Promotional Document Signed By Feldmarshall Erhard Milch

Original promotion citation signed by Field Marshall Erhard Milch. Complete with ink signature and correct seal stamp.

Feldmarshall Erhard Milch played a central role in founding, developing, and managing the Luftwaffe during the rearmament of Germany before and during WW2. He served as state secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation from 1933-1944 and inspector general of the Airforce working directly under Hermann Göring. Following the suicide of Ernst Udet in 1941, Milch took control of Germany’s armaments and aircraft procurement. He shifted the industry toward mass production, though he faced frequent industrial friction and strategy clashes.

By 1944, following severe Luftwaffe failures on the Soviet front and during the Battle of Britain, Milch joined Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels in an attempt to convince Adolf Hitler to replace Göring. The coup failed, Hitler refused, and Göring retaliated by forcing Milch out of his command. For the rest of the war, he worked under Albert Speer in a diminished capacity.

Milch was captured by Allied forces in May 1945. In 1947, he was prosecuted by a U.S. military court at Nuremberg in what was known specifically as the Milch Trial.

He was charged with crimes involving the widespread use of inhumane slave labor (using tens of thousands of foreign workers and prisoners of war in aircraft factories) and facilitating fatal human medical experiments (high-altitude and freezing tests) on concentration camp inmates. He was found guilty of the forced labor and prisoner-of-war charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. His sentence was commuted to 15 years in 1951, and he was paroled in 1954. He lived out his remaining years in West Germany working as an industrial consultant before dying in 1972.

Milch to this day remains an interesting and complex character surrounded by personal scandal.

Code: 4566