GERMAN AVIATION 1919–1939

Signed in June 1919 and promulgated in January 1920, the Treaty of Versailles contained numerous provisions to limit the rearmament of defeated Germany. She was thus no longer permitted to possess tanks, artillery or military aviation, which led to the dissolution of the Luftstreitkräfte. This prohibition did not stifle her aeronautical industry, however, which circumvented the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles by constructing aircraft in other countries, among other means. For the training of its pilots and the testing of its equipment, Germany could rely, from the mid-1920s onwards, on the secret aviation school at Lipetsk in the USSR, which allowed the Weimar Republic to preserve its aeronautical expertise without the knowledge of France and the United Kingdom. The Lipetsk school closed in September 1933, a few months after the Nazis came to power in Germany. In 1935, the Third Reich once again established an air force: the Luftwaffe, which by 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, had become the most powerful military air arm in the Western world. It is this history that historian Jacques Pernet, specialist in German and American aviation, and journalist and writer Jean-Charles Stasi recount in a lively and richly illustrated book featuring numerous period photographs and colour aircraft profiles.