DOUBTFUL HONOUR

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 December 1937, Page 3

DOUBTFUL HONOUR

GENERAL BECOMES ARYAN Lieutenant-Gerieral Erhard Milch; brain’s of moderix Germany’s military and civilian aviation, is. first aide and sole confidant ill aeronahutics of General Hermann Goering, who is supreme head of all the. aviation forces, says the “American Hebrew.” However, some enterprising member- of the Gestapo-discovered' one day that General Milch stems from mixed parents': that his father was a Jew;. Immediately thereupon machinery was set in motion to oust Milch from his highly responsible position. But Goering—partly] because Milch is his right-hand and thus indispensable, partly because udder the’ circumstances he has no fear Of being eclipsed by his brilliant subordinate —consistently refused to part with Milch. Again and again he withstood the wrath "of rival Nazi leaders like Goebbels, Himmler, Frick, and others of the inner circle. Apparently ,even Hitler recognised that, though of Jewish paternity, Milch was too valuable a man to be dropped.

Yet there remained the problem of appeasing those rabid members of the ruling clique that see red at the sight of the word Jevt. A. solution had to be found —and a. solution was found. Pressure was brought to bear upon General Milch’s mother, who was confronted with, one or two • alternatives: either to suffer personal humiliation or to see her son incarcerated in a concentration camp. As a true and heroic mother, she chose the former. The. other day an inconspic.uous item, appearing in two official Nazi newspapers (“Voelkischer Beobachter” and “Schwartze Korps”) bluntly reported: . “General Erhard Milch, of the Aviation Corps, has submitted to the proper authorities a sworn and certified statement by his mother, declaring that he is not the son of Milcli, the Jew. She vows that General Milch was conceived and born out of wedlock, being'the son of an unnamed Aryan man.” - - - Thus a mother’s prostrate honour wipes away’ one stigma and begets another.