The Luftwaffe, a branch of the German Wehrmacht, had been created by the Nazi regime prior to World War II in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, which barred Germany from having an air force. Moreover, the air arm was headed by Hermann Göring, a World War I flying ace and a career military aviator, but also a member of Adolf Hitler's innermost circle. As a Nazi creation presided over by a high-ranking Nazi, the German air force enjoyed a kind of privileged status among the branches of the German military. This was a dramatic contrast with the Allied powers, in which the air force was typically regarded as a kind of military stepchild, second to the army and navy. Indeed, Hitler, who, throughout the war, placed great faith in "wonder weapons," saw the air force as just such a weapon, the sovereign means of achieving his territorial ambitions and one that was even more important than the army and far more important than the navy. Hitler intended to use the air force as an offensive weapon, which would reach out to intimidate his neighbors. For this reason, he allocated extensive resources to the Luftwaffe in an effort to build it up from post-World War I nonexistence to a force that would overmatch the air arms of France and Great Britain.

Hitler emphasized the production of large numbers of advanced aircraft, and he achieved just that. However, the production was devoted almost exclusively to single-engine fighters and twin-engine light or medium bombers. These were short-range aircraft designed for short wars, and they were incapable of the long-range strategic bombing that might have been of great use, possibly even decisive, in the campaigns against Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The almost complete absence of long-range strategic bombers in the Luftwaffe was another key contrast with the air forces of Great Britain and the United States, which put great emphasis on four-engine heavy bombers.

The absence of heavy bombers was not the Luftwaffe's only serious deficiency. Goring presided over an unnecessarily complex and redundant command structure, which was not rationalized until the creation of the Luftwaffe High Command late in the war, in the middle of 1944. By this time, the Luftwaffe had been hobbled by procurement problems, which a unified command would have done much to solve. Such a command would also have been able to shift the make-up of the Luftwaffe from the offensive force that had entered the war to the defensive force required in the war's endgame. Goring exercised personal and sometimes capricious control of the Luftwaffe, and because he was an intimate of Hitler, the fuhrer did little or nothing to keep him in check. Goring proved to be a singularly poor personnel manager who interposed between himself and the airmen in the field a layer of staff officers combining inexperience with a desire to please their chief, often at the expense of the hard realities. The result was that Goring continually received the overly optimistic reports of yes men. As the Luftwaffe increasingly yielded air superiority and then air supremacy to the Allies, Goring seemed simply to give up on his leadership responsibilities, and, by late 1944, the air arm fell under the personal direction of Hitler, who was quite incapable of managing it. . .

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