German Lufthansa (GDR)
| German Lufthansa | |
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| IATA code : | |
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| Founding: | 1955 |
| Operation stopped: | 1963 |
| Seat: | Schönefeld |
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| Fleet size: | |
| Aims: | National and international |
| Deutsche Lufthansa ceased operations in 1963. The information in italics refer to the last status before the end of operation. | |
The German Lufthansa GmbH was the first airline in the German Democratic Republic and was under this name from 1955 to 1963. She was not related to Deutsche Lufthansa AG .
founding
On April 28, 1955, in coordination with the Soviet Embassy, a resolution of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the GDR of April 27, 1955 was published with the following wording: "With effect from May 1, 1955, German Lufthansa is responsible for carrying out civil passenger and cargo air traffic to found. The German Lufthansa is subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior. ”This decision was preceded by preparatory work since May 1954 for an agreement signed on April 27, 1955 between the GDR and the USSR on the transfer of the Schönefeld airport (southern section) as the central airport of the GDR was operational. On July 1, 1955, the Council of Ministers appointed the first management of Deutsche Lufthansa. This date is generally regarded as the day Deutsche Lufthansa GmbH was founded in the GDR .
The Directory
On July 8, 1955, the board of directors appointed a week earlier met for the first time. The venue was the meeting room of the main administration office of the GDR government. The meeting was chaired by the main director Arthur Pieck , the son of Wilhelm Pieck . Arthur Pieck's first deputy, Fritz Horn , the director responsible for air traffic , was a trained pilot. The technical director Ernst Wendt, a polar aviator, had also become works director at Deutsche Lufthansa AG after working as a locksmith and master craftsman. Director Karl Heiland was ultimately responsible for political work, but he was a specialist insofar as he had completed pilot training with the Air Force , albeit without a qualification due to the war.
| designation | First name Name | period of service |
|---|---|---|
| Chief Director | Arthur Pieck | 1955 |
| Director Air Traffic | Fritz Horn | 1955 |
| Director of flight operations | Walter Lehweß-Litzmann | 1959-70 |
First flights
On July 30, 1955, the first machine of the new company, an Ilyushin Il-14 with the aircraft registration DDR-ABA , landed at the central airport Berlin-Schönefeld . The first official flight took place on September 16, 1955. The machine brought a government delegation under Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl to Moscow to sign the State Treaty between the Soviet Union and the GDR .
Scheduled flight
On February 4, 1956, Lufthansa opened scheduled services on the Berlin– Warsaw route. That same year, followed on February 27, the fair air traffic Berlin- Leipzig and Berlin on May 16, the line Prague - Budapest - Sofia , on May 19, Berlin-Prague-Budapest- Bucharest and Berlin on October 7, Vilnius -Moscow.
Personnel and machines
At first, the GDR Lufthansa only provided the ground crew. The crews and the machines of the Ilyushin Il-14 type initially came exclusively from the Soviet Union. On March 13, 1957, Gerhard Frieß flew as the first German commander on a scheduled Lufthansa flight to Moscow. While the first 14 Ilyushin Il-14s were still imported from the Soviet Union, the 15th was already a license for the Elbe Flugzeugwerke in Dresden. Lufthansa almost received machines that were not only built in their own country, but also designed in the GDR. Neither the Type 152 nor the Type 153 went into series production, however, and so Lufthansa continued to cover its need for larger passenger aircraft with Ilyushin aircraft. From March 28, 1960, the Il- 14s were joined by Il-18s , after all, turboprop aircraft . At the end of 1962, Lufthansa in the GDR had 26 older Il-14s and five Il-18s.
The end of Lufthansa in the GDR
Against the background that the West German Lufthansa had already legally bought the brand names and trademarks of the "old Lufthansa" in liquidation before the founding of the GDR Lufthansa, Arthur Pieck made the following comments to Otto Grotewohl a few months after the establishment of the Lufthansa of the GDR: "From a formal legal point of view, we are in a situation where even our own courts have to forbid us to use the name Deutsche Lufthansa and the stylized crane as trademarks."
On March 13, 1958, a round at Erich Honecker , to which Arthur Pieck also belonged, decided to found a new company in case of an "emergency" and to enter it in the trademark register (GDR, Madrid, Bern). On September 8, 1958, Interflug, Gesellschaft für internationale Flugverkehr mbH, was founded. With 1.1 million marks, Lufthansa in the GDR provided the majority of the total of two million marks and with Arthur Pieck the chief executive.
In view of the threatened legal defeat of Lufthansa (GDR) against Lufthansa (West) in a process in Belgrade, the withdrawal into the expanded interception line began. In July 1963, the declared SED - Politburo agrees "that Lufthansa is liquidated because it is unprofitable to have two companies and that a society under the name Inter flight is formed." On September 1, 1963, the GDR's air transport operations were merged and continued with the management of GDR-Lufthansa, but under the company name Interflug .
Further history of aviation in the GDR
The further history of aviation in the GDR is described in the article Interflug .
See also
literature
- Klaus Breiler: The big book of Interflug . Das Neue, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-360-01904-2 .
- Helmut Erfurth: The big book of the GDR aviation . GeraMond, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7654-7216-6 .
- Horst Materna: History of the Berlin-Schönefeld Airport 1945–1963 . Rockstuhl Verlag, Bad Langensalza 2016, ISBN 978-3-86777-326-3 .
