Anthony Fokker was twenty-one and studying in Germany when he flew the Spin — the Spider, his own design — around a church tower in Haarlem to become the first Dutchman to fly a Dutch-built aircraft over the Netherlands. He stayed in Germany because that was where the money and the customers were. In 1912 he set up Fokker Aeroplanbau in Berlin, then moved the operation to Görries, a suburb southwest of Schwerin in Mecklenburg, where the company that mattered was founded as Fokker Aviatik GmbH on 12 February 1912. The location is easy to overlook and it explains what followed. Fokker had already sold several Spin monoplanes to the German government; when war came two years later he had a factory on German soil, a working relationship with the German Army, and no particular reason to refuse an order.

His first design produced in numbers for the Germans, the M.5, was close to a copy of the Morane-Saulnier G, rebuilt with a steel-tube fuselage. What made it lethal was an addition. Firing a machine gun forward meant firing through one's own propeller arc, and Fokker developed a synchronization gear — similar to a mechanism Franz Schneider had patented — that timed the bursts between the blades. The armed M.5 became the Fokker Eindecker, and for months in 1915 and 1916 it made the western front a killing ground for Allied crews in aircraft that could not shoot straight ahead. The period has a name: the Fokker Scourge. It ended only when the Nieuport 11 and Airco DH.2 arrived. Later the German government forced Fokker and Junkers into an uneasy joint venture, the Junkers-Fokker Aktiengesellschaft, on 20 October 1917. It did not last, but Platz absorbed Junkers's structural thinking, and out of it came the Dr.I triplane flown by Manfred von Richthofen and the D.VII the Allies demanded by name.

In 1919, owing the German state enormous sums in back taxes — 14,250,000 marks in income tax alone — Fokker went home. He founded a new works near Amsterdam with backing from the Steenkolen Handels Vereniging and called it the Nederlandse Vliegtuigenfabriek — the Dutch Aircraft Factory — specifically to keep his own name off the building. He did not arrive empty-handed. Despite the disarmament clauses of Versailles he secured an export permit and ran six entire trains of parts and 180 aircraft across the border, among them 117 C.Is, D.VIIs and D.VIIIs. That stock bought a running start, and the 1920s made Fokker the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. The F.VIIa/3m trimotor of 1925 flew for 54 airlines and held 40% of the American market as late as 1936. Richard Byrd crossed the Atlantic in an F.VII named America in 1927; Amelia Earhart crossed as a passenger in one in 1928; Charles Kingsford Smith took the Southern Cross across the Pacific the same year.

The reversal came from an unglamorous direction. In 1931 a Transcontinental & Western Air Fokker F-10 came apart over Kansas, and the investigation traced the structural failure to rot in the wooden wing. Among the dead was Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach, which turned an accident into a national story. Every Fokker in the United States was grounded, along with other types built on the same wing principles. Fokker had moved to America in 1923 and built a branch there; by 1930 it had been absorbed into General Motors, and in 1931, tired of answering to GM management, he resigned. Nevil Shute, negotiating a licence in 1934, found him shrewd and already a sick man. He died in New York on 23 December 1939, aged 49. Within months the Dutch factories were in German hands, making Bücker trainers and Junkers Ju 52 parts; by 1945 they had been stripped by the occupiers and finished off by Allied bombing.

The rebuild was slow and undignified — gliders, autobuses, converting war-surplus Dakotas. Then the S-11 trainer sold, the S-14 Machtrainer became one of the world's first purpose-built jet trainers, and a new factory opened beside Schiphol in 1951. The F-27 Friendship of 1958 became the world's best-selling turboprop airliner, close to 800 sold by 1986; the jet F-28 Fellowship followed in 1962, 241 built. Fokker assembled F-16s for the four-nation European consortium and built satellites, including the first Dutch one in 1968. What killed the company was ambition: developing the Fokker 50 and Fokker 100 simultaneously sent costs out of control, forcing a 212-million-guilder government bailout in 1987 and a shotgun marriage with DASA in 1992. On 22 January 1996 Daimler-Benz decided to concentrate on cars and cut Fokker loose; Bombardier looked at the wreckage and walked away on 27 February. On 15 March 1996 Fokker was declared bankrupt, and roughly 8,000 people lost their jobs. The name survived in pieces: Stork's aerostructures business became Fokker Technologies, bought by GKN for €706 million in 2015, and a successor called Fokker Next Gen announced in 2023 that it is designing a hydrogen-powered regional airliner.