Talk:Erhard Milch

message: "Milch was put in charge of the production of planes during this time, and his many mistakes were key to the loss of German air superiority as the war progressed"
- This is an utterly outrageous claim.  Milch was by far the most competent man in the Luftwaffe, and when he was given control over production in 1942, he accomplished huge increases in both fighter and bomber production. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Msbradbury (talk • contribs) 05:05, 30 October 2008
: I just read the citation listed for this claim, and I don't believe the cited website says anything like this!  (It does, however, support the later claim that Goering forced him to step down, which is currently tagged, "citation needed.")  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.152.4.223 (talk) 23:26, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Your comments that the Me 262 was a "rouge white elephant" are ridiculous.  If built in proper numbers, the plane would have allowed Germany to "take back the skies." TL36 (talk) 23:22, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Guys it's "rogue" not "rouge" (that's the French word for "red".)Historian932 (talk) 12:24, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Ability

message: This article states that Milch's father was Jewish. However, Louis L. Snyder, in his Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, states that Milch's mother was the Jewish parent. Any citations to prove that this article is in fact the correct version? -- Necrothesp 18:46, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: even a very german family name wouldnt exclude the possibility of being jewish in the Nazi sense. Many convered jews changed their names to stereotypical german ones to blend in.--Tresckow (talk) 12:23, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes but the above poster isn't making that argument, rather he is merely pointing out that a surname that is thought to be Jewish isn't always necessarily so, consider Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg for example.Historian932 (talk) 04:36, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

text: I disagree: nazis were concerned with ancestry except in rare cases of usefulness or personal relationship. Many Jews whose parents had converted to Christianity would have claimed loyalty as indeed would many Jews who had not converted. Loyalty was insufficient to earn one reclassification. Maurice, btw, was only like 1/8th Jewish through a great-grandfather which would have been problematic for SS membership without his personal friendship with hitler. Frankly, it is pretty offensive comment implying that Jews who proved loyalty were accepted; I don't know if you meant it that way.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.37.99.86 (talk) 08:39, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Jewish parent

message: In This Section There is no reference or source of the information in that Goering was responsible of pushing the evident that Erhard Milch's father is another one . and that's why it should be quoted with need citation or removed.
--Hiens 11:04, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  1933-1939 

message: In the Section 1933-1939, the sentence "Even after that it was not necessarily Milch as the leader who did not depose of him, but, put him in an inferior position" is unclear. It should probably be "depose him" and not "depose of him", but even after making this change there are English syntax problems. I did not make any changes, since the changes should be made by someone that knows what is the intended meaning of this sentence.--User:Mateat 18:28, Aug 13, 2008 (UTC)
:That sentence *still* needs fixing. Someone do this, please, otherwise I'm inclined to remove it altogether as it's not at all clear what it's supposed to mean. Alfietucker (talk) 07:42, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I've just added a copy-editing tag for the 1933-1939 section, as on a second look I see that section's actually riddled with poorly written sentences, some of them hard or impossible to understand. Hope there's an editor out there who has relevant sources who can fix this! Alfietucker (talk) 00:17, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  English syntax 

message: Quentin Tarantino could make a movie about the thousands of Jews who fought for Germany in WWII, including Generals of Hitler´s Army, as demonstrated by the last book of American historian Bryan Mark Rigg which estimates in over 150,000 the Jews fighting in the German Army in WWII.--79.146.211.6 (talk) 04:31, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I think "Inglorious Basterds" is as close as you're going to get from him on that topic. :-) Historian932 (talk) 03:26, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  150,000 Jews fought for Hitler in the Wehrmacht 

message: Incorrectly attributed to Milch. The book is by David Irving. I was excited to hear about it in this article so I went on Amazon looking for this autobiography only to find that it was actually written by that Hitler-fancying crackpot fascist. Don't think I'll waste my money on anything written by such an unreliable source (not that an autobiography is always reliable historically, but one reads those for different reasons).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.12.54.210 (talk) 01:14, 26 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe 

message: Is this the reason there is a copyedit tag on the '1933-1939' section, para 1 ? "Even after that it was not necessarily Milch as the leader who did not depose of him, but, put him in an inferior position", because I don't understand it.
RASAM (talk) 14:51, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Understanding

message: I think if someone could find the references (I remember reading them many years ago but don't remember where) to Goering saying (in reference to Milch) "In Germany I decide who is a Jew!", and that Milch actually ordered winter coats for Luftwaffe ground crews in preparation for Operation Barbarossa (one of the common critiques of the Axis invasion [a poor one, in my opinion] being that they didn't prepare properly for the Russian winter). Historian932 (talk) 12:39, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Possible additions

message: I intended to write that "The ineffective clause in the lede seems to be an interpretation of the "lack of longterm strategy" sentence in the main text. This sentence itself seems to be an overboard interpretation of the essay it cites. This essay says nothing like that. Or maybe the original sources are lost."
In all of the publications I've read, most notably Tooze's book and German Aircraft Industry and Production, 1933-1945 by  Ferenc A. Vajda, Peter Dancey, not one author says Milch is inefficient, if not free of errors. The problems like overlapping command structures, changes of responsibilities, changes of aircraft models..etc existed, but largely due to the nature of the Third Reich's administration system, changing situations at the front and Hitler's desperate search for wonder weapons...etc rather than Milch's nature as a manager. So I've changed the content a bit to make it more balanced, but this still requires further editing because it's such a complex problem, especially regarding Milch's responsibilities in the use of slave labour.Deamonpen (talk) 09:47, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Milch being inefficient

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:
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Participate in the deletion discussion at the . —Community Tech bot (talk) 17:06, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion 

message: I've noticed a small but important discrepancy. The page states that Milch's mother signed an affidavit naming Karl Brauer as the father of her child: 
>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.
It is not clear what his mother signed. All of the publicly available documents named a deceased minor aristocrat who had been friendly with the Milch family, Hermann von Bier, as Erhard's biological father. Page 17 of the USAF version of Command and Leadership in the Luftwaffe by Richard Suchenwirth states that von Bier was the man listed on the blood certificate:  
https://www.afhra.af.mil/Portals/16/documents/Studies/151-200/AFD-090521-037.pdf
A severely incestuous family tree would have been looked down upon by almost all Germans. This is not something that would have been put on a public document. 
The incest story only became known after David Irving interviewed Milch & looked through his family papers. Irving came to the conclusion that Anton Milch was not his biological father as he (supposedly) was absent when Clara became pregnant. Irving also found references to an incestuous background in Milch's private diary. 
On page 372 of Irving's book The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, a (supposed) segment of Milch's diary is published: 
>'Kempner grills me about father... I turned it all over in my mind, then answered in line with my original official papers. Should I have disclosed the truth, shameful as it is, about C to him? But now Kempner will exploit all this'
The issue with claiming that Milch's mother signed an affidavit naming Carl Brauer as his father is that all of the primary documents name a different man - von Bier - as the father and the only proof we have that such a letter might have existed comes from David Irving (who is prone to publishing sensationalistic things). 
It'd be fascinating to see a collage of Anton Milch, Hermann von Bier, and Carl Brauer side-by-side with Milch to compare their faces. Dani'sAccount98 (talk) 22:59, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Blood Certificate Named Hermann von Bier as Milch's Father