From the Wasserkuppe to Darmstadt

The DFS grew out of the Rhön-Rossitten Gesellschaft, founded in 1925 by the gliding pioneers of the Wasserkuppe. In 1933 the new regime nationalised it as the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug, moved it to Griesheim airfield outside Darmstadt and put it under the meteorologist Walter Georgii. It began with 73 staff. By summer 1940, relocated to the Luftwaffe base at Ainring in Bavaria, it employed 680 people, with institutes for meteorology, instruments, tailless aircraft and aircraft design.

Gliders for a nation

Its design office, led by Hans Jacobs, shaped German gliding. The Kranich two-seater of 1935 was the most widely built German two-seat glider of the period. The Habicht was a fully aerobatic sailplane whose displays inside the stadium at the 1936 Berlin Olympics thrilled the crowds. The Weihe and the Olympia Meise, chosen for the cancelled 1940 Olympic gliding contest, ran to hundreds of examples. After a fatal accident at the Wasserkuppe in 1938, a DFS competition produced the airbrakes still known as Schempp-Hirth brakes.

The silent assault

The DFS 230 showed the military what gliders could do. First flown in 1937, it carried nine soldiers besides the pilot and could dive steeply onto its target behind a braking parachute. On 10 May 1940 DFS 230s landed paratroopers directly on the roof of the Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael. They flew into Crete in 1941 and, in September 1943, landed the commandos who snatched Benito Mussolini from the Gran Sasso. More than 1,600 were built, and they hauled supplies into encircled pockets from Demyansk and Stalingrad to Budapest and Breslau.

Rockets and tailless wings

The institute also worked at the edge of the possible. Alexander Lippisch’s department developed tailless aircraft, including the rocket-powered DFS 194 of 1940, and on 2 January 1939 his whole team moved to Messerschmitt in Augsburg, where the work became the Me 163 Komet. DFS engineers tested Mistel composite aircraft, the Me 328 and Argus pulse jets, and designed the DFS 228 rocket reconnaissance glider and the swept-wing DFS 346, which the Soviet Union completed and flew after the war.

Waves, records and an ending

The DFS proved the existence of mountain wave lift, and on 11 October 1940 Erich Klöckner climbed a Kranich to 11,460 metres, an altitude record the FAI recognised only in the late 1990s. The test pilot Hanna Reitsch made her name there. The DFS was dissolved on 28 April 1945, its engineering school following that August. Its research role passed in spirit to today’s German aerospace centre, the DLR.

Fábricas

• Griesheim airfield · Griesheim, near Darmstadt — Headquarters from 1933
• Fliegerhorst Ainring · Ainring, Bavaria — Headquarters from summer 1940 to 1945

Pessoas

• Walter Georgii · director — Meteorologist who led the DFS throughout
• Hans Jacobs · head of aircraft design — Designer of the Kranich, Habicht, Weihe and Olympia Meise
• Alexander Lippisch · head of tailless aircraft department — Moved to Messerschmitt with his team on 2 January 1939
• Hanna Reitsch · test pilot — Began her test flying career at the DFS

Recordes e pioneirismos

• Glider altitude 11,460 m, Erich Klöckner in a Kranich, 11 October 1940; recognised by the FAI in the late 1990s
• First fully aerobatic sailplane, the Habicht