As it marks its 100th anniversary, Lufthansa is breaking with decades of corporate caution and publicly confronting its deep ties to Nazi Germany, a move executives say reflects a broader shift toward institutional accountability in Europe’s largest economy.

“We at Lufthansa are proud of what we are today,” CEO Carsten Spohr said in remarks released Wednesday. “To then ignore the difficult, dark, terrible years would simply have been dishonest.”

The comments accompany a company-backed reexamination of Lufthansa’s origins and wartime role, including a new historical study and an exhibition at its visitors’ center. Both efforts are aimed at acknowledging how the airline’s predecessor, Deutsche Luft Hansa, was embedded in Adolf Hitler’s regime.

For years, Lufthansa emphasized a legal and organizational break between its Nazi-era predecessor, which ceased operations in 1946, and the modern company founded in 1953. That distinction, executives and historians now acknowledge, was partly designed to shield the carrier from reputational and legal fallout.

That strategy is being retired.

“This is about responsibility,” Spohr said, signaling a willingness to publicly own the airline’s past rather than frame it as a separate corporate chapter.

Founded in 1926, Deutsche Luft Hansa became a central player in Germany’s aviation infrastructure under the Third Reich. From the early 1930s, members of its board and supervisory board joined the Nazi Party. As the state airline, it routinely transported government officials and military personnel.

By World War II, the company had become closely integrated into Germany’s war economy. It supported the Luftwaffe and expanded into aircraft repair, maintenance and arms production. By 1944, more than two-thirds of its revenue came from the armaments sector.

Those activities, long downplayed in corporate histories, are now central to Lufthansa’s anniversary narrative.

“This was not a neutral commercial enterprise,” said Manfred Grieger, a historian who contributed to the new company-sponsored book. “It was part of the regime’s military and economic machinery.”

The reassessment also revisits Lufthansa’s use of forced labor, a subject that earlier internal studies examined but the company declined to fully acknowledge.

According to Grieger’s research, more than 12,000 people were exploited in Luft Hansa’s wartime production, repair and maintenance operations. Only recently did historians confirm that those forced laborers included children.

Lufthansa commissioned academic research into its past more than 25 years ago, but critics say the findings were never fully incorporated into public-facing narratives.

That is now changing.

The new history volume will be distributed to more than 100,000 employees worldwide, and company officials say it will be used in internal training programs and management education.

The move places Lufthansa among a growing group of major German companies — including automakers, banks and industrial firms — that have publicly revisited their Nazi-era records in recent years.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)