Hitler's Commanders (34 page)

6

The Lords of the Air

Hermann Goering. Erhard Milch. Walter Wever. Ernst Udet. Wilhelm Balthasar. Hans “Fips” Philipp. Otto “Bruni” Kittel. Prince Heinrich zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. Erich Hartmann. Hans-Joachim “Jochen” Marseille. Kurt Andersen.

From January 30, 1933—the day the Nazis came to power in Berlin—the leader of the German Air Force was
hermann goering
. Born in the Marienbad Sanitarium at Rosenheim, Bavaria, on January 12, 1893, he had a most interesting and exciting career. Assisted by Ritter Hermann von Epenstein, a rich and powerful half-Jewish aristocrat who was his godfather and his mother’s lover, Goering was educated in the Karlsruhe Military Academy and the prestigious Gross-Lichterfelde Cadet Academy in Berlin. Commissioned second lieutenant in the Prince Wilhelm (112th Infantry) Regiment at Muelhausen in 1912, he fought on the Western Front in 1914. That winter, however, he became bored with trench warfare and transferred himself (!) to the 25th Air Detachment at Ostend, Belgium, as an aerial observer. When the commander of the Prince Wilhelm Regiment learned of this impertinence, he instituted court-martial proceedings against Goering, but these were quietly quashed by his godfather’s friends at the Imperial Court, and Goering’s transfer to the air service was soon given official sanction.

From the beginning, Lieutenant Goering proved to be an incredibly brave aviator, largely, it seems, because he did not believe he could be killed. In the Battle of Verdun (1915) he and his pilot, Bruno Loerzer,
1
performed so courageously that both won the Iron Cross, First Class, and were personally decorated by Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm. Goering’s adventures were just beginning, however. By the end of the war he was a captain, a fighter pilot with 22 kills, a holder of the Pour le Merite, and was the last commander of the famous 1st Fighter Wing “Richthofen,” whose original leader had been the Red Baron himself.

After the war, an embittered Hermann Goering briefly joined the Freikorps and then went into self-imposed exile in Sweden, where he seduced Karin von Kantzow (nee von Fock), the beautiful wife of a Swedish army officer. Karin soon left her husband and moved in with Goering, whom she would eventually marry after her divorce became final in 1923. Meanwhile, Goering—supported by his mistress and her husband’s money—returned to Germany and, in 1922, enrolled in the University of Munich as a history and political science student. Here he met Adolf Hitler, the second and last hero of his life (his half-Jewish godfather had been the first). Hermann Goering served his Fuehrer and the Nazi Party in a variety of important jobs and assignments from 1922 to 1933, but only one is germane here: on November 9, 1923, during the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, Goering was in the front ranks when the police opened fire on the right-wing revolutionaries. A high-velocity 7.9mm slug hit him in the upper right thigh, just inches from the groin. He fell to the pavement and got dirt in the wound, causing serious medical complications. Given morphine to relieve the terrible pain, his metabolism was permanently altered. Besides becoming a drug addict, he quickly doubled his weight, ballooning to more than 320 pounds.

When Adolf Hitler took power, Hermann Goering assumed a multitude of offices. He was Hitler’s chief deputy, president of the Reichstag, minister of the interior of Prussia, and minister without portfolio in the national cabinet. Soon he would add the posts of prime minister of Prussia, Reichs forest master, Reichs game warden, minister of aviation, and chief plenipotentiary of Hitler’s Four Year (economic) Plan. He was also (unofficially) the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. (The German Air Force was officially banned by the Treaty of Versailles; it was not until March 9, 1935, that Hitler officially announced its existence.) However, he had neither the time nor the inclination to personally direct the development of the Luftwaffe. This he left to his state secretary for aviation, Erhard Milch, and Lieutenant General Walter Wever, the chief of the Air Command Office and (unofficially) the first chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe.

erhard alfred richard oskar milch
was born on March 30, 1892, in Wilhelmshaven, the son of a naval pharmacist named Anton, who happened to be a Jew. Anton Milch left the navy in the 1890s and moved to the Ruhr, where he established his own pharmacy in Gelsenkirchen. His wife, the former Klara Vetter, left him in the 1900s and returned to her native Berlin, where she saw to it that her children received good educations. Erhard matriculated in 1910 and promptly volunteered for duty with the Imperial Navy, which turned him down, allegedly because of his Jewish ancestry.
2
Undeterred, he joined the 1st Foot Artillery Regiment at Koenigsberg and, after attending the Anklam War Academy, was commissioned second lieutenant in 1911. He was back with his regiment when World War I broke out.

Lieutenant Milch served on the Eastern and Western fronts as a battalion adjutant, aerial observer, intelligence officer, and (briefly) the commander of the 6th Fighter Group (
Jagdgruppe
6
), even though he could not yet fly himself. Promoted to captain in 1918, he was chosen to attend the all-important War Academy in Berlin, but the war ended before he could undergo his General Staff training. Then the Treaty of Versailles outlawed the General Staff and the air service and reduced the Officer Corps to 4,000 men. In 1920, a 27-year-old Milch found himself unemployed in a Germany rocked by revolution.

Erhard Milch returned home a disillusioned and embittered man. The Imperial Germany he had fought for no longer existed, and idealism in him was extinguished forever. From this point on, Milch had no guiding star except his own ruthless ambition. After briefly serving in the Freikorps and in the police, he went to work for Professor Hugo Junkers, the aviation pioneer, in 1922. Through ruthless corporate maneuvering he became chief executive officer of Lufthansa, the German national airlines, in 1929, at the age of 36. Later he turned on his mentor. As a result Hugo Junkers—a pacifist and the father of 12 children—escaped conviction on trumped-up charges of high treason only by dying in 1935.

Like his corporate life, Milch’s home life was not above reproach. In 1927, he married Kaethe Patschke, the daughter of a landowner from Schoeneck, possibly because she was pregnant. Their first daughter was born later that year, and a second daughter was born in 1928. Milch, however, loved luxury, good food, fine wines, excellent cigars, and other pleasures of the flesh. He and his wife were separated by the late 1930s.

In 1929, the Nazi Party became a serious factor in German politics. Milch, very much aware of his Jewish ancestry, quickly ingratiated himself with the future Fuehrer and his lieutenants—especially Reichstag President Hermann Goering. By 1932, Milch had placed a Lufthansa airplane at Hitler’s disposal (free of charge) and was depositing Lufthansa funds of 1,000 Reichsmarks a month into Goering’s personal bank account. Milch was named Goering’s deputy and state secretary for aviation in 1933. At the same time he was given the rank of colonel in the secret air force. Eventually he would be rapidly promoted: to major general (1934), lieutenant general (1936), general of flyers (1936), colonel general (1938), and field marshal (July 19, 1940). First, however, Goering had to conduct a cover-up of Milch’s racial background. An “investigation” revealed that Milch’s mother had carried on an adulterous affair with Baron Hermann von Bier for years, while still living with her husband but not having marital relations with him. None of her several children, therefore, were Jewish. (“If we’re going to make Milch a bastard, the least we can do is to make him an aristocratic bastard,” Goering is alleged to have quipped.) Based upon this incredibly thin tale, Goering had Milch’s birth certificate reissued with Bier listed as the father. “Fat Hermann” then had Milch officially declared an Aryan and had his background file sealed, ordering that it never be reopened. It was not, either, but whispers about Milch’s ancestry continued until the end of the Third Reich.

Milch repaid Goering’s generosity by attempting to use his influence with Hitler to ease Goering out as head of the growing air ministry and Luftwaffe, so that he could take his place. By now, Milch was too deeply entrenched in the Fuehrer’s trust to be overtly sacked. Hitler had even presented Milch with the Golden Party Badge—a special mark of favor and distinction. Goering, therefore, employed the age-old political principle of divide and rule. He decided to pit Erhard Milch against the Luftwaffe General Staff, reasoning that if these two factions were at each other’s throats, neither could challenge his own position. Hermann Goering knew less about how to set up and run an air force than either side, and although this ploy worked, it did irreparable damage to the Luftwaffe in the process.

None of this political intrigue mattered while
walter wever
was alive. Although he never officially held the title, Wever was the first chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe, from September 1933 to June 3, 1936. He was remembered by all who knew him as a man of incredible foresight, tact, diplomatic skill, and military ability. He was an officer in the finest professional traditions of the German General Staff and was arguably the only senior officer in the history of the Luftwaffe to consistently exhibit real strategic genius.

Wever was born in the eastern province of Posen (now Poznan, Poland) in 1887 and joined the Kaiser’s army as a Fahnenjunker in 1905. In 1914, he served as a platoon leader on the Western Front. Promoted to captain in 1915, he became a member of the General Staff and in early 1917 was assigned to the staff of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff. Here his brilliance was fully recognized; for example, he was partially responsible for originating the concept of the elastic defense, which broke the back of the French offensive in the Chemin des Dames sector—a remarkable achievement for a company-grade officer. Continuing to exert influence far beyond his rank, Wever became Ludendorff’s adjutant but broke with him professionally after the war, when the former quartermaster general began to demonstrate unstable and unrealistic right-wing political tendencies.

Walter Wever joined the Truppenamt (the clandestine General Staff) after the armistice and was held in high esteem by Colonel General Hans von Seeckt, the commander of the Reichsheer. He was promoted to major in 1926 and to lieutenant colonel in 1930; he was chief of the Training Branch of the army in 1933, when the Luftwaffe began its secret expansion.

General Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s defense (and later war) minister from 1933 until early 1938, was not a selfish man. Realizing that the embryonic air force was in desperate need of competent General Staff officers, he assigned some of his best men to the new branch. Foremost of these was Walter Wever, who was named chief of the Air Command Office and, in reality, chief of the General Staff of the Luftwaffe. When he transferred Wever, Blomberg remarked that he was losing a future chief of the General Staff of the army.

Colonel Wever quickly immersed himself in his new duties and in a remarkably short period of time grasped the fundamentals of how the Luftwaffe should develop. A firm and enthusiastic believer in National Socialism, he read Hitler’s book,
Mein Kampf
, from cover to cover (a remarkable achievement in itself), and it became his strategic Bible. Unlike most of his peers, Wever learned that Hitler wanted no war of revenge against France and/or Britain; instead, the Fuehrer believed that Germany’s principal strategic enemy in its struggle for German
Lebensraum
(living space) was Russia. Wever, therefore, designed and began to build the Luftwaffe for a strategic air war against the Soviet Union.

Wever believed that it was far more economical to destroy the enemy’s weapons at their sources—the factories—than on the battlefield. He therefore demanded a heavy bomber that had sufficient range to reach Russia’s industrial heartland and beyond—even as far as the Ural Mountains, which were 1,500 miles east of the Reich’s nearest airfield. The result was the so-called Ural Bomber, a four-engine strategic airplane. By 1936, two promising prototypes were ready for test-flying—the Junkers 89 and Dornier 19. Wever—by now a lieutenant general—was not satisfied with their speed, so he instructed the German aircraft industry to develop additional bombers with greater horsepower. Guided by the inspired leadership and clearly stated, firm requirements of the brilliant chief, research and development work on the German strategic bomber accelerated and intensified in the first half of 1936.

In addition to General Wever’s many other talents, he was also a master of the vital art of handling people. He made his way through the jungle of political intrigue that was the government of the Third Reich without resorting to intrigue himself but nevertheless having his way on all critical issues concerning the development of the Luftwaffe. For example, neither Goering nor Milch appreciated the need for a long-range strategic bomber, and both opposed its development. Then Wever—the consummate diplomat—went to work on them one at a time. Soon they were wavering, doubting their own previously held opinions, while the Luftwaffe continued to develop along the lines envisioned by the chief of the Air Command Office.

Lieutenant General Wever was a unique character in the history of Nazi Germany. In the context of a regime noted for its backbiting and political infighting, one searches the literature of the Third Reich in vain for negative references aimed at Walter Wever. Had this gifted officer lived, the outcome of the entire war might have been different. His skills as an aviator, however, were marginal at best. He was not a natural flyer and did not become a pilot until after he was transferred to the Luftwaffe in 1933. He had less than 200 hours of flight time in his logbook on June 3, 1936, when he flew to Dresden to address the cadets of the Air War Academy. He returned to the nearby airfield angry and upset because his co-pilot had disappeared. In a hurry to return to Berlin (to attend the funeral of General Karl von Litzman, a hero of World War I), Wever impetuously decided to skip the preflight inspection of his aircraft. This decision has killed many people who were far better pilots than Wever, before and since. When the unfortunate co-pilot at last returned from his unauthorized excursion, the general hustled him into the awaiting He-70—a type of airplane Wever had flown only once or twice before. In his haste, the general did not notice that the aileron lock was still engaged. As a result, his last flight was extremely short. The fully fueled Heinkel barely became airborne before it stalled, plunged to earth just beyond the runway, and exploded. Lieutenant General Walter Wever was killed instantly.