get gliders airborne. In 1933 with the Nazis in power, the RRG as an independent society could no longer exist in a uniform Nazi Germany. Therefore the RRG was broken up, and the flying club was partly absorbed by the Hitler Youth. The design and research section was preserved under the new name of "Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug" (DFS), the German Research Society for Gliding. In the new society, Lippisch was allowed to retain his post as chief designer. Under his leadership the DFS continued to turn out a series of successful sailplanes. Up to World War II, RRG and DFS were major forces in German aeronautical design. When Theodore von Kármán looked back at the Treaty of Versailles, he saw the motor-flight prohibition as a mistake: I have always thought that the allies were short-sighted when they banned motor flying in Germany. They stimulated the very development they wanted to stop: the growth of German aviation. Experiments with gliders in sport sharpened German thinking in aerodynamics, structural design, and meteorology. In aerodynamics, for instance, they took attention away from the limited double- and triple-wing arrangements of World War I planes and showed how the single long span increases efficiency. The relation between span and chord is known as aspect ratio, and gliders showed that if this ratio is high efficiency is improved. Though he had left Germany long before writing, Kármán recalled some advances made there: In structural design, gliders showed us in Germany how to distributed weight in a light structure, and revealed new facts about vibration...we uncovered the dangers of hidden turbulence in the air, and in general opened up the study of meteorological influences on aviation. See also RRG Prüfling RRG Falke RRG Professor Hanna Reitsch References Gliding in Germany Hesse East Prussia 20th-century German aviation Rhön Mountains