Laage is an unusual thing in the German order of battle: a Cold War fighter base laid out by the losing side and inherited intact. Work started in 1979, the field opened in 1984, and the unit that opened it was Jagdbombenfliegergeschwader 77 "Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher" with the Sukhoi Su-22M4. By the time the concrete had settled, the Nationale Volksarmee had six years left to run.

In 1988 a second Su-22 unit was raised here, Marinefliegergeschwader 28 "Paul Wieczorek", and in the spring of 1990 it was transferred from the air force to the Volksmarine to give East Germany a naval strike wing of its own. It is one of the stranger footnotes of 1990: a state in the middle of dissolving itself stood up a brand-new anti-shipping arm. The wing passed to the Bundeswehr on 3 October 1990 with everything else and was dissolved on 31 December 1990. The Bundeswehr never flew the Su-22 operationally.

The base was then shut. For two years it did almost nothing except take its first civil traffic, under a shared-use agreement signed with the Bundeswehr in January 1992. The decision to reopen it as a fighter base was made because the MiG-29s had to go somewhere, and because a reunified Luftwaffe that kept no combat flying in the east would have been making a political statement it did not want to make.

Jagdgeschwader 73 was formed at Laage on 31 May 1993 from two halves that could hardly have been less alike: Jagdbombergeschwader 35 from Pferdsfeld in Rhineland-Palatinate, flying the F-4F Phantom, and the MiG-29 trials wing descended from the East German Jagdfliegergeschwader 3 at Preschen. For several years the two types sat on the same apron, Western and Soviet, flown by pilots who until recently had been training to kill each other.

Twenty-four MiG-29A and MiG-29UB airframes came to the Bundeswehr with the Nationale Volksarmee. Rather than scrap them, the Luftwaffe had them reworked to Western standards as the MiG-29G and MiG-29GT: Western radios, an ICAO-compatible transponder, a new navigation fit, and instruments in feet and knots rather than metres and kilometres per hour. They were painted in Luftwaffe grey and given Iron Crosses and German serials in the 29+ block, and they remained the only Warsaw Pact combat aircraft ever flown operationally by a NATO air force in its own markings.

What made them precious was not the aeroplane so much as what it carried. The MiG-29 combined a helmet-mounted sight with the highly agile R-73 short-range missile, which together let a pilot shoot at a target well off the nose without pointing the aircraft at it. Western fighters of the day could not do that. Every NATO air force that could arrange an exchange came to Laage, and Laage MiGs went to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to fly against American fighters. The lesson — that a close-in turning fight against a Fulcrum was a losing proposition — ran straight into Western tactics and into the Western programmes for helmet-mounted cueing of their own.

One aircraft was lost. On 25 June 1996 a 28-year-old Hauptmann of Jagdgeschwader 73 put 29+09 into a flat spin during a descending training manoeuvre over Mecklenburg, could not recover it even with afterburner, and ejected at about a kilometre. He came down some 200 metres from the wreck near Brudersdorf with a bitten tongue and a stiff neck. The investigation found his control inputs at fault and his flying career with the Luftwaffe ended. It remains the only Soviet-built combat aircraft the Bundeswehr ever lost in an accident.

The end came for political and practical reasons at once: the type was expensive to support, spares came from the wrong direction, and Poland — a new NATO member flying the same aeroplane — wanted more of them. Twenty-two aircraft went to the Polish Air Force in 2003 and 2004 for a symbolic sum, widely reported as one euro each, with the last nine landing at Bydgoszcz on 4 August 2004. One airframe stayed in Germany for the Luftwaffenmuseum at Berlin-Gatow.

On 18 September 1997 the wing was given the name "Steinhoff". Johannes Steinhoff, born in Thuringia in 1913, flew for the Wehrmacht’s Luftwaffe from the first day of the war to nearly the last, claimed 176 victories in 993 operational sorties, was one of the officers who confronted Göring in the fighter pilots’ revolt of January 1945, and finished the war on the Me 262 with Adolf Galland’s Jagdverband 44.

On 18 April 1945, taking off from Munich-Riem, his Me 262 struck debris, swung off the runway and exploded. Steinhoff was burned over most of his body. He spent two years in hospital and underwent something in the order of sixty-nine operations; his eyelids were rebuilt by a British surgeon at the RAF hospital at Halton. He was released in 1947, worked in ceramics and advertising, and joined the West German rearmament office in 1952 as an air adviser.

The second career is the reason the name is on the hangar. Steinhoff was one of the first three German pilots retrained on jets by the United States Air Force, became a Brigadegeneral in 1958, and took over as Inspekteur der Luftwaffe in 1966 in the middle of the Starfighter crisis, when the F-104 was killing German pilots at a rate that had become a national scandal. He treated it as a training problem rather than an aircraft problem and drove it down: German total losses fell from 44.3 per 100,000 flying hours in 1965 to 9.3 per 100,000 in 1967. From 1971 to 1974 he chaired the NATO Military Committee, the alliance’s senior military body.

None of that resolves the question, and the Bundeswehr does not pretend it does. The 2018 Traditionserlass is blunt that the Wehrmacht as an institution is not worthy of tradition for the armed forces of a democratic state under the rule of law, and that individuals may be admitted only on a careful case-by-case examination. Steinhoff is the case the rule was written for: a man who served a criminal regime to the end and then spent thirty years building the democratic air force that replaced it. At the Bitburg cemetery ceremony of 5 May 1985 that so embarrassed Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl, it was Steinhoff who turned and shook the hand of the American general Matthew Ridgway. Asked afterwards why, he said it just seemed to be the right thing to do.

Laage took the Luftwaffe’s first six Eurofighters on 30 April 2004, all of them twin-seaters, because the base’s job was to teach the type rather than to fight with it. The 2nd Squadron had stood down as an F-4F Phantom unit in April 2002 and came back as the German Eurofighter conversion squadron. Every German Eurofighter pilot since has done the type course here, and under a cooperation agreement Austrian pilots convert at Laage too.

That has made one airfield in Mecklenburg the gatekeeper of German fast-jet flying, and the pipeline is being rebuilt around it: elementary flying training, done in Arizona for decades, is coming home, with Lufthansa Aviation Training contracted to run it at Rostock-Laage from 1 February 2027 for roughly fifty trainees a year on the Diamond DA40 NG.

The other half of the training mission is the Waffenschule der Luftwaffe, commissioned at Laage on 1 October 2019 and initially riding on Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 73’s infrastructure and aircraft. It runs the German weapons instructor course — the equivalent of the American Weapons School patch — for Eurofighter pilots and for fighter control officers, a course of roughly 140 days. It started with nine staff and about twenty students a year and was planned to grow to something like thirty military and civilian posts. Concentrating conversion, weapons instruction and, from 2027, elementary training on one field is efficient and fragile in equal measure.

On 6 January 2022 the first Eurofighters of Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 71 "Richthofen" were pulled out of their hangars at Wittmundhafen and flown to Laage. Nineteen aircraft and about 240 soldiers and civilian staff made the move, which was completed by the end of that month, because Wittmund’s runway was about to be dug up in February and most of the base dated from the 1960s. Crews rotated between Ostfriesland and Mecklenburg every fortnight.

They brought the northern quick reaction alert with them: two armed Eurofighters at readiness 365 days a year to intercept anything that goes wrong in German airspace, from an airliner that stops talking to a Russian aircraft on the Baltic without a flight plan. While the detachment was at Laage the crews flew one or two practice Tango scrambles a day on top of the real ones.

It was supposed to last until 2024. It lasted until 2026. The first Richthofen Eurofighters flew home to Wittmund on 17 July 2025, and the alert pair itself followed on 13 July 2026, three and a half years after it arrived — and even then on an interim arrangement, using the western shelter loop, with the full rebuild of Wittmundhafen running to 2032 at a cost of some 774 million euros.

In between, Laage got a visit nobody had planned for. On 23 September 2025 F-15Js of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force landed here, the first Japanese fighter aircraft ever to come to Germany, on the outbound leg of Operation Atlantic Eagles — Japan’s first fighter deployment to Europe and North America, begun on 14 September. The chief of the German air force, Generalleutnant Holger Neumann, was on the apron with his Japanese counterpart to watch them arrive.