1920s , a type which was operated by Luft Hansa in substantial numbers Deutsche Luft Hansa was founded on 6 January 1926 in
Berlin. The name of the company means "German Hansa of the Air". The Hansa or
Hanseatic League dominated maritime trade in the Baltic Sea area for hundreds of years, and is well regarded in Germany to this day. The airline was created by the merger of
Deutsche Luft-Reederei and
Junkers Luftverkehr in 1926. The two companies, Germany's largest airlines at the time, were forced to merge by the German government, while all other airlines were shut down. This reorganization was intended to reduce the amount of financial support the government provided to the airline industry. Like many other countries, Germany subsidized the airlines, which also gave the German government control over them. The stylised flying
crane symbol predates Luft Hansa and had been used by
DLR and Deutscher Aero Lloyd. It was created by German graphic designer . , named
Brandenburg, at
Stettin Airport (1927). The foundation of the airline coincided with the lifting of restrictions on commercial air operations imposed on Germany by the
Treaty of Versailles. This allowed the route network to be quickly expanded to cover major European cities. The initial fleet consisted of 162 aircraft, nearly all of them outdated
World War I types, and the company had 1,527 staff. The most important airfield for DLH was
Berlin Tempelhof. From there a
Fokker F.II took off on 6 April 1926 for the first scheduled flight to
Zürich via
Halle,
Erfurt and
Stuttgart. In the same year,
Deutsche Luft Hansa acquired a stake in
Deruluft, a joint German-
Soviet airline, and launched non-stop flights from Berlin to
Moscow, which was then regarded as an exceptionally long distance. Shortly after that, flights to
Paris were commenced.
Deutsche Luft Hansa was one of the first airlines to operate night flights, the first of which connected Berlin with
Königsberg using
Junkers G 24 aircraft. This route proved so successful that the night train connection was discontinued some years later. During its first year, the airline operated more than six million flight kilometres, transporting a total of 56,268 passengers and 560 tons of freight and mail. Over the following years, the domestic network grew to cover all the important cities and towns of Germany. More international routes were added through co-operation agreements. With the newly founded
Iberia in
Spain its longest scheduled route was 2,100 kilometres from Berlin to
Madrid (though with several stopovers). The establishment of
Syndicato Condor in
Brazil served the airline's interests in South America where there were important German minorities at that time. The first east–west crossing of the North Atlantic Ocean (from
Baldonnel Aerodrome in
Ireland to
Greenly Island, Canada) was made by the Luft Hansa pilot
Hermann Köhl,
Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld and the Irish pilot
James Fitzmaurice using the
Junkers W 33 aircraft
Bremen in April 1928. The airline launched scheduled multi-leg flights to
Tokyo. A
Heinkel HE 12 aircraft was launched (by
catapult) off the NDL liner
Bremen during her maiden voyage crossing the Atlantic in 1929, shortening the mail delivery time between Europe and North America. Both the Bremen and her sister ship
Europa launched mail planes on their scheduled North Atlantic crossings until 1935.
1930s Even though the early years of the decade saw a difficult financial situation due to the
Great Depression, Deutsche Luft Hansa further expanded its international route network in South America, and launched scheduled flights from Germany to the Middle East. Politically, the company leaders were linked to the rising
Nazi Party; an aircraft was made available to
Adolf Hitler for his campaign for the
1932 presidential election free of any charge. The Nazi party used footage of those flights for their propaganda efforts and gained an advantage in being able to hold events featuring Hitler in different places in far quicker succession than other parties which relied largely on rail transport.
Erhard Milch, who had served as head of the airline since 1926, was appointed by
Hermann Göring to be head of the
Aviation Ministry when Hitler came to power in 1933; Milch had been a member of the Nazi party since 1929, and was later convicted of war crimes. According to a leading scholar of the history of German aviation, from this point, "Lufthansa served as a front organization for armament, which took place secretly until 1935 – it was an air force in disguise." A key interest of Deutsche Luft Hansa at that time was the reduction of mail delivery times. In 1930, the
Eurasia Corporation was established as a
joint-venture with the
Chinese transport ministry, granting Luft Hansa a monopoly position for mail transport between Germany and China, as well as access to the Chinese market. To this end, the
Shanghai-
Nanjing-
Beijing route was launched in the following year using
Junkers W 34 specially deployed there. A record was set in 1930 when the mail route from
Vienna to
Istanbul (with stopovers in
Budapest,
Belgrad and
Sofia) was completed in only 24 hours. By comparison, the first transatlantic passenger flight by the airline (from
Warnemünde to
New York City using a
Dornier Wal flying boat) took roughly one week. After several years of testing, a scheduled postal route between Europe and South America was inaugurated in 1934. This was the first regularly scheduled airline service across an ocean in the world.
Wal flying boats were used, catapult launched for the trans-Atlantic leg These were replaced by the
Dornier Do 18 in 1936 making operations in non-visual conditions possible. The European network saw the introduction of the
Junkers G.38 (at that time the largest passenger aircraft in the world) on the Berlin-
London route via
Amsterdam, as well as the
Junkers Ju 52/3m and
Heinkel He 70, which allowed for faster air travel. This was promoted by so-called "
Blitz Services" (German:
Blitzstrecken) between
Berlin,
Hamburg,
Cologne and
Frankfurt. In 1935, the first aircraft not manufactured in Germany were introduced into the Luft Hansa fleet: two
Boeing 247s and one
Douglas DC-2. The grip on the domestic South American markets was further tightened in 1937, when the
Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Transportes Aéreos (SEDTA) and
Lufthansa Perú were founded as Luft Hansa co-operations in
Ecuador and
Peru respectively, operating
Junkers W 34 aircraft. The Middle Eastern network was expanded with the launch of the Berlin-
Baghdad-
Tehran route in the same year. In 1938 the
Focke-Wulf Fw 200 long range aircraft was introduced making it possible to fly non-stop between Berlin and New York and from Berlin to Tokyo with only one intermediate stopover. This last year prior to the outbreak of
World War II turned out to be the most successful one in the history of the airline, with 19.3 million flight kilometres on the scheduled European routes and a total of 254,713 passengers and 5,288 tons of mail transported. From 1936, Deutsche Luft Hansa carried out route proving flights to carry mail across the North Atlantic. This service was intended to replace the mail planes launched by catapult from trans-Atlantic steamers. However this never materialized, as German planes were denied the right to carry mail into the country by the United States for political reasons. On 1 April 1939, Deutsche Luft Hansa launched scheduled transatlantic flights to
Natal, Rio Grande do Norte and
Santiago de Chile using Fw 200 aircraft, a route which had previously been operated by
Syndicato Condor. With
Bangkok,
Hanoi and
Taipei, further Asian destinations were added to the route network. During the 1930s, Luft Hansa aircraft were deployed on a number of experimental and survey missions, most notably for developing the best airborne crossing of the South Atlantic. During the
German Antarctic Expedition (1938–1939) (
Antarctica expedition), two Dornier Wal aircraft performed a photographic survey of 350,000 square kilometres, an area which became known as
New Swabia.
During World War II With the outbreak of
WWII on 1 September 1939, all civilian flight operations of Luft Hansa came to an end, and the aircraft fleet came under command of the
Luftwaffe, along with most staff. The company focused on aircraft maintenance and repair. There were still scheduled passenger flights within Germany and to occupied or neutral countries, but bookings were restricted and served the demands of warfare. During the later years of the war, most passenger aircraft were converted to military freighters. The Luft Hansa co-operations in foreign countries were gradually dismantled:
Deruluft ceased to exist in March 1940, and by November of that year, the Eurasia Corporation had to be shut down following an intervention by the
Chinese government.
Syndicato Condor was nationalised and renamed
Cruzeiro do Sul in 1943, in an attempt to erase its German roots. The last scheduled flight of Deutsche Luft Hansa – from Berlin to
Munich took place on 21 April 1945, but the aircraft crashed shortly before the planned arrival, killing all 21 aboard. Another (non-scheduled) flight was performed the next day, from Berlin to
Warnemünde, which marked the end of flight operations. Following the surrender of Germany and the ensuing
Allied occupation of Germany, all aircraft in the country were seized and Deutsche Luft Hansa was dissolved. The remaining assets were liquidated on 1 January 1951.
Use of forced labor During World War II, Deutsche Luft Hansa employed more than 10,000 forced laborers, including many children, from occupied countries; forced Jewish labor was particularly used from 1940 to 1942. Forced laborers were used to install and maintain radar systems and to assemble, repair, and maintain aircraft, including military aircraft. Forced laborers were lodged in barracks run by Luft Hansa on the Tempelhof site and elsewhere in Berlin. They were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by authorities with machine guns; sanitation in these camps was poor, as was the level of medical care and nutrition. In 2012, a team of archaeologists excavated the site of the camp run by Luft Hansa on Tempelhof airport.
Legacy preserved by
Lufthansa in the colours of Deutsche Luft Hansa (2000)
Lufthansa, today's German
flag carrier, acquired the name and logo of the 1926–1945 airline upon its foundation in 1953 and claims DLH's history as its own. However, there is no legal link between the two companies. Between 1955 and 1963, the newly founded
East German national airline operated
under the same name but, having lost a lawsuit with the
West German company, it was liquidated and replaced by
Interflug. ==Route network==