Hitler’s personal interventions and odd theories—for instance, in favor of jet bombers—further aggravated severe irrationalities in aircraft design and production schedules. This problem was eased somewhat from 1943 by the succession of Erhard Milch to the position of chief of staff. Milch was a technically competent man who greatly increased fighter production into 1944, when Albert Speer took over the aircraft industry and stretched production to even greater levels. Improved production was achieved by cutting back on bombers and transports, in favor of ramping up output of earlier model fighters that were already outclassed by new planes in all major enemy air forces. Without a strategic bomber force the Luftwaffe had been unable to punish Britain sufficiently to drive that country from the war in 1940. Germans now paid the price in blood and destroyed cities from 1943 to 1945, as the RAF and USAAF flew from Great Britain, and later also from Italy, to destroy dozens of German cities. Nor could the Germans knock out Soviet factories relocated far behind the combat lines, not even at the deepest extent of Wehrmacht penetration on the Eastern Front in 1942. Germany had devoted too much of its limited material and intellectual resources and war production to the Luftwaffe, without developing a decisive air weapon or a sufficient defense to successfully fend off superior and far more numerous enemy aircraft. A fundamental structural flaw was Luftwaffe political isolation within the Wehrmacht and the Nazi political system. The latter was a by-product of Göring’s chronic scheming, which was outmatched by Nazi rivals as his performance and that of the Luftwaffe declined in tandem. That left the Luftwaffe without a clientele base in the war economy or political support when Hitler turned against it, scapegoating the air force for Germany’s overall strategic failure.
Unknown to the general German population, Luftwaffe thinking about civil defense dating to 1934 assumed that enemy bombers would always get through. With their usual ruthlessness, prewar Nazi and German state planners set out secret lists of cities to receive funds for priority defense and building of bomb shelters, based on their importance to the future war economy rather than exposure of citizens. They also prepared lists of German towns deemed “expendable.” When the bombers came, wave upon wave or in long streams, even in the priority cities there were never enough bomb shelters. The Party stepped in to build some shelters to fill the gap, but as sirens wailed terrified civilians were crammed into the few public shelters that existed. Those who could ran inside the huge and nearly invulnerable, but stifling, Flak towers (Flaktürme) in the few key cities that had them. Most just huddled in some nearby basement that was no protection against high explosive bombs. Worse, these basements were connected by tunnels so that people might run from cellar to cellar in front of the bombs, and poisonous carbon monoxide was channeled into cellars to silently kill those inside. Slave laborers, who comprised most foreigners in Germany by 1944, were provided no shelter whatever. They remained in the street when the bombs fell, and suffered commensurately enormous casualties. Most harmful to civilians was that civil air defense (“Zivlier Luftschutz”) was left to the Luftwaffe to organize as a military matter. The air force was too decentralized, grossly inefficient, and politically weakened late in the war to obtain or manage the men or material resources needed for the job. Instead, the Luftwaffe turned to women and the Hitler Jungend to crew its forests of anti-aircraft guns. These were concentrated in the Ruhr Valley and other industrial areas, then later around Berlin and other repeated urban targets of Allied air raids.
By 1943 the Luftwaffe included hundreds of thousands of ground personnel engaged in air defense of the Reich, as Germany faced thousand bomber raids and round-the-clock bombing. Those facts were pointed to by Winston Churchill in 1943 when protesting directly to Stalin that the air campaign constituted an effective “second front,” well before the landings in Normandy. As German infantry losses mounted, pressure was brought to bear to surrender some of the Luftwaffe’s many nonflying personnel for the frontlines. Some 200,000 were transferred to the Heer in 1943. Göring’s waning political influence was still strong enough in 1944 to ensure that additional infantry units were formed as Luftwaffe field divisions that remained under his control. Most were armed into 1943 with captured Czech, French, or Soviet guns, along with various German PAK anti-aircraft guns and horse-towed anti-tank guns. They were not consistently organized until 1944, and were never effective or highly ranked in the Heer’s order of battle. In addition to erosion of Luftwaffe manpower on the ground, bomber pilots were transferred to fighter units without real success, and suffered high casualties. The effects of poor planning were felt across the board from the second half of 1944, as fighter production peaked, but there were not enough trained pilots to man new squadrons, while fuel and other supplies reached critically low levels by the autumn. Morale and performance thereafter plummeted in inverse relation to rising battle losses.
The Luftwaffe was progressively overmatched on all fronts from 1943: in Africa and Italy, over the Balkans, in the skies of France and Germany, and all along the Eastern Front. Each of the three main enemy air industries—the RAF, USAAF, and VVS—on its own outproduced Germany’s aircraft industry. The Luftwaffe continued to produce many older types of outmoded fighters such as the Ju-88 and Me-109. Failure to stop enemy bombers meant that many of these planes were destroyed on the ground or in factories, so that the fighter loss rate reached an astonishing 73 percent of monthly strength throughout 1944, the peak months of fighter production. The Luftwaffe was the first air force to deploy operational jets, but it produced these in paltry numbers and far too late in the war to have any effect on its outcome. Senior Luftwaffe and political leadership also delayed development of jets by arguing over whether they should be used primarily as bombers or fighters, with Hitler insisting on the former. That meant that those aircraft actually produced had serious design flaws. In any case, there was hardly fuel for aircraft of any kind by early 1945, as the skies over Germany grew dark with enemy heavy bomber fleets and “Jabos” hunted ground forces and Panzers at will.
Toward the end, Hitler took more personal charge of the air war, as he did all aspects of the German war effort. His limited knowledge and bias toward steering resources to the Heer, matched with absolute personal conviction about his own military insights—though these seldom rose above the level of vulgar misunderstanding—exacerbated extant problems in the organization of the Luftwaffe. For instance, he insisted that anti-aircraft guns would suffice to defend cities from bombers and never sanctioned a system of air defense-in-depth. He also utterly failed to appreciate that the air war could be won only by constant and routine daily operations. Instead, he resented what he saw as “hoarding” of reserves, then flung these away in grand but futile spectaculars such as the Ardennes offensive. He also wasted precious resources on supposed Wunderwaffen. Hitler’s growing disgust with Luftwaffe failures led to an order in 1944 to disband the air force and replace it with a huge anti-aircraft army to defend Germany. Only Göring’s residual call on past Nazi Party and personal glories in the first years of the war prevented this bizarre Führer order from being carried out.
The defeat of the Luftwaffe was total at all levels, in tandem with the final and utter military rout of Nazi Germany. Its failure was exacerbated by Göring’s and Hitler’s personal idiosyncracies and interference, but it had much deeper structural causes. The German air force failed to develop a strong bomber arm, leading to a fundamental imbalance that was never corrected; it fell behind in the “battle of the beams” and radar war; it worked on too many and too radical new designs even as it delayed full war production until it was too late to correct for the growing Allied lead; it lost control of training even as it received more fighters, with the end result that pilot wastage rose dramatically in 1944.
Suggested Reading: M. Cooper, The German Air Force: Anatomy of Failure (1981); John Killen, The Luftwaffe: A History (1967; 2003); Williamson Murray, Luftwaffe (1985); Richard Overy, Göring: The Iron Man (1984).
