“We were proud. We were pampered. We were the guarantors of the future.”
Writing about his experiences many years later, the words of German flying ace Johannes Steinhoff reflect the innate confidence of the Luftwaffe during the early days of the Third Reich. Enraged by Germany’s humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, it was both a burning sense of ambition and entitlement that fuelled the Luftwaffe’s destiny in becoming one of the most formidable air forces the world has ever seen.
Spearheaded by its forceful commander-in-chief, Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe’s rise to notoriety under the Nazis appeared to corroborate their claim that Göring had built the air force “als einzelner Mann” (“as a lone man”). But in reality, the Luftwaffe had been created long before pilots such as Steinhoff took to the skies, initially as a secret Schwarze Luftwaffe (Shadow Luftwaffe) by the preceding Weimar Republic. As Heinrich Brüning, chancellor of Germany between 1930 and 1932, later claimed, “Hitler didn’t start the Luftwaffe – we did”.
