Wittmundhafen was not built for aeroplanes. Work began south of Wittmund in 1911 on a naval airship station, one of a chain along the German North Sea coast serving the Kaiserliche Marine’s Zeppelin scouting force. LZ 90 made the first landing there on 7 November 1916 and was lost to a storm the very next night, which is about as bad a start as an airfield can have. Three more airships moved in during April 1917, and the navy formally took the site over that year, changing the spelling to Wittmundhaven.

The end came on 23 June 1919. On the day the interned High Seas Fleet opened its seacocks at Scapa Flow, airship crews across the German stations wrecked their own craft in the sheds rather than hand them over. At Wittmundhafen the two remaining naval airships were destroyed by their own people. It is a small, characteristic detail of that summer: the aircraft were broken by the men who flew them, on the same afternoon the fleet went down.

One did survive. L 61 was kept in preservation and repaired at Wittmundhafen over nearly two years, to be delivered to Italy as war reparations. On its final test flight, according to an account by the airship mechanic Emil Kraft, he and a colleague stowed away without permission for a thirteen-hour run up to 3,000 metres over Emden, Borkum, the Frisian islands, Bremerhaven, Hamburg and the Baltic before returning to Wittmundhafen. Kraft wrote of being shaken by invisible giant fists as the weather closed in. He was not punished.

The Luftwaffe of the Third Reich rebuilt the airfield from 1938 and finished at the end of 1940 with three runways of 1,200 metres. Heinkel He 111 bombers used it until 1943, Messerschmitt Bf 110 night fighters were based there for the defence of the Reich, and early in 1944 II./Kampfgeschwader 54 staged through for Operation Steinbock, the last German bomber offensive against Britain.

The strange part of the record is what came next. On 26 April 1944 the 1st Staffel of Jagdgeschwader 400 was formed at Wittmundhafen and in June it received its first Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, the rocket-powered point-defence interceptor that climbed at extraordinary rates, flew for about seven and a half minutes of powered endurance and then glided back. The Staffel moved to Brandis near Leipzig on 25 July 1944, where the type saw what little combat it ever saw. For three months East Frisia hosted one of the very few rocket fighter units in history.

Flying at Wittmundhafen stopped in March 1945 under Allied bombing, and the Royal Air Force began rebuilding the site in 1950. When the Bundeswehr arrived a decade later it inherited a field whose bones were wartime and whose surfaces were British.

On 21 April 1961, the forty-third anniversary of Manfred von Richthofen’s death, Federal President Heinrich Lübke granted Jagdgeschwader 71 the honour name "Richthofen". It was the first German operational flying unit named after a famous aviator, and it took the stylised red R of the Wehrmacht’s Jagdgeschwader 2 "Richthofen", adding a NATO star. That second half of the sentence is where the trouble lives: the emblem the modern wing wears is inherited not from Richthofen’s own Jagdgeschwader 1 of 1917 but from a Luftwaffe wing of the Second World War that carried his name.

The rules changed around it. The Traditionserlass of 20 September 1982, issued by Hans Apel, stated that the "Drittes Reich" as an unjust regime could found no tradition, but described the military under National Socialism as partly culpably entangled and partly blamelessly misused, and avoided ruling on the Wehrmacht as an institution. The decree of 28 March 2018, issued by Ursula von der Leyen after the Franco A. affair and the barracks-name reviews, was blunt: for the armed forces of a democratic state under the rule of law, the Wehrmacht as an institution is not worthy of tradition. Individuals may still be taken up, but only after a careful case-by-case examination.

Richthofen himself is not the difficulty. He died on 21 April 1918, fifteen years before the National Socialists took power, and the Royal Air Force buried him with military honours. The difficulty is the chain of units, and the wing walked straight into it in 2017. The deputy commodore, Oberstleutnant Gero Finke, put the annual Richthofentreffen at Wittmund under the motto "100 Jahre vom Jagdgeschwader 1 zum Taktischen Luftwaffengeschwader 71 Richthofen".

The Kommandierender General der Luftwaffe wrote to him. The letter, reported on 3 July 2017, said the misleading title drew a direct line from the modern wing to the former Richthofen wings of the imperial era and of the Third Reich, and thereby implied an unbroken line of tradition from the Luftwaffe to the Wehrmacht. The general demanded an unambiguous clarification at the event itself and left no doubt about the air force’s critical engagement with its history. That is a striking document: a serving German general ordering one of his own wings to stop claiming a hundred years of lineage.

It is worth saying plainly, because German base pages often do not. The Bundeswehr’s Luftwaffe was founded in 1956 and is deliberately not a continuation of the Wehrmacht’s. The name over the gate at Wittmund is a considered exception, not an oversight, and the Luftwaffe has been forced to defend it in writing at least once. The argument is not closed, and a page that presents the red R as uncomplicated heritage is not telling the truth about it.

Jagdgeschwader 71 was commissioned at Ahlhorn on 6 June 1959 by the Inspekteur der Luftwaffe, Josef Kammhuber, with about fifty Canadair Sabres; the first two had been flown in on 26 February that year by Erich Hartmann, the wing’s first commodore and the highest-scoring fighter pilot in history, and Oberstleutnant Peters. The wing was assigned to NATO on 1 June 1960 and moved to Wittmundhafen on 29 April 1963.

It was also first in line for the Starfighter, taking the F-104G on 9 April 1963 ahead of every other Bundeswehr fighter wing. Nobody at the time understood what that would cost the Luftwaffe as a whole, and the wing flew the type for eleven years; Hauptmann Harry Giese made the last Starfighter flight out to Erding on 19 September 1974.

The Phantom era was the long one. The first two F-4F arrived on 31 August 1973 for technical training, the first operational aircraft followed on 7 March 1974, and the type stayed until the middle of 2013 — thirty-nine years, and 250,000 F-4 flying hours reached on 30 May 2007. In 1988 the wing gave up its secondary fighter-bomber assignment; from 22 July 1993 it took the upgraded F-4F ICE with the AN/APG-65 radar and AMRAAM, which is what kept the aircraft credible into the 2000s. In 2007, for the second year running, it was the Luftwaffe’s most active fighter wing, flying over 7,600 hours.

The first Eurofighters landed on 8 April 2013 and took over the alert on 1 July. The wing has flown without an accident since 1999, which for a single-seat fighter unit over more than a quarter of a century is a genuinely unusual record and rather more of an achievement than anything painted on the fin.

Almost everything at Wittmundhafen dated from the 1960s, and the Eurofighter needs different infrastructure from a Phantom. The answer was to close the airfield and rebuild it. The first jets left for Rostock-Laage on 6 January 2022 and the move of all nineteen Eurofighters, with roughly 240 military and civilian staff rotating between the two bases every fortnight, finished by the end of that month. Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 73 "Steinhoff" at Laage hosted them, and the northern alert pair stood duty from there.

The programme is one of the largest military construction jobs in Germany. The Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Bau und Liegenschaften lists about 351 million euros across the major measures alone: roughly 155 million for the runway with its drainage, lighting and taxiway connections, 68 million for an aircraft maintenance hall, 60 million for the shelter loops, 33 million for a four-pack aircraft shelter, 27 million for a noise-suppression hall, and four million each for a guard building and a weapons store. The full planned investment for the period 2020 to 2031 is given as about 774 million euros.

The schedule slipped, as it does. The original plan had the aircraft back in 2024. The first four Eurofighters flew in on 17 July 2025, by which time the runway, the maintenance hall, the noise-suppression hall and the main access road were finished. Full flying operations are expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, and construction runs well into the 2030s. Oberst Björn Andersen, the commodore since 27 February 2023, has commanded a wing that spent most of his tenure flying from somebody else’s airfield.

There is one piece of Wittmund that never moved. The adversary aircraft are not Luftwaffe machines: the Canadian company Top Aces flies civil-registered Douglas A-4N Skyhawks there, since early 2015, and Alpha Jets since 2020, providing dissimilar air combat training and target facilities. BAE Systems held the work before them with F-100F Super Sabres from 1991 to 2002. On 19 January 2026 Germany awarded Top Aces a ten-year contract worth up to 420 million euros, running to 2035, covering the air force, army and navy.