What Happened to Germany’s Top Luftwaffe Field Marshals After World War II?
In the spring of 1945, the men who had once commanded one of the most feared air forces on Earth were discovering something terrifying.
There was nowhere left to fly.
Airfields had been cratered. Fuel depots were empty. Factories had been smashed. Pilots who once crossed Europe behind formations of hundreds of aircraft were hiding in forests, hospitals, mountain villages, and collapsing headquarters.
And the men at the top—the field marshals whose signatures had moved aircraft, men, bombs, and entire air fleets across continents—were suddenly facing a question no Luftwaffe operations map had ever prepared them for:
What happens when the war ends…and the victors come looking for you?
Only a few years earlier, their uniforms had been covered in medals.
They had stood beside Adolf Hitler.
They had commanded forces over Britain, France, Italy, North Africa, Spain, Russia, and the Balkans.
Their names appeared in military dispatches. Their orders sent thousands of aircraft into the sky. Some had become symbols of German military power long before the catastrophe of 1945.
Then the Third Reich collapsed.
And from that moment forward, their stories went in completely different directions.
One would be sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars—then walk free years later.
One would face a major war-crimes tribunal and be acquitted.
One would hear a death sentence pronounced against him, only to survive and eventually become a public figure among German veterans.
One would die in American captivity before a courtroom could ever decide his responsibility.
One would receive the highest promotion of his career when Germany was already virtually defeated—and kill himself less than a month later.
And the most famous of them all, Hermann Göring, would sit in the defendant’s dock at Nuremberg, hear judges condemn him to death…and deny the executioner his final moment.
The astonishing part is that these were not six obscure officers swept up in the confusion of surrender.
They represented the summit of Luftwaffe power.
Technically, by the final years of the Third Reich, Göring stood above the rank of Generalfeldmarschall. Hitler had promoted him to the unique title of Reichsmarschall in July 1940. Below him, the Luftwaffe’s field-marshal class included men such as Erhard Milch, Albert Kesselring, Hugo Sperrle, Wolfram von Richthofen, and—during the final days—Robert Ritter von Greim.
Six careers.
Six endings.
And almost none of them ended the way anyone might have predicted when German aircraft dominated European skies in 1940.
In 1940, men like these appeared almost untouchable.
Germany had crushed Poland.
Denmark and Norway had fallen.
The Netherlands and Belgium had been overrun.
France—regarded before the war as one of Europe’s great military powers—had collapsed with shocking speed.
Newsreel cameras captured German generals accepting decorations and promotions as Hitler celebrated victories that seemed to confirm the myth of an unstoppable German war machine.
On July 19, 1940, following the defeat of France, Hitler carried out a spectacular round of promotions.
Among the Luftwaffe officers elevated to field-marshal rank were Erhard Milch, Albert Kesselring, and Hugo Sperrle.
At the same ceremony, Hermann Göring rose even higher.
Hitler created the position of Reichsmarschall specifically for him.
It placed Göring symbolically above Germany’s other field marshals.
For a moment, the hierarchy seemed permanent.
It wasn’t.
Five years later, Hitler was dead.
Berlin was occupied.
The Luftwaffe barely existed as an organized fighting force.
And its senior commanders were no longer asking where their next offensive would begin.
They were wondering which Allied army would capture them first.
For Wolfram von Richthofen, however, the end arrived differently.
He was already losing a battle no army could fight for him.
Richthofen belonged to a famous military family. He was a cousin of Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary First World War fighter pilot remembered as the “Red Baron.”
But Wolfram’s own career was formidable.
He served with the German Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War and became closely connected to the development of Luftwaffe air-ground tactics that Germany would use with devastating effect during the opening years of World War II.
His name is also inseparable from one of the most notorious episodes of the Spanish conflict: the bombing of Guernica.
The surviving wartime diary material preserved by Germany’s Federal Archives is chillingly significant. Richthofen’s own records described the destruction of Guernica in stark terms after the attack.
During World War II, his career continued upward.
He commanded major Luftwaffe formations on the Eastern Front and elsewhere and was promoted to Generalfeldmarschall in 1943.
But by 1944, while Nazi Germany was being squeezed from east and west, Richthofen was facing his own private collapse.
He developed severe headaches and exhaustion.
Doctors discovered a brain tumor.
Surgery followed.
The war continued without him.
By the time Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Richthofen was in a hospital at Bad Ischl in Austria.
American forces took control of the facility.
The once-powerful field marshal became a prisoner.
And then came the first strange ending in the story of the Luftwaffe elite:
There would be no dramatic trial.
No defense attorney.
No verdict.
No prison sentence.
Richthofen’s illness had already decided the outcome.
On July 12, 1945—barely two months after the German surrender—Wolfram von Richthofen died.
The Bundesarchiv confirms the date. Other biographical accounts record that the hospital had passed into American hands and that he died there as a prisoner of war.
A man whose career had stretched from the experiments of the Condor Legion to enormous air operations on the Eastern Front was gone before postwar prosecutors could fully examine what responsibility he might have faced.
For some, the reckoning after 1945 would last years.
For Richthofen, it never truly began.
But another Luftwaffe field marshal would survive Germany’s surrender by only sixteen days.
And his story was even stranger.
Robert Ritter von Greim spent almost the entire war outside the spotlight occupied by Göring, Kesselring, or Milch.
Then, in April 1945, with Hitler trapped beneath Berlin and Soviet troops closing around the center of the city, Greim suddenly received the promotion of his life.
It happened when promotions had become almost meaningless.
Hermann Göring had sent a message to Hitler asking whether, under the succession arrangements previously established, he should assume leadership if Hitler had lost freedom of action.
Hitler erupted.
Göring was accused of betrayal and stripped of his offices.
The man who had commanded the Luftwaffe since its creation was finished.
Hitler now needed someone else.
Greim was ordered into Berlin.
The journey itself bordered on suicidal.
He traveled with famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch while Soviet forces were tightening their grip on the capital.
During the approach, Greim was wounded in the foot by enemy fire.
Yet he reached Hitler.
Inside the ruined capital, at a moment when Germany had virtually no functioning strategic air power left, Hitler promoted Greim to Generalfeldmarschall and made him commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe.
Think about the absurdity of that moment.
The rank was prestigious.
The title was enormous.
The organization behind it was disintegrating.
Greim had become the commander of an air force whose bases were being captured, whose aircraft lacked fuel, whose command structure was collapsing, and whose country would surrender within days.
It was one of the last great promotions issued by Hitler.
And instead of opening a glorious new chapter, it effectively became Greim’s death warrant.
Greim and Reitsch escaped Berlin shortly before the capital fell.
Hitler killed himself on April 30.
Germany surrendered on May 8.
Greim entered American custody.
He was wounded, defeated, and now possessed a title that made him exceptionally important to Allied interrogators.
Then Greim learned that he could be transferred to Soviet custody.
On May 24, 1945, in Salzburg, Robert Ritter von Greim took poison and killed himself.
He had been commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe for less than a month.
A promotion meant to crown his career became the final episode of it. Accounts of his last weeks record his arrival in Hitler’s bunker, appointment to replace Göring, American detention, and suicide on May 24.
That was fate number two.
No trial.
No acquittal.
No prison.
Only a title bestowed upon a dying military organization—and poison before the victorious powers could decide what to do with him.
But while Richthofen and Greim never reached a postwar courtroom, Hugo Sperrle did.
And what happened there would surprise anyone who assumes every senior German commander captured in 1945 was automatically convicted.
Sperrle looked every inch like the old-school German field marshal.
Massive in physical appearance and unmistakable in photographs, he had commanded German air forces in the Spanish Civil War and later headed Luftflotte 3, the Luftwaffe formation responsible for operations against western Europe.
His forces fought during the Battle of Britain.
They participated in bombing operations against Britain.
Later, from bases in occupied France, they confronted the growing Allied air offensive.
But by 1944 the balance of power had reversed.
The Allies were not merely resisting the Luftwaffe anymore.
They were overwhelming it.
When American, British, and Canadian forces landed in Normandy on June 6, Allied aircraft dominated the skies over the battlefield.
German commanders faced a problem they had inflicted on other armies earlier in the war: trying to move men and equipment while enemy aircraft watched the roads.
Hitler eventually removed Sperrle from command in August 1944.
A year later, the Reich itself was gone.
Sperrle was arrested.
And unlike Richthofen or Greim, he lived long enough to stand before judges.
He became one of fourteen defendants in what became known as the High Command Trial, one of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.
The accusations against the defendants involved major questions about the conduct of German commanders during the war, including alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
To a casual observer, Sperrle’s future might have appeared obvious.
He had held one of the highest ranks in Hitler’s armed forces.
His career connected him to Germany’s wars in Spain and western Europe.
He had served the regime at the highest military level.
Yet a courtroom is not supposed to ask only whether a defendant served a criminal government.
It asks whether the prosecution proved the specific charges against that individual.
And here came the twist.
The tribunal acquitted Hugo Sperrle.
Completely.
The Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project records the result simply: “Sperrle: acquitted.”
Imagine the moment from the perspective of the courtroom.
Around Sperrle sat other commanders.
Several would receive prison sentences.
The proceedings had examined a command structure associated with a war that had devastated Europe.
Yet when Sperrle’s own legal responsibility was assessed under the charges and evidence before that tribunal, conviction did not follow.
That distinction matters.
An acquittal does not turn an officer’s entire wartime career into moral approval.
It means the tribunal did not find the charges proved to the standard necessary for conviction.
For Sperrle, that difference meant freedom.
He returned to civilian life.
There would be no execution chamber.
No decades behind prison walls.
No spectacular political comeback either.
He lived quietly in West Germany and died in Munich on April 2, 1953.
From commanding one of the largest Luftwaffe air fleets to spending his last years outside the public spotlight, his decline was almost strangely uneventful.
And that may be what makes it so striking.
The Third Reich had promised its senior military figures a place in history.
Sperrle ended up with something far simpler:
An acquittal.
A few quiet postwar years.
And death at sixty-eight.
But the next field marshal was not going to walk away from Nuremberg.
Erhard Milch had spent years near the machinery that made the Luftwaffe possible.
Aircraft do not fight wars merely because pilots are courageous.
Somebody has to produce them.
Somebody has to allocate factories.
Somebody has to coordinate raw materials.
Somebody has to increase output when aircraft are being destroyed faster than they can be replaced.
Milch occupied that world.
As a senior figure in the Reich Aviation Ministry, he became deeply involved in the administrative and industrial system behind German air power.
That made his postwar problem very different from the problem faced by a commander accused of battlefield decisions.
Prosecutors could follow paperwork.
Production targets.
Labor allocation.
Meetings.
Orders.
The vast German war economy had relied heavily on millions of foreign laborers, prisoners, deportees, and forced workers.
And after the war, Milch found himself sitting alone as the defendant in one of Nuremberg’s major subsequent proceedings.
United States v. Erhard Milch.
The trial began in January 1947.
The prosecution accused him on three counts involving forced labor and medical experiments.
The evidence was substantial.
The case lasted weeks.
Dozens of witnesses and hundreds of exhibits were placed before the tribunal.
Milch denied criminal responsibility.
The judges did not accept enough of the prosecution’s case to convict him on everything.
He was acquitted regarding the specific medical-experimentation charge.
But on the forced-labor accusations, the result was devastating.
Milch was convicted.
On April 17, 1947, the judges ordered him to stand.
The sentence was life imprisonment.
The Harvard Nuremberg archive preserves the official proceedings. Its summary records that Milch was convicted over slave labor, acquitted concerning responsibility for the medical experiments charged against him, and sentenced to life.
That sounds like the ending.
It wasn’t.
Because in postwar Germany, sentences written in the late 1940s did not always remain unchanged.
Within a few years, Europe had entered an entirely different geopolitical crisis.
The alliance that defeated Hitler fractured.
The United States, Britain, and France now confronted the Soviet Union.
Germany itself was divided.
West Germany was becoming strategically important to the Western bloc.
Questions about German rearmament, political stabilization, and the integration of the new Federal Republic into Western defense structures changed the atmosphere surrounding many convicted German prisoners.
Clemency reviews followed.
Sentences were reduced.
Prisoners once expected to remain behind bars for decades began returning home.
Milch was one of them.
In 1951, his life sentence was commuted to fifteen years.
Then came another reversal.
He was released in 1954.
The man sentenced in 1947 to spend the rest of his natural life in prison survived until 1972.
He lived for roughly a quarter-century after hearing the words “life imprisonment.”
Biographical records indicate that he later worked as an industrial consultant in West Germany.
That is one of the uncomfortable realities of postwar justice.
The courtroom sentence may sound final.
History is rarely so cooperative.
Governments change.
Priorities change.
Enemies change.
And sometimes prison doors open long before the sentence on the original judgment says they should.
Yet even Milch’s story was not the most dramatic example.
For that, you have to look at Albert Kesselring.
Because Kesselring did not receive life imprisonment.
He received death.
Albert Kesselring had been one of the most versatile high-level commanders in the German armed forces.
He was a Luftwaffe officer, but much of his wartime reputation came from commanding far more than aircraft.
He held senior commands in the Mediterranean theater and later became commander-in-chief of German forces in Italy.
There, Germany fought a brutal defensive campaign as Allied forces pushed northward.
The Italian campaign was not simply a conventional battle between armies.
Behind the front lines, German occupation forces confronted partisan warfare.
Reprisals followed.
Civilians died.
Entire communities experienced violence.
One atrocity became especially infamous.
On March 23, 1944, Italian resistance fighters attacked German police troops in Rome.
The German response was rapid and murderous.
The following day, hundreds of prisoners and civilians were taken to the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.
A total of 335 people were killed.
After the war, investigators turned toward the chain of command.
Kesselring could not disappear behind the argument that he had merely been an air commander.
He had been the senior German commander in the theater.
In 1947, a British military court in Venice placed him on trial.
The first charge concerned his responsibility in connection with the killing of 335 people at the Ardeatine Caves.
The second concerned orders and policies encouraging the killing of Italian civilians in reprisals.
The case ran from February until May.
Then, on May 6, 1947, the judges delivered their decision.
Guilty.
And then the sentence:
Death by shooting.
The United Nations War Crimes Commission’s published law reports record both charges and the proceedings against him. Contemporary Nuremberg records likewise noted that Kesselring had been found guilty over the Ardeatine atrocity and other crimes against Italian civilians.
At that moment, Kesselring appeared to have reached the most final ending possible.
A field marshal who had once commanded armies and air fleets was now a condemned prisoner.
There would be no return to civilian life.
No memoir tour.
No veterans’ meetings.
No old age.
Or so it seemed.
Then came the reversal.
His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The execution never happened.
Later, even the life sentence would not remain intact.
It was reduced again.
And in 1952, only five years after a military court had ordered him shot, Albert Kesselring walked out of prison.
The British government publicly described his release as an act of clemency and pointed to his serious health problems, including a cancer operation.
The decision was discussed in the British Parliament.
Whatever one thinks of the broader politics surrounding postwar clemency, the basic sequence is extraordinary:
1947: sentenced to death.
Then: death sentence commuted.
Then: punishment reduced.
1952: released.
Alive.
Free.
But the story still wasn’t over.
A person might imagine that a convicted former commander released from prison would disappear into private life.
Kesselring did the opposite.
He became active in veterans’ organizations.
He published memoirs.
He publicly argued on behalf of former German soldiers and officers.
He assumed leadership roles in organizations including the reconstituted Stahlhelm veterans’ movement.
Germany’s Historical Museum notes that from 1952 until his death he was active as a leading figure in the organization, and research into his postwar activities documents his advocacy on behalf of former comrades, including imprisoned war criminals.
This is where the story becomes more complicated than a simple tale of crime followed by punishment.
Postwar justice did not occur in a vacuum.
By the early 1950s, West Germany was increasingly central to Western strategy in the Cold War.
Debates over rearmament intensified.
Veterans’ organizations gained political significance.
Campaigns for clemency grew.
Former officers who had only recently been prisoners became participants in arguments about Germany’s military future.
A man condemned to death in 1947 was, within a few years, publicly speaking again.
Kesselring died in 1960.
He had lived thirteen years after his death sentence.
And if that already seems like the ultimate reversal, the final man in this story had one more shock left for the world.
Hermann Göring had been more than a field marshal.
He had been one of the central pillars of Hitler’s regime.
A decorated First World War fighter pilot, early Nazi Party member, political operator, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, head of major economic programs, and for years Hitler’s designated successor, Göring accumulated offices on a scale few men in Nazi Germany could match.
He was not merely associated with German military aggression.
He was deeply embedded in the political system that made it possible.
He played a major role in Nazi persecution and economic plunder.
In July 1941, Göring authorized Reinhard Heydrich to prepare the organizational groundwork connected to what became the “Final Solution.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes him as, for a time, the second most powerful official in Nazi Germany and documents his role in persecution, plunder, aggressive war, and the regime’s anti-Jewish policies.
But even Göring experienced the same pattern that swallowed nearly every other Nazi leader:
Power first.
Humiliation later.
The Battle of Britain damaged his reputation.
Allied bombing made his promises to protect Germany look increasingly hollow.
As the war deteriorated, Hitler’s trust in him weakened.
By 1945, the huge Luftwaffe Göring had built was being destroyed in the air, on the ground, and in its factories.
Then came April 23.
Hitler was trapped in Berlin.
Göring, outside the capital, sent a telegram asking whether he should assume leadership under the succession arrangements if Hitler had lost freedom of action.
The reaction from inside the bunker was explosive.
Hitler accused him of betrayal.
Göring was stripped of his positions.
The man once presented as Hitler’s successor suddenly became an enemy in the eyes of the regime he had helped create.
On May 7, 1945, Göring surrendered to American forces.
His uniforms, decorations, titles, estates, art collection, and political status meant nothing now.
The Allies had plans for him.
Nuremberg.
When the International Military Tribunal opened in November 1945, Göring became the most prominent defendant in the courtroom.
Photographs from the trial are among the defining images of the postwar era.
The surviving leaders of Hitler’s regime sat in rows while prosecutors presented documents, films, testimony, orders, correspondence, and administrative records.
Göring fought back intellectually.
He defended himself aggressively.
He attempted to justify the regime.
He tried to dominate the atmosphere among the defendants.
But this time he was not speaking from the Air Ministry or a command headquarters.
Judges controlled the room.
And the documents followed him everywhere.
The tribunal found Göring guilty on all four counts brought against him: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
On October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to death by hanging.
His execution was scheduled for October 16.
For the Allies, hanging carried enormous symbolic meaning.
The former Reichsmarschall would not receive a soldier’s death before a firing squad.
He would be executed as a convicted criminal.
Göring objected to hanging.
It appeared to make no difference.
By October 15, guards were preparing for the executions.
Nuremberg prison was under tight security.
The condemned men were watched.
Everything seemed settled.
But sometime that evening, Göring still possessed one final weapon.
Not an aircraft.
Not a pistol.
Not an army.
A small capsule.
Cyanide.
Hours before he was supposed to be led to the gallows, Hermann Göring swallowed poison.
Guards found him dead in his cell.
The most powerful surviving member of Hitler’s inner circle had escaped the executioner.
Not the verdict.
Not the historical record.
Not conviction.
But the physical act of hanging.
When the gallows were used on October 16, Göring was not there.
Ten other condemned Nazi leaders were executed.
Göring’s body was later cremated along with those of the executed men, and the ashes were disposed of so that no grave could become a shrine.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum records that Göring committed suicide by cyanide on the night before his scheduled execution.
And suddenly the final pattern becomes visible.
Look again at the men who had occupied the summit of German air power.
Wolfram von Richthofen.
Dead from illness in American captivity before any postwar trial could determine his legal responsibility.
Robert Ritter von Greim.
Promoted while Berlin was collapsing, commander of the Luftwaffe for only days, then dead by suicide shortly after capture.
Hugo Sperrle.
Indicted at Nuremberg—and acquitted.
Erhard Milch.
Convicted for his involvement in forced labor, sentenced to life, sentence reduced, released in 1954, lived until 1972.
Albert Kesselring.
Convicted by a British military court, sentenced to death, sentence commuted, eventually released, then active in veterans’ organizations until his death in 1960.
Hermann Göring.
The most powerful of them all.
Convicted on every count at the International Military Tribunal, sentenced to hang, dead from cyanide hours before the execution.
There is no neat ending here.
And perhaps that is the real story.
People often imagine the end of World War II in Europe as a clean line.
May 8, 1945.
Germany surrenders.
The war ends.
The guilty are punished.
Europe moves on.
Reality was far messier.
Some defendants were executed.
Some received prison sentences.
Some had sentences reduced.
Some were released early.
Some were acquitted because prosecutors failed to establish individual criminal responsibility under the charges before the court.
Some never faced trial at all.
And as the Cold War intensified, the priorities of the victorious Allies began changing faster than many survivors of Nazi occupation could have imagined.
The former enemy, West Germany, was becoming a potential strategic partner.
Questions of punishment began colliding with questions of reconstruction, anti-communism, rearmament, sovereignty, and political stability.
That did not erase the crimes.
It changed what happened to some of the people convicted of participating in them.
The contrast was enormous.
At the end of the 1940s, a field marshal might be sitting behind bars under a sentence that appeared permanent.
By the middle of the 1950s, he might be home.
That history can feel deeply unsatisfying because justice itself was uneven.
There was no single fate reserved for those who had served at the highest levels of Hitler’s military establishment.
Rank alone did not determine a verdict.
Neither did notoriety.
Courts examined particular charges and evidence.
Different Allied powers operated different tribunals.
Clemency decisions later altered punishments.
Illness intervened.
Suicide intervened.
Politics intervened.
Death intervened.
And the result was a collection of endings almost impossible to invent.
One of the Luftwaffe’s most senior men died in a hospital bed.
Another entered Hitler’s bunker for a promotion and was dead weeks later.
Another walked out of Nuremberg acquitted.
Another heard “life imprisonment” and lived free for almost two decades afterward.
Another was condemned to death and later became a veterans’ leader.
And the man who once stood above all of them died alone in a prison cell with cyanide in his body while the execution chamber waited.
But there is one final detail worth remembering.
These stories should never become merely stories about defeated generals.
The ranks, uniforms, medals, trials, prisons, and dramatic endings can easily dominate the narrative because famous men leave enormous paper trails.
Behind those files were millions of people who did not receive memoir deals, veterans’ platforms, clemency hearings, or lengthy debates about their reputations.
Forced laborers whose exploitation became evidence in the Milch trial.
The 335 victims murdered at the Ardeatine Caves.
Communities struck during occupation and anti-partisan reprisals.
Victims of Nazi persecution and mass murder.
Civilians beneath bombing campaigns.
Prisoners who never returned home.
For them, the collapse of the Luftwaffe’s leadership was not a fascinating reversal of fortune.
It came far too late.
That is why the fate of these commanders matters.
Not because powerful men falling from power is automatically justice.
But because their endings reveal how complicated justice became after the shooting stopped.
Some verdicts were final.
Others were rewritten by clemency.
Some accused men were acquitted.
Some convicted men returned to public life.
And some ensured that no court or executioner would ever get the last word.
In 1940, these men could look at a map of Europe and see German power expanding in almost every direction.
Five years later, some were prisoners.
Some were dying.
Some were waiting for judges.
One had already killed himself.
And Göring—the man who had once been elevated above every other German field marshal—was eventually reduced to one final possession small enough to hide inside a prison cell.
A capsule of poison.
The Luftwaffe had once promised Nazi Germany mastery of the skies.
In the end, its most powerful commanders could not escape the ground beneath their own feet.
And perhaps that is the part history makes impossible to forget: power can look permanent right up until the moment the doors close, the uniforms lose their meaning, and the people who once gave orders are finally forced to answer for where those orders led.
