The suicide of Ernst Udet

On 17 November 1941 Colonel General Ernst Udet shot himself in his Berlin villa. He was Director-General of Air Equipment (Generalluftzeugmeister), the man responsible for the development, production and supply of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft and equipment. He was 45 years old. He had been one of the most famous Germans of his generation: after Manfred von Richthofen, the most successful German fighter ace of the First World War, and later a star of air shows and films. The regime concealed the truth. The press reported that the general had died of severe injuries sustained while testing a new weapon, and Adolf Hitler ordered a state funeral. It is usually said that Udet took his own life because he felt unable to carry out his task properly. That is only partly true. His death was the result of a combination of causes: the real failures of the German aircraft industry, for which he bore much of the responsibility, but also the power struggles within the Luftwaffe leadership, in which Hermann Göring made him a scapegoat, and the collapse in health of a man who had for years abused alcohol and stimulants.

An ace in office

Udet was neither an engineer nor an administrator. In the 1920s and early 1930s he made his living from aerobatics, films and advertising, and led a hard-drinking, extravagant life. Göring, his commanding officer in the last months of the First World War, drew him into the Nazi Party in 1933 and into the military air force then being secretly rebuilt. Udet was an enthusiast for the dive bomber, which he had encountered in the United States, and it was he who pushed through the further development of the Junkers Ju 87 when, in June 1936, Wolfram von Richthofen wanted to halt it. In the same month, after the death of Walther Wever and a reorganisation of the ministry, he took charge of the Technical Office of the Reich Air Ministry. On 1 February 1939 Göring made him Director-General of Air Equipment. From then on he had under him 26 departments and some 4,000 officers, officials and engineers responsible for the design, testing, ordering, production and delivery of everything the air force needed.

Udet’s biographer in the German national biographical dictionary (Neue Deutsche Biographie) judges that, lacking technical training and organisational ability, Udet “barely” coped with the task. Formally he was subordinate to the ministry’s state secretary, Erhard Milch, an efficient organiser and former head of Lufthansa, with whom he was a rival from the outset. Göring, who did not trust Milch, preferred to deal with Udet directly, which encouraged both men to intrigue. As long as the Luftwaffe was winning, the weaknesses of this arrangement remained hidden. The dive bombers associated with Udet became a symbol of the Blitzkrieg in Poland, where Ju 87s razed Wieluń, and in France. In July 1940 Udet received the Knight’s Cross and promotion to colonel general.

The aircraft that never came

The Battle of Britain showed that the Luftwaffe lacked the equipment for a long air war. It had no heavy bombers or long-range fighters, and the aircraft meant to replace the types of the mid-1930s were still not ready. This was to a large extent the legacy of decisions taken by the Technical Office. Udet, convinced of the superiority of dive bombing, demanded that almost every new bomber be capable of diving attacks. The Junkers Ju 88 medium bomber, after the modifications intended to adapt it for diving, became considerably heavier and slower, and its production was delayed. In 1937 the requirement for dive attacks was also imposed on the Heinkel He 177 heavy bomber. Ernst Heinkel warned at once that so large an aircraft would never manage it. These demands, combined with an unreliable arrangement of coupled engines, meant that in 1941 the He 177 was still far from combat-ready. The Messerschmitt Me 210, successor to the Bf 110 heavy fighter, was ordered in a batch of a thousand before the first prototype had even flown. It proved unstable and dangerous, yet at the beginning of 1941 it was put into series production. The factories carried out one modification after another, and the front-line units received no aircraft.

Not everything failed. In the summer of 1941 the modern Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter, superior to the Spitfires of the day, went into action over the English Channel. The overall balance, however, was poor. According to figures compiled by the British historian Richard Overy, in 1941 Germany produced some 11,800 aircraft, Britain more than 20,000, the Soviet Union nearly 16,000 and the United States, not yet at war, more than 26,000. German output barely grew throughout the year. There were many reasons: shortages of aluminium and other raw materials, effort scattered across dozens of types and variants, constant changes to orders, and the fact that industry was still working on a peacetime footing in the expectation of quick victories. Göring and Hitler, however, were looking for someone to blame, and Udet was the easiest target.

The last months

The attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 made Udet’s position worse. The Luftwaffe was now fighting in the east, over the Mediterranean and in the west, and aircraft losses were rising faster than deliveries. In the summer Göring instructed Milch to prepare a programme for a rapid expansion of the air force which, according to some studies, envisaged as much as a fourfold increase in the Luftwaffe’s combat strength within a few years, and gave him sweeping powers over industry. Udet resisted the reorganisation of his office, but in the autumn Göring sided with Milch. Udet’s closest associates, among them his chief of staff, Generalmajor August Ploch, were removed, and Milch increasingly took control of orders and production. Udet was losing his freedom of action and the confidence of a superior he had known for more than twenty years.

He had also long been ill. He drank a great deal of cognac, smoked and, according to German literature, took Pervitin, a stimulant issued to soldiers in the Wehrmacht. Ernst Heinkel recalled that as early as the autumn of 1940 Udet was bloated and sallow and gave the impression of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He drew biting caricatures of his superiors and of himself, among them one of an airman chained to a desk in the ministry. In the autumn of 1941 he was on sick leave. According to some biographers, Ploch, who visited him at that time, told him about the mass murder of Jews and others in the occupied east; it is impossible, however, to establish what part this conversation played in his decision.

17 November

On 17 November 1941, after another night of drinking, Udet telephoned his companion, Inge Bleyle, and during the conversation shot himself in the head. On the headboard of his bed he left words written in red pencil and addressed to Göring, who among former airmen was known as “der Eiserne” (“the Iron One”). Their content is known only from later, differing accounts: according to one version they read “Iron One, you have deserted me”, according to others “Iron One, you lied to me” or “Iron One, you are to blame for my death”. According to some accounts, in his farewell notes he also blamed Milch. Ernst Heinkel, who knew him well, later named as the “objective” reasons for his decision the failure of the Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, in which the Luftwaffe was bleeding itself white, and the prospect of “streams of American aircraft”.

The Reich leadership decided that the truth must not come out. The suicide of a celebrated airman and one of the Luftwaffe’s most senior generals at a moment when the German armies had stalled before Moscow, and the November offensive against the Soviet capital was only just beginning, would have been a blow to propaganda. The official announcement therefore stated that Udet had died of severe injuries sustained while testing a new weapon. A state funeral was held on 21 November. After a ceremony in the ministry building the cortège passed through Berlin to the Invalids’ Cemetery, where Udet was buried beside Manfred von Richthofen. Behind the gun carriage bearing the coffin walked Göring, who delivered the funeral oration and, according to witnesses, wept. According to accounts cited by historians, however, he later said that Udet had reduced the whole aircraft programme to chaos and that, had he lived, he would have had to tell him that he was responsible for the destruction of the Luftwaffe.

Udet’s death was followed by a series of further tragedies. On 20 November, on his way to the funeral, General der Flieger Helmuth Wilberg, one of the architects of Luftwaffe doctrine, was killed in an air crash near Dresden. On 22 November the most famous German fighter pilot of the day, the Inspector of Fighters, Colonel Werner Mölders, was killed on his way from the Crimea to Berlin, where he had been summoned for the funeral ceremonies. The He 111 bomber in which he was travelling as a passenger lost both engines on its approach to land at Breslau (Wrocław) and crashed. Mölders was laid to rest in the Invalids’ Cemetery beside Udet. He was succeeded by Adolf Galland. Udet’s name was given to Jagdgeschwader 3 (JG 3) and to the airfield of the Luftwaffe test range near Tarnowskie Góry, which the Germans called Udetfeld; it is today’s Katowice Airport at Pyrzowice.

Place in the war

Udet was succeeded as Director-General of Air Equipment by Milch, who held the post until the summer of 1944. He began by putting in order what he had inherited. In the spring of 1942 he halted production of the Me 210, of which only a few dozen had been delivered to units, while hundreds of unfinished airframes went into storage. He reduced the number of types in production, forced the manufacturers to co-operate and centralised supply, and from 1942 he worked with the armaments minister, Albert Speer. German aircraft production began to rise and peaked in 1944, but by then it was too late. In December 1941 the United States entered the war, and the Allies’ material superiority could not be overcome. The Luftwaffe never obtained a heavy bomber to match those of the Allies, and the He 177 remained an unreliable aircraft. For the rest of the war Göring blamed Udet for the air force’s troubles, although according to many historians he himself had for years concealed them from Hitler. After the war Milch was sentenced to life imprisonment in one of the Nuremberg trials and was released in 1954.

The truth about Udet’s death was known in Luftwaffe circles, and after the war it became common knowledge. His friend from the First World War, the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who had fled the Nazis to the United States, wrote there the play The Devil’s General (Des Teufels General), first staged in Zurich in December 1946. Its hero, General der Flieger Harras, a charming airman who sold himself to the regime for the sake of flying and in the end came to understand it, was modelled on Udet. The play became one of the most frequently performed in post-war West Germany, and in 1955 Helmut Käutner brought it to the screen with Curd Jürgens in the title role. The drama fixed the image of Udet as a tragic idealist and of his death as a gesture of defiance. Historians treat this image with reserve: the author of his entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that Udet’s suicide was certainly not an act of resistance. Udet had willingly enjoyed the regime’s favour, had for years helped to build its air force and had let himself be used by its propaganda. His death was above all the personal defeat of a man placed in a post he could not cope with, in a system that rewarded loyalty and personal intrigue rather than competence. At the same time it exposed a serious crisis in German aviation at the very moment when the war in the east, contrary to all predictions, was ceasing to be a Blitzkrieg.