* 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica ( or Gernika in Basque ), Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.

German successes are closely related to the extent to which the German Luftwaffe was able to control the air war in early campaigns in Europe and the Soviet Union.

While early German tanks, Stuka dive-bombers and concentrated forces were used in the Polish campaign, the majority of the battle was conventional infantry and artillery based warfare and most Luftwaffe action was independent of the ground campaign.

The Luftwaffe did end up with an air force consisting mainly of relatively short-range aircraft, but this does not prove that the German air force was solely interested in ’ tactical ’ bombing.

In Des Teufels General ( The Devil's General ) of 1954, a Luftwaffe general named Harras loosely modeled after Ernst Udet, appears at first to be cynical fool, but turns out to an anti-Nazi who is secretly sabotaging the German war effort by designing faulty planes.

This was just the opportunity the German Luftwaffe, Italian Regia Aeronautica, and the Soviet Union's Red Air Force needed to test their latest aircraft.

During the invasion of Poland and the Battle of France, Luftwaffe fighters — primarily the Messerschmitt Bf 109 — held air superiority, and the Luftwaffe played a major role in German victories in these campaigns.

Allied fighters, by gaining air superiority over the European battlefield, played a crucial role in the eventual defeat of the Axis, which Reichmarshal Hermann Göring, commander of the German Luftwaffe summed up when he said: " When I saw Mustangs over Berlin, I knew the jig was up.

With Hitler preoccupied with the war, Himmler focusing on the " final solution to the Jewish question " in eastern Europe, and with Hermann Göring ’ s position declining with the failure of the German Air Force ( Luftwaffe ), Goebbels sensed a power vacuum in domestic policy and moved to fill it.

His proposal had a certain logic, as Göring – despite the failures of the Luftwaffe and his own corruption – was still very popular among the German people, whose morale was waning since Hitler barely appeared in public since the defeat at Stalingrad.

* 1940 – World War II: Battle of Britain – The German Luftwaffe begins attacking British convoys in the English Channel thus starting the battle ( this start date is contested, though ).

* 1994 – Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, German Luftwaffe officer ( b. 1907 )

The Luftwaffe was the aerial warfare branch of the German Wehrmacht during World War II.

After the German Empire's World War I-era army air force, the Luftstreitkräfte, and naval air units had been disbanded under the term of the Treaty of Versailles the Luftwaffe was reformed in 1935 and grew to become one of the strongest, most doctrinally advanced, and most battle-experienced air forces in the world when World War II started in Europe in September 1939.

Luftwaffe is also the generic term in German speaking countries for any national military aviation service, and the names of air forces in other countries are usually translated into German as " Luftwaffe " ( e. g. Royal Air Force is often translated as britische Luftwaffe ).

The forerunner of the Luftwaffe, the Imperial German Army Air Service, was founded in 1910 with the name Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches.

As all such prior NSFK members were also Nazi Party members ; this gave the new Luftwaffe a strong Nazi ideological base in contrast to the other branches of the German military.

During the interwar period the Luftwaffe leadership rejected the concept of terror bombing, and confined the air arms use to battlefield support of interdiction operations.

J. P. Harris states that most Luftwaffe leaders from Goering through the general staff believed as did their counterparts in Britain and the United States that strategic bombing was the chief mission of the air force and that given such a role, the Luftwaffe would win the next war and that:

Hitler re-established the Luftwaffe ( air force ) and reintroduced universal military service.

And because Luft means " air " and Waffe may be translated into English as either " weapon " or " arm ", " Air Arm " may be considered the most literal English translation of Luftwaffe ( cf.

Luftwaffe Regulation 10, The Bomber ( Dienstvorschrift 10: Das Kampfflugzeug ), published in 1934, advocated air superiority and approaches to ground attack tactics without dealing with operational matters.

The premature death of one of the Luftwaffes finest officers, one that left the Luftwaffe without a strategic air force during World War II, eventually proved fatal to the German war effort.

The Sudeten Crisis highlighted German unprepardness to conduct a strategic air war ( although the British and French were in a much weaker position ), and Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe be expanded by five times.

At the start of the war the Luftwaffe had four Luftflotten (" air fleets "), each responsible for roughly a quarter of Germany.

Flying in reinforcements and winning air superiority, the Luftwaffe contributed decisively to the German conquest and expulsion of the Western Allies from Scandinavia.

The Luftwaffe produced advanced fighter aircraft in an effort to turn the tide of the air war in 1944 and 1945

The Luftwaffe lacked an effective air defence system early in the war.

However, the Luftwaffe was a broadly based force with no constricting central doctrine, other than its resources should be used generally to support national strategy.

The rearmament of the Kriegsmarine was to have been completed in 1949, the Luftwaffe rearmament program was to have been completed in 1942 with a force capable of carrying out strategic bombing using heavy bombers.

The failure of the Luftwaffe to progress further towards attaining a strategic bombing force was attributable to several reasons.

Due to a lack of Strategic bombers, the Luftwaffe could not strike at Soviet production centers regularly or with the needed force.

Afterwards the Luftwaffe had ceased to be an effective fighting force.

The absence of a strategic bomber force for the Luftwaffe, following General Wever's accidental death in 1936 and the end of the Ural bomber program he fostered before the invasion of Poland, would not be addressed again until the authorization of the Bomber B design competition in July 1939, which sought to replace the medium bomber force with which the Luftwaffe was to begin the war, with more advanced, twin-engined high speed bomber aircraft fitted with pairs of relatively " high-power " engines of 1, 500 kW ( 2, 000 hp ) output levels and upwards each, that would also be able to function as shorter range heavy bombers.

One of the unique characteristics of the Luftwaffe ( as opposed to other independent air forces ) was the possession of an organic paratrooper force called Fallschirmjäger.

* 1940 – World War II: the old city centre of the Dutch town of Middelburg is bombed by the German Luftwaffe, to force the surrender of the Dutch armies in Zeeland.

For commanding the navy and the air force, Third Reich had also the Oberkommando der Marine ( OKM ) and the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe ( OKL ) respectively.

The British had between 700 and 800 of these vessels in service, making it a critical threat if the Luftwaffe could not deal with the force.

The SS rank system was unique in that it did not copy the terms and ranks used by the Wehrmacht's branches ( Heer (" army "), Luftwaffe (" air force "), and Kriegsmarine (" navy ")), but instead used the ranks established by the post-World War I Freikorps and taken over by the SA.

As the capital of an Axis country and a major transit point for Axis troops en route to the Eastern Front, Bucharest suffered heavy damage during World War II due to Allied bombings, and, on 23 August 1944, was the site of the royal coup which brought Romania into the Allied camp, suffering a short period of Luftwaffe bombings as well as a failed attempt by German troops to take the city by force.

As a result, Luftwaffe General Kurt Student was put in overall command of developing a paratrooper force to be known as the Fallschirmjäger.

During the invasion, Belgrade was bombed by the German air force ( Luftwaffe ).