The Würzburg radar was the primary ground-based gun laying radar for both the Luftwaffe and the German Army during World War II. Initial development took place before the war, entering service in 1940. Eventually over 4,000 Würzburgs of various models were produced. It took its name from the city of Würzburg as the project leader liked geographical names.

In January 1934 Telefunken met with German radar researchers, notably Dr. Rudolf Kühnhold of the Communications Research Institute of the German Navy and Dr. Hans Hollmann, an expert in microwaves, who informed them of their work on an early warning radar. Telefunken's director of research, Dr. Wilhelm Runge, was unimpressed, and dismissed the idea as science fiction. The developers then went their own way and formed GEMA, eventually collaborating with Lorenz on the development of the Freya and Seetakt systems.

By the spring of 1935 GEMA's successes made it clear to Runge that the idea was workable after all, so he immediately started a crash program at Telefunken to develop radar systems of their own. With Lorenz already making progress on the early warning front, Runge had the Telefunken team concentrate on a short-range gun laying system instead. Management apparently felt it to be as uninteresting as Runge had a year earlier, and assigned it a low priority for development. Nevertheless, development started and by the summer they had built a working experimental unit working in the 50 cm band that was able to generate strong returns off a target Junkers Ju 52. By the next summer, the experimental setup had been developed into a real prototype machine known as the Darmstadt, which offered a range accuracy of 50 m at 5 km, not nearly enough for gun laying. Attitudes changed in late 1938, when a full development contract was received from the Luftwaffe.