In 1940 the victories in the west gave the 47-year-old Göring new power, and new tastes of luxury. He went shopping for diamonds in Amsterdam, and took a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Göring liked Paris so much that he decided to move into a fine house on the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. That this was the British Embassy – now unoccupied except for one caretaker – made it no less attractive.
Göring took the German ambassador with him to inspect the property but when they explained the purpose of their visit, the custodian said, ‘Over my dead body, your Excellency’, and closed the door in their faces.
As far back as 1933, Hitler had authorised Göring to start a national art collection which would remain in Göring’s hands for his lifetime but then become a public collection. The conquests of 1940, and the way in which the European currencies were all pegged artificially lower than the German mark, gave new impetus to this collection. Many art treasures were simply seized: ‘ownerless’ Jewish collections and ‘enemy possessions’ were taken into new custody. To obtain paintings from unconquered countries, Göring simply swapped his surplus. A dealer in Lucerne, Switzerland, received 25 French Impressionist paintings in exchange for 5 Cranachs and 2 German Primitives.
The regal splendour of Göring’s life-style was completed by his train. Code-named ‘Asia’, its vanguard was a pilot train which accommodated the staff – civilian and military – in comfort that extended to bathing facilities. There were also low-loaders for cars, and freight wagons for Göring’s shopping.
The train in which Göring travelled, and sometimes lived, was specially weighted to provide a smooth ride. This luxury meant two of Germany’s heaviest locomotives were needed to move it. One coach was designed as bedrooms for himself and his wife, and a study. Another coach was a modern cinema. A third was a command post with a map room. A fourth was a dining car.
There were also carriages for his senior commanders and for guests, some of whom (Milch, for example) had a whole carriage to themselves. At front and back, there were special wagons with anti-aircraft guns and crews, although whenever possible the train was halted near tunnels as protection against air attack.
In the spring of 1940 Göring, who liked to be called ‘the Iron Man’, ordered his train west to Beauvais in France, a suitable place to command his Luftwaffe for the attack upon England. Few doubted that Der Eiserner was about to lead his Luftwaffe to a unique military victory. To do it would be nothing less than a personal triumph.
The Rise of the New German Air Force
In November 1918, a defeated Germany was forbidden the use of military aviation. Since there was at that time virtually no other sort of aviation, about a hundred large companies were without work.
AEG (manufacturer of the G.IV twin-engined bomber) had already planned for such a contingency. As early as 1917, they had formed Deutsche Luftreederei, an airline which would use the aircraft they built. So within three months of the war’s end, the world’s first civil aeroplane airline* connected Berlin with Leipzig, Weimar and Hamburg.
Professor Hugo Junkers, another German aircraft manufacturer, was just as quick to adapt to the changing times. On the very morning that the Armistice was signed, he had held a senior staff conference to discuss the changeover to manufacturing civil aircraft. By 25 June 1919 – three days before the signing of the Versailles Treaty – the outstanding Junkers F-13 was test flown. And while the other transports in use were cumbersome old wood-and-fabric biplanes, Junkers’s new machine was an all-metal cantilever monoplane, and such a breakthrough in design that sales were made in spite of the thousands of war surplus aircraft that were available at give-away prices. It was a period when many wartime flyers formed one-man airlines. But the manufacturers were in the most advantageous position to prosper, and Junkers had shares in several airlines.
Professor Hugo Junkers came from an old Rhineland family. He was a scientist, a democrat and a pacifist. He was also a genius. While working on gas-stove design he became interested in the efficiency of layered metal plates for heat transfer. He built himself a wind tunnel to study the effect of heated gases on various shapes, and ended up as the most important pioneer of metal aircraft construction.
By 1918, as the First World War ended, Hugo Junkers was already 60 years old. He was a white-haired old man with a large forehead and clear blue eyes. He had a large family but was ready to ‘adopt’ brilliant newcomers.
The most successful of Junkers’s protégés was a small, rather pop-eyed man named Erhard Milch. No account of the Luftwaffe, its victories or its failures, would be complete without devoting some words to this strange personality.
Erhard Milch did not create the Luftwaffe (that was the role of General Hans von Seeckt and dated from his memo of 1923), but Milch wet-nursed the infant air force, and dominated it right up to the end.
Milch was born in March 1892 in Wilhelmshaven, where Milch senior was an apothecary of the Imperial German Navy. ‘Loyalty to the Kaiser and loyalty to my country were the only political doctrines I received either as an officer or earlier in my parents’ home,’ he told the judge at Nuremberg at his war-crimes trial.
But the dominant influence upon Milch’s life was a secret that troubled him throughout it. So much so that when, near the end of his life, a biographer discovered the truth, Milch suppressed it still. The facts are simple, but, even in this permissive age, bizarre.
Klara, who was to become Milch’s mother, fell in love with her uncle. Such a marriage was forbidden not only by her parents but by Church law too. Eventually she did her parents’ bidding and married another man – Anton Milch – but did so on the strict understanding that he would not father her children. It was a decision endorsed by the discovery that his mother was in an asylum, and incurably insane. And so she agreed to the arranged marriage on condition that her uncle – the man she truly loved – would be the father of her future children. Erhard Milch grew up to know the wealthy man who visited them as ‘uncle’, not realising that the visitor was his father.
So carefully did his parents guard their secret that it was not until 1933 that the by then middle-aged Milch discovered the truth behind the mysteries that had haunted his youth. And this was the result of an investigation started by an informer who said that Milch’s father was Jewish. It was an accusation calculated to get him removed from the key job he had in the Nazi regime.
The rumours said that because Anton Milch was Jewish, his mother had invented a story about Erhard’s illegitimate birth in order to get Erhard classified as ‘Aryan’. The rumours continued throughout the war and after it. They were fomented by Milch’s evasive replies at the post-war Nuremberg trials. Milch allowed these stories to circulate all his life, for the only way that he could refute them was by revealing a secret that he was determined to take to his grave.
‘I’ll decide who is Jewish and who is not Jewish,’ Göring told several men who came to him with stories of Milch’s birth. But such replies only convinced the accusers that Göring was a part of the cover-up.
But Göring knew all the facts of Milch’s birth. He had in fact been behind the Gestapo’s investigation of the mystery. It is difficult not to wonder what Göring himself made of the curious fact that his right-hand man had a secret about his mother that was even darker than Göring’s own.
Milch was an observer with the German Army Air Service in the First World War. His organisational abilities gave him command of a fighter squadron in spite of the fact that he could not fly an aeroplane! So it was no surprise that Milch proved to be such an able employee in the Junkers organisation. And yet his next change of job took him to the very top levels of commerce. When the German government bullied and cajoled thirty-eight separate airlines into becoming just one subsidised state monopoly, Milch was selected to be one of its bosses. This choice remained ‘inexplicable’ even to Milch: he still couldn’t pilot a plane, had