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Volume II · Page 375
was appointed Plenipotentiary General for Labor Allocation on 21 March 1942, and the Central Planning Board was created on 22 April 1942.
Turning now to the defendant's position as Chief of the Jaegerstab. The Jaegerstab was formed pursuant to a Speer decree of 1 March 1944, for the purpose of increasing the production of German fighter aircraft, which, because of effective and heavy raids by strategic air forces of Great Britain and America, had suffered a production decrease to a figure below 1,000 planes a month.
Because of this reduced production of fighter planes, Milch had requested Speer to establish a commission to deal with this most vital problem. The commission was created and Speer and Milch were joint chiefs. The Jaegerstab was actually a group of experts, drawn from the various phases of German industry and supplemented by representatives of the various Ministries concerned, such as Labor, Supply, Transportation, Power and Energy, Raw Materials, Health, Repairs, and so forth.
Meetings were held almost daily, in the beginning at the Air Ministry in Berlin and later at Tempelhof airfield in the same city. The Jaegerstab functions were these: the quick repair of plants damaged in bombing or strafing operations, the dispersal of German aircraft plants, and the construction of underground factories for aircraft production.
As it was with the Central Planning Board, so it was with the Jaegerstab, a major problem was the procurement of slave labor. The workers for the Jaegerstab were procured from the Sauckel Ministry, from occupied countries, and from the SS, who supplied concentration camp inmates and Hungarian Jews.
So successful was the work of the Jaegerstab that Speer decided to enlarge its functions to include other phases of armament and munitions production. Accordingly, on 1 August 1944, he issued a decree expanding the functions of the Jaegerstab and changing its name to Ruestungsstab. The Position of Generalluftzeugmeister was taken over by the defendant in 1941, following the death of Colonel General Ernst Udet. In this post the defendant was in charge of all technical research in the Luftwaffe and his was the over-all responsibility for all aircraft production. As such he spoke for the Luftwaffe in the meetings of the Central Planning Board and in conferences with Hitler. It is obvious that here again the procurement of labor was a primary consideration for one who had the complete responsibility for keeping the Luftwaffe in the air.
In the trial before the International Military Tribunal, it was
