Was Erhard Milch Jewish?

Few senior military figures in the Third Reich have been more subject to claims of jewishness than the architect of the Luftwaffe: Erhard Milch. The problem is that - like Magda Goebbels (1) and Hermann Goering - (2) this legend is based upon having a parent who has taken a jew to be their lover or spouse, but they are not the biological parent of the individual involved.

Milch is just such a case: even the Wikipedia article gets this outright wrong as it cites Brian Rigg's 'Hitler's Jewish Soldiers' on the subject. (3) Rigg does cite primary documentation, but crucially doesn't cite the all-important Gestapo investigation into Milch's racial origins in 1935. (4) This exonerated Milch of the rumours on the grounds that his actual father was not actually Anton Milch (who was jewish) but rather his mother's uncle: Karl Brauer. (5)

The evidence upon which this exoneration was based was a confession written by Milch's mother Klara Vetter to her son in the autumn of 1933: where in four heart-rending pages she explained to Milch the socially unacceptable way in which he was conceived and why she (and his step-father Anton Milch as well as his biological father Karl Brauer) had kept it from him. (6)

Klara's family was Catholic you see and her parents desired her to marry a penniless jewish orphan in the navy called Anton Milch, but Klara really loved another man (and he also loved her): her mother's brother Karl Brauer. Such a union was not illegal at the time (witness Adolf Hitler's parents who were uncle and niece), but it was enough to cause exclusion (per Canon Law) from the Roman Catholic Church in which the Vetter family was in communion. (7)

It was also against the wishes of Klara's parents who forced her to marry Anton, which she consented to but with the explicit proviso (agreed with Anton) that she would not bear his children: rather she would bear the children of Karl Brauer or she would not go through with the marriage. (8) This Anton agreed to and Milch was duly conceived by Klara's sexual activities with Karl Brauer not with Anton Milch: however to the rest of the world it would seem like Klara's children were also Anton's, which would in turn give them the necessary social legitimacy and prevent their true socially unacceptable origins becoming known to the world.

In support of this state of affairs we have not only Klara Milch's signed statement to Milch, but we also have Anton Milch's two page confirmation to Milch from October 1933 that what his mother had written to him was in fact true. (9) This was not widely known during the Third Reich and because Milch was therefore a bastard not a jew: he could not technically be a officer in the Wehrmacht.

This is social quagmire is the origin of Hermann Goering's famous declaration: 'I decide who is a Jew!' Since he couldn't reveal Milch's true origins that the Gestapo investigation had discovered to the world, because it would mean losing a very capable officer due to a social stigma, but yet he also knew the claim that Milch was jewish was wrong.

Thus Goering took the only way out available to him at the time: declare that Milch was de jure non-jewish. He was quite right, but looking back as a historian this is unfortunate since the legend of Milch's jewishness has continued up to the present day and Goering's statement is oft used as 'proof' of how 'unscientific' the Third Reich's racial doctrines were.

C'est la vie.

References

(1) See the following article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/did-magda-goebbels-have-jewish-ancestry

(2) See the following article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/did-hermann-goering-have-jewish-ancestry

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Milch#Early_life

(4) Cf. Bryan Rigg, 2002, 'Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military', 1st Edition, University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, p. 288, n. 77; 78

(5) http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/erhard_milch.htm

(6) David Irving, 2002, [1973], 'The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshall Erhard Milch', 1st Edition, Focal Point: London, p. 371

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid., pp. 371-372

(9) Ibid., p. 372