This is an acronym for “Deutsche Luft Hansa,” the German national airline that was founded in 1926.
References usually make a point of saying that this Lufthansa is not the legal predecessor of the modern Lufthansa.
That’s like saying American scientists at NASA put a man on the moon, or that Russian scientists put the first man in space. In either case, it was German scientists from the Peenemunde Rocket labs dating from Nazi Germany, who did the heavy lifting.
Even 50 years after the demise of the Third Reich, the Nazis were still the best engineers in the world.