[Leica] Leica manufacture during WW2

[msmall at aya.yale.edu (Marc James Small)]

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


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