The founding of the Luftwaffe

On 15 May 1933 the Luftschutzamt, or Air Defence Office – which under this innocuous name brought together, within the Reichswehr Ministry, the secret air staffs of the army and the navy – was transferred to the new Reich Air Ministry headed by Hermann Göring. From then on all German aviation – military, civil and sporting – came under one office and one man. This day is regarded as the birth date of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, whose existence the Treaty of Versailles prohibited. Popular summaries speak of the “official creation” of the Luftwaffe. This needs qualifying. Nothing was announced in May 1933. Military aviation was built up in secret, under the cover of government offices, sporting associations and airlines, and Germany did not officially reveal its existence until March 1935. 15 May 1933 is an organisational date, later recognised by the Luftwaffe itself as its birthday, not the day on which the world learned of Hitler’s new weapon.

Aviation banned by Versailles

Article 198 of the Treaty of Versailles laid down that Germany could have no military or naval air forces. Aircraft and aero-engines had to be surrendered to the victors or destroyed, and for several years even the construction of civil aircraft was restricted. In 1918 Germany had possessed one of the strongest air forces in the world, and the ban struck at men who saw flying as the future of war.

The head of the Army Command, General Hans von Seeckt, had no intention of accepting this. He kept a group of some 180 officers with flying experience in the 100,000-strong Reichswehr, scattered among various staffs, and within the camouflaged general staff, the Truppenamt, a small aviation cell operated under Helmuth Wilberg. Most important, however, was training abroad. As part of secret cooperation with Soviet Russia, a German flying school operated at Lipetsk from the mid-1920s; according to various studies, some two hundred or more pilots and observers were trained or given further training there, and new aircraft were tested. In Germany itself, after the restrictions on civil aviation were lifted in 1926, the airline Deutsche Luft Hansa, gliding clubs and the aircraft works of Junkers, Heinkel, Dornier and Arado flourished. Many of these civil aircraft were designed so that they could easily be converted to military use.

Göring, Milch and the new ministry

After Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Göring, the last commander of the Richthofen fighter wing, was made Reich Commissioner for Aviation in the new government. A decree of President Paul von Hindenburg of 2 February 1933 transferred to him the aviation powers of the Ministries of Transport and the Interior. His deputy, and from February State Secretary, was Erhard Milch, until then a director of Luft Hansa and an able organiser, who in practice built the new air force while Göring was busy with the Prussian police, the Gestapo and the fight against political opponents.

At the end of April 1933 – on 27 April, according to archival studies by the German Federal Archives – the commissariat was converted into the Reich Air Ministry (Reichsluftfahrtministerium, RLM), and on 5 May Göring formally became minister. The military made concessions reluctantly, but it made them. The Reichswehr Minister, General Werner von Blomberg, who wanted an independent air force, agreed that aviation should leave the army’s control. On 1 April 1933 the scattered air staffs of the army and navy were merged into the Luftschutzamt, and on 15 May the whole office passed to Göring’s ministry. On 1 September 1933 it was renamed the Luftkommandoamt, the Air Command Office. Its head was Colonel Walther Wever, one of the Reichswehr’s ablest staff officers, who learned to fly in his forties and later became the first chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff.

The new ministry acted without scruple. One of its first decisions was to take over the works and patents of Hugo Junkers, an aviation pioneer and opponent of the Nazis, who was forced to give up his company and was pushed out of it. The works at Dessau became one of the pillars of air rearmament.

An air force in disguise

For almost two years the Luftwaffe existed although officially it did not. At the end of March 1933 all sporting aviation organisations were merged into the German Air Sports Association (Deutscher Luftsportverband), headed by Göring’s friend, the First World War fighter ace Bruno Loerzer. Its members wore the uniforms of the future Luftwaffe, and the training of future military pilots began on gliders and light aircraft. Candidates from the army formally left the Reichswehr so that Germany could claim it was abiding by the treaty. Further training was provided by commercial pilot schools, and Luft Hansa pilots took short military courses. In the autumn of 1933 the school at Lipetsk was closed, because Hitler, an enemy of Bolshevism, no longer wanted cooperation with the Red Army, and Germany could in any case now train its airmen at home.

At the same time production began. The manufacturers received orders for hundreds, then thousands, of aircraft – at first mainly trainers and interim combat types, such as the Junkers Ju 52 transport converted into a bomber. Airfields were built as civil ones. According to German studies, by the end of 1934 there were already several dozen air units in Germany camouflaged as civilian organisations, including bomber, fighter and reconnaissance squadrons. At first the air force leadership deliberately built a so-called “risk Luftwaffe”: a force made up largely of obsolete aircraft, whose only purpose was to deter France and Poland from a preventive war during the period when German rearmament was at its weakest yet could no longer be fully concealed.

The secrecy was, in any case, relative. Foreign intelligence services knew a good deal about German air rearmament, and in Britain Winston Churchill warned in the House of Commons from 1934 onwards that Germany would soon catch up with British air power. In October 1933 Germany left the League of Nations and walked out of the Disarmament Conference, showing that Hitler had no intention of accepting any arms control.

Unveiling in 1935

On 26 February 1935 Hitler signed a secret decree establishing the Luftwaffe as the third branch of the armed forces, alongside the army and the navy, with effect from 1 March 1935. Göring became its commander-in-chief while remaining minister. Around 10 March 1935, in an interview with a correspondent of the British Daily Mail, he announced that Germany had a military air force and insisted that it served purely for defence. Six days later, on 16 March, Hitler announced the reintroduction of universal military service and the building of an army of 36 divisions. By a law of 21 May 1935 the Reichswehr was renamed the Wehrmacht. At the end of March, during the British Foreign Secretary’s visit to Berlin, Hitler declared that his air force had already reached parity with Britain’s. This was an exaggeration, but it made a great impression in London, and from then on fear of German bombers was a constant presence in British policy towards Hitler.

The powers protested but did nothing more. Britain, France and Italy condemned the breach of the treaty at the Stresa conference in April 1935, and two months later the British concluded a naval agreement with Hitler. The secret rearmament of 1933–1935 had thus paid off: by the time the world learned of the Luftwaffe, it was too late to disband it without war.

Significance

The Luftwaffe was the most Nazi of the Third Reich’s armed services. Its chief was the second man in party and state, and a large part of its cadre came from party organisations and sporting aviation rather than from the traditional officer corps. It grew at a dizzying pace. In the summer of 1939, according to German figures, it numbered some 373,000 men and several thousand combat aircraft, among them modern Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17 bombers and Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers. It gained combat experience in Spain, where its Condor Legion supported General Franco and in April 1937 bombed Guernica.

The threat of air raids was one of Hitler’s strongest arguments in the crises of 1938–1939. On 1 September 1939 German dive bombers destroyed Wieluń, a town of no military significance, and in September the Luftwaffe bombed Warsaw, killing thousands of civilians. In May 1940 it bombed Rotterdam, and in the summer and autumn of that year it lost the Battle of Britain. An organisation that in May 1933 had been an office with a misleading name in a new ministry became, within six years, one of the chief instruments of the war Hitler intended to unleash.