[Leica] Leica manufacture during WW2

[douglas.sharp at gmx.de (Douglas Sharp)]

Excellent and interesting Marc,

I heard the IIIc story as part of the "Mosquito" mythology,high 
speed,unarmed 
night flights to neutral Sweden to pick up ball-bearings and precision 
components for the British war effort. Any truth in this?

The allied airforces were in fact so "effective" at the bombing of German 
industry, railway and canal transportation that Speer 
(Reichsr?stungsminister) 
even managed to increase strategic (Kriegswichtig) production figures by 40% 
between 1943 and the end of hostilities. Two typical examples: the 
production of 
ball bearings in Schweinfurt and the refinery and carbon black factories in 
Hannover-Misburg (where I live) was never reduced to any great extent, 
although 
both were primary targets. Schweinfurt went underground, in Misburg a dummy 
Deurag-Nerag complex was built out of wood and canvas in the fields a couple 
of 
miles out of town - this got totally plastered - the real storage tanks at 
the 
refinery were enclosed with wooden panels painted to resemble farm buildings 
and 
the canal spur to the loading quays camouflaged as woodland.Needless to say 
the
"forced labour" camp (Neuengamme- Aussenstelle Misburg)about 500 yards from 
here 
on the canal bank,was heavily damaged,the prisoners were not allowed to use 
nearby air-raid shelters. BTW, 2 virtually undamaged munitions factories 
(Muna) 
were dicovered in a local wood in Misburg a few weeks after the capitulation.
The Ford-Werke in Cologne also sustained so little damage that the myth 
arose 
that the US airforce had been ordered to leave it alone. Fact is, bombing 
practises and aiming were just not accurate.
In the case of the railways most of the mainline links from north to south 
and
east to west were still operating even in early 1945.
The colossal damage caused by the firestorms in L?beck and Hamburg, both 
cities 
had a predominance of timber framed houses in narrow streets, eventually led 
to 
the operations against Dresden, which contrary to the opinion of many 
historians, did have flourishing strategic industries.
The urban planning and architecture of cities like Berlin made it impossible 
to 
start the initial fires required for a firestorm and led to the carpet 
bombing 
"tausend-bomber" raids.
It's interesting that the Luftwaffe called this kind of operation 
"Coventrierung" after the raids on Coventry in the UK. It has been reported 
that 
the authorities in Britain had cracked the Luftwaffe communication codes and 
could have warned the people of Coventry, but, in order to retain secrecy, 
they 
didn't.
Douglas


Marc James Small wrote:
> At 04:47 PM 5/28/05 -0400, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
> 
> Larry
> 
> Thanks for a most fascinating post.  A few minor emendations are interlined
> below.
> 
> 
>>During WW2 almost the entire output of Leitz/Wetzlar was taken by the 
>>German military services although a substantial number of civilian garb 
>>Leica IIIc cameras were made for foreign exchange purposes. The 
>>Luftwaffe Leica with its grey Vulcanite body was used by the Luftwaffe 
>>(of course) for reportage and not for gun cameras as popularly supposed. 
>>Other Leicas were supplied to German army (Leica HEER) and navy units. 
>>Some Leicas were even assembled out of spare parts in the US by 
>>Leitz/New York and supplied to the US military. Often these were fitted 
>>with a Wollensack lens. These cameras were all minor variations of the 
>>Leica IIIc. 
> 
> 
> COMMENT:  The IIIc was only introduced in 1940, and the ELNY Leicas were
> therefore made to earlier standards, mainly, as I recall, IIIa's.  The
> IIIc's sold to the German government were primarily used by civilian
> agencies though some were used by the Heer and the Luftwaffe.  The late
> Theo Kisselbach drafted an article for VIEWFINDER some years back about his
> service in a German military photographic team using an 80cm lens to catch
> pictures from France of German bombers returning over the Cliffs of Dover
>>from bombing Britain in 1940:  the prints are remarkable.  But most of the
> cameras which went to the Government ended up in rather mundane uses in
> various public agencies and some even ended up in the hands of the RSHA and
> the Kripo and Gestapo.  The cameras made for foreign exchange were almost
> entirely marketed in Sweden to assuage the high price for steel charged to
> the Reich;  these cameras were equipped with Zeiss lenses, mainly either
> 2/5cm or 1.5/5cm CZJ Sonnar T's.  One of these cameras was purchased by the
> British Embassy and sent back to the UK for analysis, as no IIIc had
> previously appeared in Allied hands.  And a few foreign-exchange cameras
> were marketed in Switzerland and Spain, though these were few in number.
> 
> 
>>As the war progressed, German camera manufacturing quality 
>>gradually deteriorated as supplies became difficult to obtain and as 
>>skilled workers were transferred to militarily more important 
>>assignments. As reported in postwar documents, several precision Leitz 
>>machinists and toolmakers were assigned to the German atomic bomb 
>>project. 
> 
> 
> COMMENT:  I do not believe that Leitz suffered much problem from workers
> being drafted to other manufacturing tasks, though its workforce was
> depleted by its younger male workers being drafted into the military for
> combat service, especially towards the end of the War.  The German A-Bomb
> project was effectively ended by Speer in late 1943 and the workers drafted
> for its use were returned to their original employment, with only a hard
> core of nuclear physicists remaining on hand.  (See, THE FARM HALL
> TRANSCRIPTS for discussion, a most fascinating book.)
> 
> 
>>The bombs missed the Leitz factory building itself. Apart from the fact 
>>that most of the windows were blown out, the machinery remained largely 
>>intact. 
> 
> 
> COMMENT:  See the Reports of the US and UK Strategic Bombing Surveys.  Even
> direct hits rarely harmed industrial machinery.  The VW plant at Wolfsburg
> suffered several direct hits which blew off its roof.  The damage to the
> plant itself was minimal, and the workers found some damaged tentage and
> used that to cover the roof, a condition which remained until at least 1948
> before the money could be found to repair the building.
> 
> 
>>When 
>>American troops occupied Wetzlar in 1945, a citizen delegation, headed 
>>by Dr. Elsie Leitz persuaded the Americans that there would be no 
>>resistance. The town surrendered without a shot being fired. 
> 
> 
> COMMENT:  No!  A thousand times no.  The facts were laid out to me by the
> late Tink Ewald, then the photographer for the US Engineer Battalion which
> captured the plant.  This is not to disparage the many contributions both
> to social consciousness and to the Leitz camera works made by Else (note
> spelling) Leitz.  A cousin of hers, Henri Dumur, was the business manager
> of hte plant during the War Years.  He simply hoisted a Swiss flag and this
> caused the battalion commander to ask for instructions from his higher
> headquarters.  Bafflement resulted, and the message went eventually to
> SACEUR, which responded to find out more.  (I am most positive that
> Eisenhower was never informed of this, espeically at the time in question,
> when he was having his gonads hauled over the coals for his failure to
> press on to the capture of Berlin as he had been directed.)  The Battalion
> then sent a patrol to the plant and learned that it was the Leitz plant.
> They reported this up through channels and, in a few weeks, SGT Emil
> Keller, a former employee of the Leitz Wetzlar plant and of ELNY and a
> personal friend of the Leitz family, was delegated to serve as the
> Occupation Manager of the works under the direction of COL Carl Nelson, the
> US Representative on the Allied Committee for Optical Reparations.  (Both
> Keller and Nelson still live, incidentally, and both have confirmed the
> chain of events to me.)  
> 
> 
>>Still, many 
>>of the skilled former Leitz employees had moved to other areas and would 
>>not return to the plant.
> 
> 
> COMMENT:  I have never heard this and would question it.  Hard-currency
> jobs were all but impossible to find in Gemany in the aftermath of the War
> -- for instance, VW "paid" its employees for the three years after the War
> by telling banks that they were good for the scrip they were issuing, and
> building cars by scrounging materials from bombed out buidlings and the
> like, often at the connivance of the British military which wished to
> procure vehicles and to which all production went until 1947, when civilian
> sales began.  Leitz received a contract with the Army PX system in the
> autumn of 1947 and sold almost all of its production through that market
> until 1948, when its production was restored to a level where general
> civilian sales were possible.  Given the economic situation in Germany in
> those years, I find it hard to believe that any qualified employee would
> decline to return to Wetzlar to receive a rarity at that time, an actual
> paycheck.
> 
> 
>>It was fortunate that the Leitz factory was located in the American Zone 
>>and that its machinery had not been destroyed or dismantled. Zeiss 
>>plants in the Russian Zone had been severely damaged and the Russians 
>>carted off what remained of the production equipment as war reparations. 
>>Zeiss, as a German competetor to Leitz, effectively ceased to exist for 
>>several years until reorganized in Stuttgart. This gave Leica an 
>>enormous postwar advantage. The Russians used the Zeiss machinery and 
>>tooling to produce the Kiev camera, a somewhat roughly constructed clone 
>>of the pre-WW2 Contax.
> 
> 
> COMMENT:
> 
> First, the head of the German Optical Industries during the War was Dr
> Heinz K?ppenbender, then the head of Zeiss.  No German optical works were
> dismantled and none were destroyed by Allied military action.
> K?ppenbender, though distrusted by the Nazis for his custom of shielding
> "undesireable elements" (skilled workers and engineers who happened to be
> of Gypsy, Jewish, or Slavic blood, or of Socialist political leanings and,
> in a few cases, of homosexual natures) as "necessary to the German war
> effort", was much respected by Speer, and thus K?ppender's writ ran
> unchallenged through the German optical industry.  (Thanks to his efforts
> at Zeiss and his support for similar efforts by Voigtl?nder, Leitz, Ihagee,
> and Franke & Heidecke, about 10,000 "undesireables" were spared internment
> in a concentration camp or a trip to one of the totenlagers.  Schindler was
> a relative piker, saving only around 900, but the Israelis made him a
> "worthy gentile" or whatever the honor is called.  Time awaits for
> K?ppenbender, the Leitz family, und so weiter, to be so recognized.)
> 
> Second, the "Zeiss" works were not heavily damaged and most of their plants
> were not harmed at all -- the main works at Jena were bombed twice, once
> ineffectually by the RAF in 1943 and a second time in March, 1945, by the
> USAAF, with almost an equal lack of import -- production of submarine
> periscopes, for instance, was slowed up by three weeks as a result of the
> long chamber in which they were assembled being knocked a-gley, but this
> made no difference to the German war effort, as there were ample assembled
> periscopes at the German shipyards to fit out U-Boats for the next year,
> had the War gone on.  The plants at Saalfeld, Eisfeld, and Munich were not
> damaged at all, the latter at the insistence of the USAAF, which wished to
> have it produce ?rial recon lenses, especially the Pleon, for use in
> Operation DOWNFALL, the invasion of Japan.  
> 
> Now Zeiss Ikon, a camera company controlled, but not owned, by the same
> folks who owned the Zeiss lensworks and the Schott glassworks, had four
> primary plants during the War.  These were located in Berlin, Stuttgart,
> and Dresden.  Three of the plants -- the old Goerz works in Berlin, the
> Contessa-Nettel works in Stuttgart, and the Ernemann works in Dresden --
> survived the war undamaged to any significant extent.  However, the ICA
> works in Dresden was flattened in the firebombing of that City in February,
> 1945.  The ICA works was the principal Zeiss Ikon factory for 35mm camera
> production and was the technical center for the concern.  The corporate
> headquarters was in the Ernemann Building in central Dresden, a building
> whose ground floor now is occupied, I understand, by a sex shop and whose
> upper stories contain the Saxon Technical Museum.  The loss of the ICA
> works meant the loss of much of the paper trail on the Contax camera line
> though the machinery (see my remarks suipra concerning VW at Wolfsburg) was
> little damaged.  This was the machinery taken to Jena and, eventually,
> high-jacked quite legally by the Soviets.
> 
> Third, your remarks on the quality of the Kiev RF camera line indicate a
> need for head-space adjustment.  The early Kiev II cameras were produced at
> Jena, as were their lenses, and the cameras were produced at the Arsenal
> Works under the supervision of Zeiss Ikon personnel for years thereafter.
> There is not a bit of difference between an early Kiev camera and a Contax
> II or III and damn little for the later ones.  If you are interested in
> pursuing the point, I would recommend that you read Sasaki, Minoru.  Contax
> to Kiev: A Report on the Mutation.  Tokyo, Japan: Office Heliar, 2000.
> ISBN: 4-901241-02-8, as he covers the quality issue in some detail.
> 
> Emil Keller's books provide a great background to the situation of Leitz
> during the War Years and afterwards, including the absurdity of the return
> of ELNY to Leitz control -- the situation with the return of Carl Zeiss USA
> to the hands of the Zeiss Foundation are even more amusing.
> 
> Marc
> 
> 
> msmall@aya.yale.edu 
> Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!
> 
> NEW FAX NUMBER:  +540-343-8505
> 
> 
> 
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