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The Leica Freedom Train: A new book by Frank Dabba Smith August 5, 2020

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Leica, Metaphor Online , trackback
LEICA AND THE JEWS
The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product – precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient.
Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family-owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty. E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany’s most famous photographic product, saved its Jews.
And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe , acted in such a way as to earn the title, “the photography industry’s Schindler.”
As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as “the Leica Freedom Train,” a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.
Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were “assigned” to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the United States, Leitz’s activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.
Before long, German “employees” were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry.
Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom – a new Leica camera.
The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press.
Keeping the story quiet The “Leica Freedom Train” was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders.
By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes’ efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it?
Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected
credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced cameras, range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz’s single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.
Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works. A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe.
Leitz’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland . She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s.
(After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d’honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.)
Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the “Leica Freedom Train” finally come to light.
It is now the subject of a book, “The Greatest Invention of the Leitz
Family: The Leica Freedom Train,” by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England.
Honour for German Leica manufacturer who sent prewar apprentices to US

 in Berlin THE GUARDIAN

He was responsible for bringing to the world a high-quality compact camera that changed the face of 35mm photography. But after dogged research by a British rabbi it has emerged that Ernest Leitz II had a secret but possibly greater claim to fame – saving Jews from Nazi persecution in prewar Germany.Days after Hitler’s rise to power, Leitz, who manufactured the Leica camera, began taking on a string of young Jewish apprentices from the town of Wetzlar where his optics factory began producing Leicas in 1925. He purposely trained them so that he could transfer them to New York to work in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US and thus rescue them from the fate that was to befall many other Jews.Others were able to escape punishment for being related to Jews by marriage, thanks to Leitz’s intervention. The numbers he saved, about 50 sent to the US plus 23 others, are much smaller than those rescued by Sudeten German industrialist Oskar Schindler, to whom he is being compared. But the risks he took were arguably just as high.Only now have details of the Leica refugees come to light, thanks to the detective work of a London-based rabbi.

Frank Dabba Smith, 51, rabbi of the Harrow and Wembley Progressive Synagogue in northwest London and a Leica enthusiast, has reconstructed their stories through photographs, documents and letters of thanks from survivors and their families. Yesterday his painstaking work culminated in a posthumous award for Leitz, who died in 1956, in recognition of the efforts that risked his life and those of his family.

The Anti-Defamation League presented Leitz’s granddaughter, Cornelia Kuhn-Leitz, with its Courage to Care award in Palm Springs, Florida. The ADF credits Leitz with saving hundreds of lives – counting both the workers and their families – and has compared him to Schindler, believed to have saved more than 1,200 Polish Jews from death by employing them in his enamel factory in Cracow.

“Under considerable risk and in defiance of Nazi policy, Ernst Leitz took valiant steps to transport his Jewish employees and others out of harm’s way,” said Abraham Foxman, director of ADL. “If only there had been more Oskar Schindlers, more Ernst Leitzs, then less Jews would have perished.”

Leitz’s simple ethos, Rabbi Frank Smith told Die Welt, was “that of old Jewish fathers – do a lot, speak little”. He spoke not at all to his family or friends about what he had done. “He didn’t want to distinguish himself from the other citizens of Wetzlar,” said Mr Smith. “It wasn’t in his nature to talk of his own good deeds and he thought he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position.”

His son, Günther, tried to write an article about the refugees. But Leitz wanted nothing to do with it. Günther later said: “He did what he did because he felt responsible for his workers, their families, for our neighbours in Wetzlar.”

It was in part thanks to the Nazis’ dependence on the military optics that Leitz’s factory produced, as well as their belief in the importance of the Leica camera for their propaganda purposes, that he was able to succeed in his plan to spirit Jewish workers and their families out of Germany. Many times the Gestapo turned a blind eye to what Leitz was doing, so important was it to them that production at the plant continued.

“He was able to act in the way he did because the Nazis needed our factory for their military production,” Günther Leitz said. “But no one can ever know what other Germans had done for the persecuted within the limits of their ability to act.”

And so his story might have been forgotten were it not for the doggedness of the rabbi. He first came across Leitz’s story as a student in a brief mention of the refugees in a photography magazine.

The most complete biography of the Leica refugees belongs to camera mechanic Kurt Rosenberg. There is evidence that Leitz paid for his journey to New York in 1938 and got him a post at the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue. As with other workers, he helped him get a visa. He also provided them with a Leica as financial security because it could be easily exchanged for cash.

Petapixel: https://petapixel.com/2011/05/03/the-story-of-how-jews-were-saved-by-the-leica-freedom-train/

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