The Cult of Leica

Great story by Jonathan Margolis in this weekend’s issue of Air Mail:

Later, Leica helped Jewish employees and their families—along with other Wetzlar Jews who didn’t work for Leica—escape the Holocaust by sending them to New York as “employees.” In many cases, the jobs they were ostensibly leaving for didn’t exist. To this day, there are dozens of descendants of the “Leica Freedom Train” living in the U.S.

The story goes that the local Gestapo wanted to round up the Leitz family as traitors but were overruled by Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, who said Leitz’s contribution to the war effort was too important to close the company down. Another story that’s never been confirmed is that Leitz deliberately made optical products such as aircraft bombsights “a little bit off,” so German bombers would miss their targets.

Ernst Leitz II never spoke publicly about the Nazi period and said almost nothing about it, even to his children. “From Ernst Leitz’s point of view,” one friend of the family has said, “he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position. The Leitz credo was ‘Do good, but do not speak about it.’”