Erhard Milch and the "Labor Allocations" of Underground Plants
By Miriam Adler ·
Prisoners of war were reduced to "labor allocations" in the underground factories of the Luftwaffe, a systematic brutality recorded in files that were later curated as intelligence spoils.
The human cost of a jet engine is measured in the deaths of those who dug the caves to house it. In the final years of the Third Reich, thousands of prisoners of war and forced laborers were treated not as people, but as biological fuel for a desperate technical gamble, their lives consumed by a process the bureaucracy called "allocation."
These facts are reconstructed from an archival scope-and-content description of the records of the Office of the Director of Technical Armaments, a collection of photostatic copies of the files of Erhard Milch. Erhard Milch was a German Generalfeldmarschall of the Luftwaffe who oversaw its founding and development during the rearmament of Germany and most of World War II, serving as State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Aviation from 1933 to 1944. He was the man responsible for the technical machinery of the air war, and the records he left behind treat the slaughter of laborers with the same sterile precision as the specifications of a wing spar.
"Labor Allocations"
The record shows a regime obsessed with the Me 262 jet fighter, a weapon they believed would reverse the tide of the war. But the Me 262 was not just a technical challenge; it was a logistical nightmare. To protect production from Allied bombing, the Luftwaffe moved its factories into the earth.
This transition was managed by the Fighter Staff (Jaegerstab), an organization established to discuss aircraft production and the underground relocation of plants, though the record provides no further internal structure. The Fighter Staff was the intersection of two of the regime's most efficient killers: Albert Speer and Hermann Goering. Speer was an architect who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production and a close ally of Adolf Hitler, while Goering was the Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe and one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party. Together, they signed the directives that created the Jaegerstab in early 1944, turning the German landscape into a network of subterranean tombs.
The document records that the Jaegerstab conducted "inspection trips to aircraft factories in Germany, Austria, and Poland" to discuss the "underground relocation of plants." It lists "the use of prisoners of war in the German armament industry" and "clothing supplies for foreign workers" as standard agenda items. To a medical ethicist, the phrase "clothing supplies" is a chilling euphemism for the bare minimum of calories and rags required to keep a slave working long enough to finish a turbine. The record establishes that these humans were simply "sources of labor" for the Me 262 program.
The Underground Shift
The scale of this operation required a seamless link between the Reich Air Ministry—the government department that served as the center of aviation administration—and the Reich Research Council. The Council had been created in 1936 for the centralized planning of basic and applied research and was later placed under Speer’s ministry. The records show that the Reich Air Ministry served as the venue for conferences where the technical dreams of the Luftwaffe were mapped onto the physical suffering of the workforce.
Milch and Goering co-presided over these conferences, treating the "allocation of raw materials" and the "allocation of labor" as identical categories of supply. The connection here is a straight line from the drafting table to the death camp. When Goering issued directives to the Fighter Staff concerning the underground relocation of plants, he was not just moving machinery; he was ordering the creation of a system where prisoners were worked to death in the dark.
This system was supported by a network of subordinates who managed the minutiae of this cruelty. The record mentions General Karl-Heinrich Bodenschatz and Ernst Udet—both of whom provided reports on the testing of aircraft in Rechlin, though the rest of their biographies are not on file—and Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen, who provided notes on aircraft research and development, though the record is silent on his wider career. Even the fringes of the files touch the regime's broader thefts, including a report by Alfred Rosenberg—who the record establishes reported on the registration of art works in eastern occupied areas—on the safeguarding of stolen art. The pattern is consistent: whether it was a painting or a human life, it was something to be registered, allocated, and consumed.
The Silence of the Summaries
There is a telling shift in how these crimes were recorded. Between 1941 and 1943, the files contain detailed "transcripts" of conferences. By 1944, as the underground factories grew and the death toll rose, the records transition into "brief summaries."
This is not a matter of clerical efficiency. The desk's reading is that this shift indicates a deliberate purging or selective preservation of records. As the war turned and the possibility of defeat became a reality, the principals—Milch, Speer, and Goering—began to shape the archive for a future where they might have to explain themselves. By replacing transcripts with summaries, they stripped away the specific orders, the names of the victims, and the explicit admissions of forced labor, replacing them with the vague language of "production problems."
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the summaries were designed to provide plausible deniability. They allow the reader to see that "labor" was discussed, but hide the exact nature of the "allocation." The gap between the transcript and the summary is where the evidence of war crimes was buried. This erasure is mirrored in the way the files handle the Me 262. The record reduces a high-level ideological struggle over the aircraft's operational role to a series of technical "production problems," scrubbing the political blood from the engineering blueprints.
Spoils for Paperclip
The most damning silence in the record is the absence of the SS. The documents discuss the "underground relocation of plants" and the "use of prisoners of war" without once mentioning the SS or the concentration camp administration that actually ran the labor camps. The pattern suggests a systemic sanitization: the records frame forced labor as a logistical "allocation" rather than a camp-run system of extermination through labor.
Furthermore, the files document the "what" of Allied capabilities—such as U.S. Lend-Lease to Britain—but carefully remove the "how." The espionage networks and intelligence sources that provided this data are missing. This suggests the collection was never intended to be a functional history of the Luftwaffe's bureaucracy.
The desk's reading is that this collection is a curated intelligence "spoils" set, designed for extraction rather than accountability. These photostatic copies, originally microfilmed by the British Air Ministry in 1945, were the raw materials for Operation Paperclip, the program that spirited Nazi scientists and technicians to the United States. The Americans and British did not want the records of the slave labor; they wanted the records of the jet engines.
By focusing on the "technical supervision" and "research and development" and ignoring the screams in the tunnels, the architects of the post-war order ensured that the men who built the Me 262 could be rebranded as assets. The still-withheld pages and the "brief summaries" protect the legacy of men like Erhard Milch, transforming a general who oversaw a slave-labor empire into a mere technician of the air. The cost of this curation was the erasure of the prisoners who died in the dark, their lives treated as a rounding error in the production schedule of a failed empire.