Lufthansa

Deutsche Luft Hansa AG was founded in Berlin on 6 January 1926. The German government, which subsidised every airline in the country, forced its two largest carriers, Deutscher Aero Lloyd and Junkers Luftverkehr, into a single company and let the rest close. The name meant a Hanseatic League of the air. The new airline began with 162 aircraft, most of them outdated, and 1,527 staff, and on 6 April 1926 a Fokker F.II left Berlin Tempelhof on its first scheduled service, to Zurich by way of Halle, Erfurt and Stuttgart. By the end of the year it had carried 56,268 passengers.

The network grew quickly across Germany and into Europe through agreements with the airlines of neighbouring countries. Luft Hansa was one of the first airlines to fly at night, between Berlin and Königsberg, and it took stakes in companies abroad: Deruluft with the Soviet Union, Syndicato Condor in Brazil, Eurasia in China and, through cooperation, the young Iberia in Spain. In April 1928 the Luft Hansa pilot Hermann Köhl, with Baron von Hünefeld and the Irish airman James Fitzmaurice, made the first east-west crossing of the North Atlantic in the Junkers W 33 Bremen.

The early 1930s were financially hard, but the airline kept reaching further. In 1934 it opened a scheduled airmail service between Europe and South America, the first regular airline service across an ocean: Dornier Wal flying boats were catapulted from ships stationed in the South Atlantic to complete the crossing. At home, the Junkers Ju 52/3m became the workhorse of the European network, and fast services linked Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt.

In August 1938 a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor flew non-stop from Berlin to New York. The same year was the best in the company's history: 254,713 passengers carried, 19.3 million kilometres flown on the European routes. It was also an airline deep inside the regime. An aircraft had been put at Hitler's disposal for his 1932 election campaign; Erhard Milch, who had run the airline since 1926, became state secretary in Göring's aviation ministry in 1933; and historians have described the company in those years as a front for the secret build-up of the air force.

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Luft Hansa's civil operations came to an end as the airline had known them. Its fleet and most of its staff were placed under the command of the Luftwaffe. Some scheduled passenger flights continued within Germany and to occupied and neutral countries, but seats were restricted to the needs of the war, and in the later years most passenger aircraft were converted into military freighters. The company's principal work became the maintenance and repair of aircraft.

That work relied on forced labour. During the war Luft Hansa employed more than 10,000 forced labourers from occupied countries, children among them, and Jewish forced labourers particularly between 1940 and 1942. They assembled, repaired and maintained aircraft, military aircraft included, and installed radar equipment, and they were held in barracks run by the airline at Tempelhof and elsewhere in Berlin, behind barbed wire and under armed guard. In 1999 the modern Lufthansa joined the German industry initiative to compensate forced labourers and commissioned a historical study of its predecessor; it was criticised for taking more than a decade to publish it.

The airline's foreign ventures were dismantled one after another. Deruluft ended in 1940, Eurasia was shut down by the Chinese government that November, and Brazil nationalised Syndicato Condor in 1943 as Cruzeiro do Sul. The last scheduled flight of Deutsche Luft Hansa, from Berlin to Munich on 21 April 1945, crashed before arrival; a final non-scheduled flight the next day ended flight operations. After the surrender, the Allies seized every aircraft in Germany and the company was dissolved. Its remaining assets were liquidated on 1 January 1951.

West Germany had no airline and no sovereignty over its own airspace when, on 6 January 1953, a company called Aktiengesellschaft für Luftverkehrsbedarf, Luftag for short, was set up in Cologne. Many of its people had worked for the old Luft Hansa. Nobody knew when it would be allowed to fly, but that year it ordered four Convair CV-340s and four Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellations and set up a maintenance base at Hamburg. On 6 August 1954 it bought the name and the crane of the liquidated Deutsche Lufthansa for DM 30,000.

On 1 April 1955 Lufthansa was cleared to begin scheduled domestic flights, on a network joining Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Cologne and Munich. International services followed on 15 May to London, Paris and Madrid, and on 1 June the Super Constellations began flying to New York; the South Atlantic followed in August 1956. The company that did this was not the private enterprise its predecessor had nominally been: it was the state's airline, its capital held largely by the Federal Republic.

Berlin was closed to it. The four occupying powers did not allow a West German airline to fly to any part of the divided city, and the hope of moving the headquarters and main base back to the capital was never realised. Frankfurt, well placed and served by a large airport, became the main hub in 1958. In East Germany a second 'Lufthansa' was founded in 1955; after losing the right to the name to the western company in the courts, it was wound up and replaced by Interflug in 1963.

Lufthansa ordered four Boeing 707s in 1958 and began flying jets between Frankfurt and New York in March 1960. One of the first, D-ABOB, was named Hamburg; Boeing 720Bs, a shorter-field derivative, followed for the routes that needed them. The network spread with the new aircraft: Hong Kong and Tokyo beyond Bangkok in February 1961, Lagos and Johannesburg in 1962.

The Boeing 727 arrived in 1964, and that May Lufthansa opened a polar route from Frankfurt to Tokyo by way of Anchorage. In February 1965 it ordered twenty-one Boeing 737s and became the launch customer of the type, the first foreign airline to launch a Boeing airliner. The first aircraft was delivered on 27 December 1967 and entered service in 1968. Lufthansa went on flying 737s in one version or another for almost half a century, until the last, a 737-300, came home from Milan to Frankfurt on 29 October 2016.

The wide-body era began with a Boeing 747 service on 26 April 1970, the first jumbo jets in Germany. The McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 followed on 14 January 1974 and the Airbus A300 in 1976; in 1979 Lufthansa and Swissair launched the Airbus A310 with an order for twenty-five. From the 1980s the long-haul fleet was built around the 747 and later the Airbus A340, and the airline became one of the most loyal customers the 747 ever had.

That loyalty lasted into the present century. In 2010 Lufthansa introduced the first of fourteen Airbus A380s, and in 2012 it became the launch customer for the Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental, eventually taking nineteen. Few airlines flew both of the largest passenger aircraft ever built side by side, and at the end of 2025 Lufthansa still had twenty-seven 747s and eight A380s in service.

Lufthansa shares had been traded on the German stock exchanges since 1966, but the state remained the controlling owner for decades. In 1993 the federal government still held 51.6 per cent. A capital increase in 1994 reduced its stake to little more than a third, and in the same years the airline was restructured into a group: maintenance became Lufthansa Technik, freight became Lufthansa Cargo, information technology became Lufthansa Systems. In October 1997 the government sold its remaining 37.5 per cent, and Lufthansa became a wholly private company.

That spring, on 14 May 1997, Lufthansa, Air Canada, SAS, Thai Airways International and United Airlines had founded Star Alliance, the first multilateral airline alliance. Lufthansa has remained at its centre ever since, and the transatlantic joint venture it runs with United and Air Canada is one of the pillars of its long-haul business.

From the mid-2000s Lufthansa turned itself into the owner of other airlines. Swiss International Air Lines, the successor of the bankrupt Swissair, joined the group in 2005. Austrian Airlines followed in 2009, and Brussels Airlines was acquired in stages and wholly owned from 2017. Short-haul flying outside the hubs was handed to Germanwings from 2012 and later to Eurowings, which became the group's point-to-point airline. On 17 January 2025 Lufthansa completed the purchase of 41 per cent of ITA Airways, the successor of Alitalia, and made it the group's fifth network airline.

The group has also been through its crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic Lufthansa cancelled almost all of its flights in March 2020, and in June its shareholders accepted a €9 billion rescue package from the German state, which took a 20 per cent stake in the company once more.

Lufthansa carries two histories under one name. One is the story it tells gladly: the airline that rebuilt German civil aviation from nothing in 1955, launched the Boeing 737, flew the 747 for more than half a century and made Frankfurt one of the great crossroads of world air travel. The other is the history of the company whose name it bought, which flew for the Nazi state and used forced labour in its hangars. Lufthansa has chosen to claim both, and the argument over how fully it has faced the second has never quite ended.

What it built after the war rests on two choices: to make an alliance the frame of its network, and to buy other flag carriers while leaving their names, crews and liveries intact: SWISS is still Swiss, Austrian still Austrian. In 2025 the group that grew from the airline carried 135 million passengers.

In its centenary year Lufthansa is also a transitional airline: its long-haul fleet still includes four-engined aircraft that many airlines have already retired, alongside new Boeing 787s and Airbus A350s as the group prepares to receive new aircraft at a rate of almost one a week. The Junkers Ju 52 in 1930s markings and the Boeing 747-8 in 1970s colours are there to say that the crane on the tail has meant the same airline all along. The record says it is more complicated than that, and the record is part of the airline too.