Luftwaffe Colors 1941 to End War Set

The Luftwaffe from 1941 to the last months

The Luftwaffe changed its palette several times during the war and 1941 is one of the dividing lines. Gray-green tones replaced the older greens, lighter variants appeared in the south and over the sea, and in the last months a trio of late shades appeared that the factories mixed from whatever happened to be at hand. The eight paints in this box cover exactly this stretch, so among them you will find a fighter of 1943 as well as a machine with mismatched blotches from the spring of 1945.

Represented are Dark Green corresponding to RLM 83, Light Green RLM 82, Black Grey RLM 66 for cockpits and instrument panels, Grey Blue RLM 84, Light Blue RLM 76 for the undersides, Grey Green RLM 74 and then Grey Violet and Brown Violet. It is the last two tones that tend to be the hardest to find, and yet the late camouflage cannot do without them, because they form the transition between the green and the blue-gray part of the scheme.

The difference between the early and the late palette

The gap between the gray-green and the late dark green is smaller on a finished model than it looks in the bottle, so it pays to lay both down over a light base and to judge them in daylight. The blue-gray underside was never uniform: its shade varied between gray and blue depending on the maker of the paint, so a small deviation on a model is not a mistake but rather evidence of the reality of the time.

Late schemes also often combined old and new shades on one airframe, because repainting was done only where it was necessary. A model with visibly different areas is therefore not unfinished but historically more accurate than a uniformly sprayed one.