L'aviation allemande 1919-1939

The interwar period is a fascinating time for German aviation, but it is hardly known. Signed in June 1919 and promulgated in January 1920, the Versailles Treaty included a lot of disposi- tions limiting defeated Germany’s rearmament. It no longer had the right to own tanks, artillery or aircraft, which meant the suppression of the Luftstreitkräften.
This ban did not limit in any way its aircraft industry, which managed to get round the clauses of the Versailles Treaty by building planes in other countries. In order to train its pilots and try out its materiel, Germany could count on the clandestine aviation school at Lipetsk, in the USSR, from the middle of the 1920s onwards, enabling the Weimar Republic to maintain its aviation know-how without the United Kingdom or France being aware of it. The school at Lipetsk was closed in 1933, a few months after the Nazis came to power in Germany. In 1935, the Third Reich gave itself a new air force: the Luftwaffe. On the eve of the Second World War, in 1939, this had become the most powerful air force in the western world.