Wandersleb

[Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>]

At 10:32 AM 4/11/97 +0200, Gerard Captijn wrote:

>There is also a patent
>from "champion extraordinaire" Ernst Wandersleb (Zeiss) who wrote an entire
>book about the impossibility to construct good large aperture extreme
>wideangle lenses because of light fall-off (Cos4 law). Shortly afterwards
>Zeiss and Schneider build the Biogon and the Super Angulon, proving the
>contrary.

Wandersleb began as the assistant to Paul Rudolph and rose to become the
Prewar head of optical design at Jena; Bertele, then one of his employees,
constructed the Biogon in 1933 under Wandersleb's direction.  Wandersleb is
also the first designer to recognize that lens coatings on internal
elements would allow older designs to find new life:  it was his work,
beginning in 1936, which led to the recomputations of the six-element
symmetrical Rudolph Planar of 1896 which culminated in the Postwar Biometar
from Zeiss and Hans Sauer's Oberkochen Planar which those of us on the
Rollei List find make our TLR's so delightful.

Wandersleb's wife was Jewish, and he was bitterly denunciatory of the Nazi
regime.  While all of the Zeiss corporations were anti-Nazi, most of the
leadership was silent about their opposition -- Kuppenbender, for instance,
was required to be a Party member, but saved almost five thousand Jewish
and Socialist workers by declaring them "essential war workers", an act
which caused him to be put on trial for his life in a Party Court.  (After
the War, he then was tried by the Allies as a "Nazi", though the US Army
sent Col Carl Nelson, the head of the Allied Optical Reparations Committee,
to testify in his behalf.)

When Wandersleb's wife was sent off to the camps, Zeiss was forced, at
government order, to discharge him.  Zeiss protected him for the remainder
of the War.  Afterwards, Zeiss went to rather extraordinary lengths to
evacuate Wandersleb to the West and he was employed at Oberkochen until his
retirement and death in 1964.  His wife survived the camps and was reunited
with her husband in the West;  she, too, died in 1964.

PLEASE!  Let's not start a political thread of any sort.  I simply wished
to point out that Wandersleb ought not be judged on one rather
understandable mis-calling.

Marc James Small
Cha Robh Bas Fir, Gun Ghras Fir!
FAX:  +540/343-7315