high and their scriveners had no reason to fear that one day they would be confronted with their hand-made records of criminality.

It would seem that at this point there should be some discussion of the various organizations with which the defendant was connected.

We are concerned principally with that part of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, known as the OKL (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe), the High Command of the German Air Force. The Chief of the OKL was Reich Marshal Hermann Goering. His Inspector General and State Secretary in the Air Ministry was the defendant Erhard Milch. As such, from July 1940, he held the rank of field marshal (comparable to the American rank of general of the armies).[[68]]

The other two branches of the OKW with which we are incidentally concerned were the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres), High Command of the Army, and the OKM (Oberkommando der Marine), High Command of the Navy. The army was commanded by Field Marshal von Brauchitsch until December 1941, at which time it was taken over by Hitler. The navy was commanded by Grand Admiral [Admiral of the Fleet] Raeder until 1943, thereafter by Grand Admiral Doenitz.

The Luftwaffe Medical Service came under this defendant in his capacity as Inspector General of the Luftwaffe. The Medical Service was headed by Dr. Erich Hippke until January 1944; thereafter it was headed by Dr. Oskar Schroeder.

There was an experimental institute in Berlin called the DVL which was a technical research institution for aero-research. This was subordinate to the defendant in his position as Generalluftzeugmeister.

We now turn to the Central Planning Board. This was established by a Goering decree, pursuant to a Hitler order of 22 April, 1942. The Board consisted of Albert Speer, Erhard Milch, and Paul Koerner. Later, by a supplementary Goering decree, in September 1943, Walter Funk was added to the Board. Speer and Milch were the dominant members, and Koerner and Funk played comparatively minor roles. The Central Planning Board was, in effect, a consolidation of all controls over German war production. The Board was found by the International Military Tribunal to have “had supreme authority for the scheduling of German production and the allocation and development of raw materials. * * *”[[69]] Hand in hand with this goes the corollary of the procurement and allocation of labor. Reich Marshal Goering, in his decree of 22 April, 1942, stated in part——“It (the Central Planning Board) encompasses that which is fundamental and vital. It makes unequivocal decisions and supervises the execution of its directives”. The Central Planning Board requisitioned labor from Sauckel with full knowledge that the demands would be supplied by foreign forced labor, and the Board determined the basic allocation of this labor within the German war economy. Sauckel was the servant of the Central Planning Board in the procurement of slave labor. There are records of some 50-odd meetings of the Board between the time of its establishment in 1942, and 1945. The defendant was present at all but a few of these meetings and on occasion his was the dominant voice. The International Military Tribunal found that the Central Planning Board determined the total number of laborers needed for German industry, and required Sauckel to produce them, usually by deportation from occupied territories.

It is worthy of note that Speer was appointed Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions on 2 February 1942, Sauckel was appointed Plenipotentiary General for Labor Allocation on 21 March 1942, and the Central Planning Board was created on 22 April 1942.