The Rise & Fall of The Luftwaffe

About the book

“The tragedy of the German air force,” David Irving concludes, “was wrought by the three men who had ruled its fortunes”: Göring who fathered it, Hitler who used it, and Erhard Milch who created it. This is Milch’s life. He ran Lufthansa, secretly nourishing the industry a future air force would need, joined Göring’s ministry in 1933 and by 1940 was a field marshal. He was a managing director in uniform, and the General Staff fought him for eleven years.

Irving’s case is that the Luftwaffe was beaten in its own conference rooms before it was beaten in the air. Göring scrapped the four-engined bomber prototypes in 1937 while Milch was away. Milch’s closest friend, Ernst Udet, was given charge of air armament and shot himself in November 1941. Milch took over the wreckage, and later named the one cardinal error himself: “One hundred and forty thousand unbuilt fighter aircraft!”

The papers behind it

Milch fetched a suitcase from a safe deposit and handed Irving some fifty diaries and notebooks, then talked to him over four years. Beside them Irving sets the sixty thousand pages of captured Milch documents, most of them shorthand minutes of his and Göring’s conferences, so the arguments are given as they were spoken. The widow of another Luftwaffe field marshal wrote to Irving after reading it: “I have been shaken to the core.”

What you will find in it

• 30 June 1934. Milch sits in a room of Göring’s villa while Himmler reads out a list of names and Göring nods or shakes his head at each.
• Stalingrad. Sent in January 1943 to rescue the airlift, Milch runs it by telephone with his back and ribs in plaster.
• Hamburg. After the raids of July 1943 he interrupts a meeting called by Goebbels, shouting “We have lost the war!”
• The Me 262. On 23 May 1944 Hitler asks how many of the jets can carry bombs. Milch answers “None, mein Führer”, and is out of office within weeks.
• Nuremberg. Beaten with his own baton on capture, he is tried alone by an American tribunal, acquitted on the medical-experiments count and sentenced to life for forced labour. The prosecution’s only German witness is later exposed as a perjurer who had never been inside a concentration camp.

The epilogue settles, from his mother’s own letter, the rumour that followed Milch from 1933 that his father was Jewish. Irving kept his promise not to name the real father.

It is not a defence of Milch. Irving records his threats against foreign workers, the concentration-camp labour in the aircraft factories and his lasting admiration for Hitler, and judges him “insensitive, ruthless but outstandingly capable”.

This edition

First published in 1973. With photographs and sketches from Milch’s own collection, an annotated bibliography, more than sixty pages of source notes and an index.