Эрхард Мильх: Нацистік Германияның әуе күштерінің дамуы және қылмыстық ізі

German general (1892–1972)

Erhard Milch (30 March 1892 – 25 January 1972) was a German Generalfeldmarschall (field marshal) who oversaw the development of the German air force (Luftwaffe) as part of the re armament of Nazi Germany (1933 1945) following World War I (1914 1918). He served as State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation from May 1933 until June 1944 and as Inspector General of the air force from February 1939 to January 1945. During most of World War II he was in charge of German aircraft production and supply. In the Milch Trial of 1947, a U. S. military court convicted Milch of war crimes and of crimes against humanity, sentencing him to life imprisonment. However, in 1951 John J. McCloy, the U. S. High Commissioner for Germany, commuted Milch's sentence to 15 years. Paroled in 1954, Milch died in 1972.

Milch was born in Wilhelmshaven, the son of Anton Milch, a Jewish pharmacist who served in the Imperial German Navy, and Clara, née Vetter. The Gestapo later investigated Milch due to his Jewish heritage. Under the Nuremberg Laws, Milch would have been categorized as mixed race (mischling). However, he would not have been considered Jewish according to that religion's orthodoxy (or halakha), which states that a person’s Jewish status is passed down through the mother. In 1935, rumours began to circulate that Milch's father was a Jew. The Gestapo began an investigation which was halted by Hermann Göring, the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, who produced an affidavit by Milch's mother that his true father was her uncle, Karl Brauer. Milch was then issued with a German Blood Certificate. If true, that would mean that Milch's mother, Clara, committed not only adultery but also incest. Author and Holocaust denier David Irving claimed in his book The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, that Milch asked him not to reveal the truth about his parentage, so although Irving states that Erhard's father was not Anton Milch and concentrates on his wealthy great uncle Karl Brauer (who died in 1906), he does not actually name Brauer as his father. However, Irving, who claimed to have had access to the Field Marshal's private diary and papers, says the rumours about Milch's parentage began to spread in the autumn of 1933, and that Erhard Milch personally obtained a signed statement by his putative father Anton that he was not the father of Clara's children. Furthermore, Irving claimed that Clara Milch had already written to her son in law Fritz Herrmann in March 1933 explaining the circumstances of her marriage, and that Göring had initiated his own investigation that identified his real father. During the Nuremberg trials 1946, Milch was again questioned about his alleged Jewish father and Göring's role in the matter by Chief United States Prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson.

Milch enlisted in the Imperial German Army in 1910, where he rose to the rank of Leutnant and commanded an artillery unit in East Prussia at the beginning of the First World War. He saw action against the Russian Army on the River Deime in September 1914 and later on the Angerapp Line in February 1915. In July 1915, he was transferred to the Fliegertruppe (Imperial Air Force) and trained as an aerial observer on the Western front, seeing action on the Somme in 1916 (through the period of it becoming the Luftstreitkräfte in October that year) and later in Flanders during 1917. After a spell as a company commander in the trenches in the spring and summer of 1918, in the waning days of the war, he was promoted to Hauptmann and appointed to command a fighter wing, Jagdgruppe 6, even though he had never trained as a pilot and could not fly himself. Milch resigned from the military in 1920 to pursue a career in civil aviation. With squadron colleague Gotthard Sachsenberg, Milch formed a small airline in Danzig under the banner of Lloyd Luftdienst, Norddeutscher Lloyds union of regional German airlines. The airline linked Danzig to the Baltic States. In 1923, Milch became the managing director of its successor company. From there, Milch and Sachsenberg went to work for rival Junkers Luftverkehr, where Milch was appointed a managing director in 1925. In 1926, Milch was named a managing director (one of three) of the newly formed airline Deutsche Luft Hansa. Milch joined the Nazi Party (number 123,885) on 1 April 1929, but his membership was not officially acknowledged until March 1933, because Hitler deemed it desirable to keep the fact hidden for political reasons. On 5 May 1933, Milch took up a position as State Secretary of the newly formed Reich Ministry of Aviation (RLM), answering directly to Hermann Göring. In this capacity, he was instrumental in establishing the Luftwaffe, the air force of Nazi Germany. Milch quickly used his position to settle personal scores with other aviation industry personalities, including Hugo Junkers and Willy Messerschmitt. Specifically, Milch banned Messerschmitt from submitting a design in the competition for a new fighter aircraft for the Luftwaffe. Messerschmitt outmanoeuvred Milch, circumventing the ban and successfully submitting a design. The Messerschmitt designed Bayerische Flugzeugwerke corporate entry, the Bf 109, proved to be the winner. Messerschmitt maintained its leading position within the German aircraft industry until the failure of the Me 210 aircraft. Even after that Milch, as the leader, did not depose him, but put him in an inferior position. In 1935 doubts about the ethnic origin of Erhard Milch began when rumors circulated that his father Anton Milch was Jewish. The Gestapo began an investigation but it was stopped by Göring, who forced Erhard's mother to sign a document that Anton was not the true father of Erhard and his brothers but that it was her uncle Karl Brauer. Those events and the later extension of the "Certificate of German Blood" were the background to Göring's statement, "I decide who is a Jew in the airforce". However, many believe that he was merely quoting Karl Lueger, the former mayor of Vienna.

Milch was tried as a war criminal in 1947 by a United States Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He was convicted on two counts:
War crimes, by participating in the ill treatment and use of the forced labour of prisoners of war (POWs) and the deportation of civilians to the same ends. Crimes against humanity, by participating in the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and the use of slave labour of civilians who came under German control, German nationals and prisoners of war. Milch was sentenced to life imprisonment. Unlike the vast majority of other Nazi war criminals who were tried under U. S. military law, Milch was not immediately sent to Landsberg Prison to serve his sentence. He was instead sent to Rebdorf Prison, near Munich, but was eventually transferred to Landsberg. Milch's sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment in 1951, and he was paroled in June 1954. He lived out the remainder of his life in Düsseldorf, where he died in 1972 as the last living Luftwaffe field marshal.

In the 1969 film Battle of Britain, Milch was portrayed by German actor Dietrich Frauboes. American actor Robert Vaughn portrayed Milch in the 1982 television film, Inside the Third Reich.

Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 4 May 1940 as Generaloberst and chief of Luftflotte 5 and Befehlshaber Nord (commander in chief north). Grand Cross with Swords of the Order of the White Rose of Finland on 30 March 1942 as Generalfeldmarschall.