Deutsche Lufthansa
The Deutsche Lufthansa Aktiengesellschaft (Deutsche Lufthansa AG) is a German airlines founded in 1926 and serves as the flag carrier of Germany. It stands as the largest airline in Europe and fourth largest in the world by revenue. Lufthansa is also one of the five founding members of Star Alliance, which is the world's largest airline alliance, formed in 1997. Lufthansa refers to the Hanseatic League of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Translated, it means the “Hanse(atic League) of the Skies”.
The company's motto (Wahlspruch) until the end of WWII was “flying means to be victorious” (Fliegen heißt siegen). Lufthansa, with almost 50 Billion Euros of total assets as of 2023, has been able to gain more passengers from year to year – the number of passengers rose from 58.8 million (2010) to 71.3 million (2019). 2023 was the first year after the COVID crisis that the high passenger numbers flying with Lufthansa (34,408 employees as of 31 December 2022) could be achieved again.
History
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In December 1917, the companies HAPAG, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and AEG founded the Deutsche Luft-Reederei (D.L.R.) with the participation of Deutsche Bank. The D.L.R. carried out its first scheduled flight in February 1919 from Berlin to Weimar. This connection is considered to be the first civil airline in Germany. In 1920, the D.L.R. merged with Sablatnig Flugzeugbau GmbH to form Lloyd Luftverkehr Sablatnig. In 1923, HAPAG and Norddeutscher Lloyd combined their aviation interests to form Deutscher Aero Lloyd.
In the same year, after the end of inflation, an initiative came from the Reich government, which hoped to reduce subsidy payments to the two heavily indebted companies Deutscher Aero Lloyd and Junkers Luftverkehr AG through their merger. On the private sector side, the deputy director of Deutsche Bank, Kurt Weigelt, played an important role. The chairman of the merger commission was Max Schwab, chairman of the board of Rheinbahn AG in Düsseldorf, which was interested in the development of air traffic because of its stake in the Düsseldorf airport operating company. On the occasion of the start of air traffic from Dresden to Munich, the name Luft Hansa was created for this new planned company at the opening ceremony in Dresden City Hall.
The beginning
On 6 January 1926, the two companies merged to form Deutsche Luft Hansa Aktiengesellschaft with its headquarters in Berlin. Already at this point in time, several of the founding members or the institutions that commissioned them and acted in the background were pursuing purely military goals with this step. They saw the AG construct as merely a suitable form of establishing German air armament and a modern air force against the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The provisional board of directors included: Major Martin Wronsky, Otto Julius Merkel (Deutscher Aero Lloyd) and Erhard Milch (Junkers), who subsequently became technical director and board member of Deutsche Luft Hansa AG and from 1942 chairman of the supervisory board of Deutsche Lufthansa AG. Heavily involved in this merger was Major a. D. Ernst Brandenburg, head of Department L (Aviation) in the Reich Ministry of Transport.
There was cooperation with the Deutsche Reichsbahn on passenger and luggage transport since the 1920s. In 1928, the numbers were already impressive:
- 9.590.570 km flown
- 111.115 passengers
- 868.460 pieces of luggage, packages, postbags etc. transported
On 1 May 1929, Deutsche Luft Hansa AG offered its passengers a return ticket with a 10 percent discount for the first time. Reich postal routes (Reichspoststrecken) from Berlin to London and from Berlin to Malmö were opened in May, and from Stuttgart to Basel in June. On 22 July 1929, a Heinkel HE 12 was launched from a catapult 400 km off the coast during the express steamer Bremen's maiden voyage in order to shorten the regular mail service across the North Atlantic. In preparation for the South Atlantic crossing, an Arado flew from Seville to Tenerife.
In 1930, Deutsche Luft Hansa became a member of the Association of German Railway Administrations. To prepare for Chinese aviation, Luft Hansa founded the European-Asian airmail company Eurasia in February 1930 together with the Chinese Ministry of Transport. Launching mail planes from passenger ships became routine. There have been 24 launches of this type this year. From 18 to 26 August 1930, a Dornier Do J (“Whale”) flew from Warnemünde to New York under flight captain (Flugkapitän) Wolfgang von Gronau. The Vienna–Budapest–Belgrade–Sofia–Istanbul airmail route with a Berlin-Istanbul delivery time of just 24 hours was inaugurated in May 1930.
From May 1931, the Eurasia Shanghai–Nanjing–Peking–Manjur postal service was established. In April 1931, regular crossings of the Alps took place. In June 1931, a flight shuttle service from Cologne to Frankfurt was tested for the price of a second-class train ticket. Luft Hansa carried out a total of 31 catapult launches in overseas traffic this year. From July 1932, the Junkers G 38, the largest passenger aircraft of the time, was used on the Berlin-Amsterdam-London route. In June 1932, the North German Lloyd cargo ship Westfalen was chartered in preparation for regular crossings of the South Atlantic. There were 36 catapult launches of Dornier Do J (“Whale”) flying boats and further catapult launches for postal advance flights with a Ju 46 from the express steamer Europa on the North Atlantic route.
Third Reich
In February 1934, DLH established the first transatlantic mail route, which ran across the South Atlantic. For this purpose, the cargo ship Schwarzenfels from the steam shipping line Deutsche Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft „Hansa“ was purchased and converted into a catapult ship under the new name Schwabenland. Travel speeds rose sharply with the use of the Junkers Ju 52/3m and the Heinkel He 70. The Heinkel He 70 flew the so-called lightning routes between Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt am Main from June. The one millionth passenger was welcomed in September 1934. Dornier whales with a take-off weight of ten tons were now also used for the South Atlantic service. A second base ship was deployed and airmail traffic between the German Reich and South America began. In February 1935, a test flight to Cairo was carried out with a Junkers Ju 52/3m.
At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, twenty Ju 52s from Deutsche Lufthansa AG, on the orders of Adolf Hitler, brought Franco's troops from Tétouan in Spanish Morocco to Cádiz; They thus bypassed the Republican naval blockade in the Strait of Gibraltar. This was the first airlift in history and made Franco's victory against the communists possible.
In 1936, Deutsche Lufthansa AG celebrated its 10th anniversary. Dornier Do 18 flying boats with Junkers diesel engines were purchased for the South Atlantic service. This meant that the ocean could be crossed even in blind flying conditions. To explore the Asian routes, a Junkers Ju 52/3m flew over the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs.
On 12 March 1937, a Heinkel He 111 of Deutsche Lufthansa (aircraft registration D-ALIX), loaded with airmail, crashed near Bathurst. The four crew members were not found. On 12 November 1937, a Lufthansa Heinkel He 111 (aircraft registration D-AXAV) crashed on a scheduled flight from Berlin to Mannheim near Schriesheim on the Weißer Stein mountain (Odenwald; 10 km east of Mannheim). Of the twelve people on board, 10 were killed.
In July 1937, the Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Transportes Aereos (abbreviation SEDTA) was founded in Ecuador. Lufthansa chartered two Junkers W34s to this company. This was followed by test flights over the North Atlantic with the new Blohm & Voss Ha 139, which were successful. The mail flight service from Berlin to Baghdad began in October. This line was shortly afterwards extended to Tehran.
In August 1937, the air route in the Far East was explored with the Lufthansa Junkers Ju-52 D-ANOY; Flugkapitän (flight captain) Carl August Freiherr von Gablenz was held with his crew in Chotan in Chinese Turkestan for four weeks after an emergency landing. He reported in detail about this flight, which he carried out together with flight captain Robert Untucht and chief radio operator Karl Kirchhoff, in his 1937 book “D-ANOY conquers the Pamirs”. The spectacular “Pamir flight”, in which the Wakhan pass heights of more than 5,300 meters had to be conquered, was a pioneering achievement that was recognized worldwide. When the airmen, who had already been thought lost, landed in Berlin-Tempelhof on 3 October 1937, they were celebrated like heroes.
In April 1938, the route from Berlin to Tehran was opened to passenger service and shortly afterwards extended to Kabul. A subsidiary was founded in Peru. Lufthansa put the four-engine Focke-Wulf Fw 200 “Condor”, designed as a civil long-haul airliner, into scheduled service just one year after its first flight (27 July 1937). In normal operation, the machine could carry 25 passengers and fly 3000 km. The test flights were so convincing that Lufthansa immediately ordered the first series. The prototype was followed by several Fw 200 A and the first larger production version, the Fw 200 B. With a wing area of 118 square meters, the Condor was almost as large as today's Airbus A 320.
On 10 August 1938, the Fw 200 V1 “Condor” (D-ACON, Lufthansa nickname “Brandenburg”), equipped with additional tanks in the fuselage, flew, serial no. 2000, under the command of flight captain Alfred Henke and with flight captain Rudolf von Moreau (second pilot), Paul Dierberg (senior radio operator and engineer) and Walter Kober (senior aircraft radio operator), the first land-based long-haul passenger aircraft flew non-stop the 6,371.302 kilometer long route from Staaken to Floyd Bennett Field in New York City in 24 hours, 56 minutes and 12 seconds; this corresponded to an average speed of 255.499 km/h. On the return flight from New York to Berlin-Tempelhof, the machine covered a distance of 6,392 km in 19 hours and 55 minutes; this corresponded to an average speed of 321 km/h. Both flights were recognized by the FAI as flight path records, 2nd category (record with crew), which represented the cutting edge technology in civil aircraft construction at the time.
On 28 November 1938, the D-ACON took off from Berlin-Tempelhof with the same crew and with flight attendant Georg Kohne (Focke-Wulf) and consul Heinz Junge (director of Focke-Wulf-Flugzeugbau GmbH Berlin) on another record flight with three stopovers in Basra, Karachi and Hanoi to Tokyo (arriving in Tokyo on 30 November 1938). On this flight, the Condor flew a total of 13,844 km in 46 hours and 18 minutes. This corresponds to an average speed of 192 km/h (including ground times in Basra, Karachi and Hanoi). On the return flight, D-ACON had to ditch in Cavite Bay off Manila on 6 December 1938 due to a defect in the fuel line. Overall, in the last full year of operation in 1938, which was also a record year, Lufthansa flew 19.3 million kilometers in European traffic alone, transporting 254,713 passengers and 5,288 tons of letters.
The German Antarctic Expedition 1938/39 took place at the beginning of 1939: two Dornier whales took off by catapult from the expedition ship Schwabenland and photographed a total of 350,000 square kilometers on several exploratory flights. This area was named Neuschwabenland after the ship. On 1 April 1939, the Brazilian Lufthansa subsidiary Syndicato Condor took over the transcontinental route from Natal (Brazil) to Santiago de Chile. At the end of June 1939, a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 became the first land aircraft to cross the South Atlantic in a non-stop flight of 9 hours 47 minutes. In April/May 1939, a Junkers Ju 52/3m flew to Tokyo via Bangkok, Hanoi and Taipei. A scheduled service from Berlin to Bangkok in five stages was offered from the end of July 1939.
WWII
With a few exceptions, almost the entire Lufthansa aircraft fleet and crews were integrated into the Luftwaffe at the beginning of the Second World War, where they formed the core of the Combat Wing 172 (Kampfgeschwader z. b. V. 172) commanded by Major of the Reserves Freiherr von Gablenz. Within the wing there was a so-called “special squadron”, which consisted exclusively of Lufthansa members and to which all four-engine aircraft (i.e. Ju 90, FW 200 and Junkers G 38) were assigned. On 29 August 1939, this special squadron had received its first mission: to bring Reichstag members from all over the German Reich to Berlin. On the evening of 31 August 1939, the order was carried out to transport the Reichstag members to Berlin. There they learned officially the next morning (1 September 1939) that “as of 5:45 a.m., we are firing back”. Later in the day, they learned France and Great Britain had declared war against Germany and in the process plunged Europe into a world war.
On 21 September 1939, there was a modest resumption of air traffic on the Berlin–Danzig–Königsberg route, although not from Tempelhof, but about 20 km south of Berlin from Rangsdorf airfield. This was followed on 18 October 1939 by the Berlin–Vienna–Budapest–Belgrade route. There were no more Lufthansa flights from Tempelhof until 7 March 1940 – it was only on this day that flights to Lufthansa's home port were scheduled again. At the end of November 1940, the Eurasia service was suspended following intervention by the Chinese government. The base in Kunming was evacuated and all employees left the Republic of China. In mid-December 1941, the Brazilian Syndicato Condor had to cease operations. Deruluft had to be liquidated on 22 March 1941. On 27 October 1941, Lufthansa flew to Riga and Helsinki for the first time since the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.
From 1943 to 1945, more and more routes were gradually closed due to the war. All Lufthansa pilots and the Lufthansa repair shops were now subordinate to the Luftwaffe of the Wehrmacht. Lufthansa civilian aircraft were converted into military transporters and used for other purposes by the Luftwaffe. On 21 April 1944, a Lufthansa Douglas DC-3-220B (D-AAIG) had to ditch in the Oslofjord about 72 kilometers south of the destination airport Oslo-Fornebu (Norway). The reason was smoke and fire from a signal flare that had been activated in the cockpit. Of the 20 occupants, 9 were killed, all three crew members and 6 passengers. On 14 August 1944, a Lufthansa Douglas DC-3-220A (D-AAIE) was irreparably damaged at Stuttgart Airport in a daytime attack by USAAF Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers. No one was harmed. On 23 March 1945, Lufthansa published its last flight plan. On 20 April 1945, a Lufthansa Junkers Ju 52 was shot down near Glienig by Soviet forces. 17 of the 18 people on board were killed. On 21 April 1945, Lufthansa carried out the last scheduled flight from Berlin and the very last flight of the “old” Lufthansa took off on 22 April 1945 from Berlin-Tempelhof to Warnemünde with a Junkers Ju-52.
Post WWII
Flight operations had to be stopped in 1945 on the orders of the invaders. Two years after the Western Allied Occupation Forces officially dissolved the first Lufthansa in 1951, the “Aktiengesellschaft für Luftverkehrsbedarf” (Luftag) with headquarters in Cologne was founded on 6 January 1953. On 6 August 1954, Luftag bought the name, the trademark – the crane – and the colors – blue and yellow – from the first Lufthansa, which was in liquidation at the time, and has since then called itself "Deutsche Lufthansa Aktiengesellschaft” (Deutsche Lufthansa Stock Company). Multiple tasks had to be accomplished by the new airline before it could begin flight traffic: finding and buying suitable airplanes, schooling airline pilots and engineers and training air stewards. Organizational and infrastructural prerequisites for the technical maintenance of airplanes also had to be set. The ambitious project succeeded. On 1 April 1955, two Convair airplanes took off from Hamburg and Munich to commence scheduled air services.
Parallel to the development of a European route network, flights to destinations in the Americas, Africa and the Far East were also added shortly after. Since 1958, the red rose has stood for the fulfillment of the highest comfort requirements in First Class on intercontinental routes.
In 1960, Lufthansa arrived in the age of the jet plane with the acquisition of the first Boeing B707. Simultaneously, the company transferred its long-distance operations from Hamburg to Frankfurt am Main and continued to expand its cargo business. This expansion was followed by a decade of crises, but also of developments. First the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, which made the prices for kerosene explode. At the same time it created a new understanding of how resources are handled and thus drove the development of fuel-efficient and quieter jet engines forwards.
Time and again Lufthansa offered innovations to their growing customer base: Wide-body aircraft with the latest technology were bought. In 1970, the Boeing B747 was deployed for the first time on long-haul routes followed by the tri-jet Douglas DC 10, and from 1976 the Airbus A300, the first wide-body twin-engine jet for medium distance flights.
The airplane developed into a means of mass transportation. Lufthansa reacted by redesigning their route network with faster connections and fewer stopovers. German women also conquered the cockpits at Lufthansa with the training of the first two female pilots in 1986.
In the second half of the 1990s, the corporate group was faced with huge changes. On the one hand, in 1995 Lufthansa Technik AG, Lufthansa Cargo AG and Lufthansa Systems GmbH were transformed into independent companies of the aviation group and on the other hand, in 1997 Lufthansa was finally privatized. Both were meant to increase the group’s competitiveness, and contributed to Lufthansa’s long-term strategy of developing into the world-wide leading provider of air travel and air travel contiguous services.[1]
| Revenue Passenger-Kilometers (scheduled flights only) | in millions |
|---|---|
| 1955 | 78 |
| 1960 | 1,284 |
| 1965 | 3,785 |
| 1969 | 6,922 |
| 1971 | 8,610 |
| 1975 | 13,634 |
| 1980 | 21,056 |
| 1989 | 36,133 |
| 1995 | 61,602 |
| 2000 | 94,170 |
| Source: ICAO Digest of Statistics for 1955, IATA World Air Transport Statistics | 1960–2000 |
