Scope of the collection

The museum at Berlin-Gatow Airfield houses the majority of the Bundeswehr’s aviation history collection. It comprises a wide range of historical artefacts relating to military aviation in Germany, spanning from the German Empire to today’s Bundeswehr on active deployment. The collection focuses primarily on the German air forces, but also covers Allied life in Germany. Now numbering over 600,000 objects, it includes more than 200 aircraft, over 60 surface-to-air missile systems, radar and other large-scale equipment, as well as documents, art, uniforms, personal papers and archives, training materials and much more.

The merger of the Air Force Museum with the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr enables the optimization of the shared storage facilities for the collection and the expansion of research involving and on the exhibits. All in all, the Military History Museum holds a collection of over 1.6 million items.

The collection is divided into the following areas:

Army air defence collection

This part of the collection is currently still housed in northern Germany. It documents the development of aviation and air defence within the Bundeswehr.

Contact

All departments answer enquiries, support exhibition projects and contribute their expertise to a wide range of events.

Your artefact in the Military History Museum

Would you like to pass on objects from your own history or that of your family to future generations? We collect and preserve stories and artefacts. For this reason, we are always looking for material relating to German military history from its beginnings to the present day.

If you would like to offer us an item, please send us an email and include a photograph of it. Please do not send items to us without prior arrangement. Contact us in advance and we will discuss the procedure with you.