In 1939-1940, the Luftwaffe helped the German army to astonishingly rapid success in both Eastern and Western Europe, but failed to win control of the skies over Britain. Later on, despite its best efforts, it could not prevent the defeat of Germany either by day, or by night, owing to constant Allied bombing of Germany's factories and cities by a numerically overwhelming force of bombers based in England. This was coupled with the advances of the Soviet armies from the East, as numbers of available German aircraft dwindled in the face of ever-growing numbers of Soviet aircraft. The Luftwaffe was, however, notable in putting the world's first jet fighter and the world's only rocket-powered fighter into action during the war.

Between 1955 and 1990, there were two German air forces as a result of the splitting of the defeated Germany in 1945 into two, but the air force of the GDR was dissolved and its structure taken over by the Luftwaffe in 1990 upon the German reunification. Only in Bosnia in 1999 has the Luftwaffe ever seen war action since the end of World War II.