. NMT02-T03368
Volume II · Page 368
known to his military chiefs his plans and objectives. (L-79.)
All in all, two points stand out in even a quick survey of Milch's career: First, he never accepted the defeat of Germany in the First World War; his life between the wars was devoted to the work of placing Germany in a position to challenge the world in the matter of air supremacy; and second, he was a man who was unlikely to allow either difficulty or honor to stand in the way of the accomplishment of his purpose - the objectives of the Nazi Party. If these characteristics are borne in mind, much of the defendant's fanaticism and the unbelievable savagery with which he adhered to the Nazi plan for conquest at the expense of all values of human decency may be seen as the natural consequences of the acts of a man with his criminal philosophy.
We have then, at the outbreak of the war this man, already within the inner circle, already devoted to the Nazi scheme of things and quite essential to their fulfillment, with a record of organization and with the work of preparation behind him — poised with his companions for the kill. We see the air armadas, which were the labor of his love, helping to shatter Poland within 18 days, helping to reduce the Lowlands to smoking ruins within a few days' time, assisting in the subjugation of the French military machine and in driving the British from the continent in a period of a few weeks. We see the hordes of the Fatherland racing on and on with the air arm always overhead, preparing the way, until Germany had overrun a territory from the Normandy Coast to Moscow, and from the North Sea to El Alamein.
Then began the occupation, the next step in the plan of the Third Reich — an empire which was to last a thousand years. over an entire continent there spread the deadly rigor of a "Pax Germanica" in which there was to be one citizen class, one race of supermen, and the balance, one class of slaves. At first the occupation overlords maintained the appearance of legality. They gave receipts for the property they plundered, they offered inducements to the laborers they shanghaied, they went through the mockery of signing contracts which were both illusory and fraudulent. But even this sham disappeared as the war went on, and as early as 1942, the German occupation appeared in public as the ugly thing it was, complete with armed recruiters, military escorts on deportation trains and prison camps for the workers brought into Germany. Mr. Justice Jackson, in his opening address on behalf of the United States of America before the international Military Tribunal,* vividly described the character and extent of the slave–labor program in the following words:
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* Ibid., vol. II, pp. 139 — 140.
