RAeS Lecture: Fledglings of the Third Reich

The National Socialist Flyers Corps (NSFK) instructed Nazi Germany’s ‘Aviation Hitler Youth’ boys and other aspirants of flight in all matters of aviation. Intended as a preparatory school for Luftwaffe personnel of the future, the organisation delivered both theoretical and practical aeronautical training to these keen young aviators. More sinisterly, however, they also intertwined their instruction with virulent Nazi ideology and propaganda. This lecture determines how the NSFK attempted to entice Germany’s youth into flying for both the Führer and the fatherland. Given that a considerable segment of Luftwaffe personnel either administered or received instruction via the NSFK, the lecture argues that eschewing study of this flying corps simplifies our understanding of the main German air force's military and political makeup in the Third Reich.
Dr Victoria Taylor is an award-winning aviation historian who completed her PhD thesis on the Luftwaffe and National Socialism in the Third Reich at the University of Hull and Sheffield Hallam University. Her main historical focus is on British and German aviation during the interwar period and the Second World War. In recognition of her PhD research, she was awarded the 2020 Royal Air Force Museum Doctoral Academic Prize in 2021. She also completed her Masters in Historical Research (MRes) on Britain’s wartime and post-war mythologization of Operation CHASTISE - better known as the ‘Dambusters raid’ - at Hull, for which she was awarded the Royal Air Force Museum’s RAF Centenary Master’s Academic Prize in 2019.
Victoria sits on the Editorial Board for the Royal Aeronautical Society’s 'Journal of Aeronautical History' and is also part of its 'Aeronautical Heritage Specialist Group. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the cross-Party Spitfire AA810 restoration project in the House of Lords and has delivered teaching on air power to junior RAF officers as part of the Joint Services Command and Staff College courses at the Defence Academy, Shrivenham. She is an Associate of the Freeman Air and Space Institute based at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, as well as an Ambassador for both the National Spitfire Project and the Royal Air Force Charitable Trust.

[@jmcn2910]

Excellent presentation

[@franciscorompana2985]

You found any Haunebu, Glocke, Hauneburg-Geräte, or Reichsflugscheiben, besides the Heinkels or BMWs?😅

[@vertexlogic]

Nazis??

[@franciscorompana2985]

They are in the US now.😅📎

[@Cuffsmaster]

@@franciscorompana2985 Republicans in the US

[@franciscorompana2985]

@@Cuffsmaster Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945-59. Some were former members and leaders of the Nazi Party.