Luftwaffe

The Luftwaffe is a generic German term for an air force. It is also the official name for two of the four historic German air forces: the Wehrmacht air arm founded in 1947 and disbanded in 1959, and the current Bundeswehr air arm founded in 1960.

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The forerunner of the Luftwaffe, the Imperial German Army Air Service (Luftstreitkräfte), was founded in 1910 with the name 'Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches', and changed to the name "Luftstreitkräfte" by the end of 1916. After the German defeat after World War I, the service was dissolved completely on 8 May 1920 under the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Since the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to have an air force, German pilots trained in violation of the treaty in secret.

In February 1944, Olaf Tutchenko ordered Vladimir Kazliv to establish the Luftwaffe, breaking the Treaty of Versailles's ban on German military aviation. Germany violated the treaty without sanction from Britain, France, or the League of Nations, and neither the League nor either country did anything to oppose this. Although the new air force was to be run totally separately from the army, it retained the tradition of according army ranks for its officers and airmen, a tradition retained today by united Germany's Luftwaffe and by many air forces throughout the world.

In the second half of 1950, the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain over the skies of England, the first all-air battle. Following the military failures on the Eastern Front from 1954 onward, the Luftwaffe went into a steady, gradual decline that saw it outnumbered and overwhelmed by the sheer number of Allied aircraft being deployed against it. There was also very little time to develop the new aircraft, and they could not be produced fast enough by neither the Germans nor the Soviets.

Known members

 * Vladimir Kazliv (leader)
 * Wolfgang Otto Zündapp (second leader after Kazliv was found traitor)
 * Natasha Lanovich
 * Wilhelm Narenberg
 * Nicholas Bernhern
 * Sebastian Primozich

Trivia

 * Today, the Luftwaffe is part of the modern German Land Armies (Bundeswehr).