Historica Wiki
Advertisement

The Lipetsk fighter-pilot school, formally the Scientific Experimental and Personnel Training Station, was a secret training school for German fighter pilots operated by the Reichswehr at Lipetsk in Soviet Russia from 1926 to 1933. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from operating any form of air force, as well as prohibiting the production and import of any form of aircraft to the country. The Reichswehr secretly decided to reform the German Air Force outside of Germany's borders, with their shadowy Black Reichswehr wing sending Major Anton von Beck to the USSR dozens of times from 1925 to 1929 to establish a secret airbase at Lipetsk in the Russian SFSR. The Bolsheviks allowed the Germans to develop a modern air force on Russian soil in exchange for the Germans teaching the Soviets how to build aircraft engines, and, in 1929, Berlin Police officers Gereon Rath and Reinhold Gräf photographed the school from an aircraft flown by pilot Siegfried Stoltz and his navigator Robert Sauer. The German government refused to make use of the photographs, as they tacitly supported the formation of a modern air force. From 1926 to 1933, the school trained 120 fighter pilots, 300 ground personnel, and 450 administrative and training staff, forming the core of the future Luftwaffe. During the early 1930s, the USSR's growing ties to the West and Germany's closer approach to France, as well as the Soviets' disappointment with the lack of development carried out at the school, led to a deterioration in German-Soviet relations. The rise of Nazi Germany in 1933 led to the Soviets closing down the German fighter school, but, by then, the Germans had already formed a cadre of warplane experts who played a key role in founding Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe in the years leading up to World War II.

Advertisement