Ernest Leitz II

Leitz's Family Continues His Work

Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith: Documenting History

Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith was born in California. He studied Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and qualified as a teacher. In 1994 he was ordained as a rabbi at Leo Baeck College. Rabbi Dabba Smith joined Harrow and Wembley, London, England, from Northwood in 1997, where he had served as assistant rabbi. He also works as a freelance photographer, and The Economist has published over 150 of his images. His rabbinical thesis Photography and the Holocaust, is a critical approach to surveying the use of photograhy as a communications and propaganda device by all parties involved in the Holocaust.

He wrote the text to My Secret Camera - Life in the Lodz Ghetto with photographs by Mendel Grossman. His has written a book concerned with altruism during the Holocaust.

In addition, Rabbi Smith has been researching for over ten years the altruistic activities of the renowned camera maker, Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar, on behalf of Jews and other persecuted people during the Shoah. During 2007, this  original research has received prominent international attention with long  articles in journals such as the Financial Times (London), Le Monde (Paris), 
Die Welt (Berlin), Suddeutscher Zeitung (Munch) and Courrier Japan (Tokyo).

 

Leica and the Nazis

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.

Leitz's transports only ended in 1939 when, following Hitler's invasion of Poland, Germany's borders were closed.

Like Schindler, Leitz - who was a member of the Nazi party - is unlikely to be viewed by historians as a straightforward character. Although the allegations were never proven, Holocaust survivors filed a legal suit against the company for employing slave labour in 1988 and along with other companies, Leica paid into a compensation fund for slave labourers in 1999.

 

Detective Work of Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith

In the last several years the humanitarian acts of Ernest Leitz and the Leica refugees come to light, thanks to the detective work of a London-based rabbi. Frank Dabba Smith, rabbi of the Harrow and Wembley Progressive Synagogue in northwest London. Rabbi Smith, aLeica enthusiast, reconstructed the stories of refugees through photographs, documents and letters of thanks, from survivors and their families.

Due to Rabbi Smith's painstaking a posthumous award for Leitz, who died in 1956, in recognition of the efforts that risked his life and those of his family was made by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).  The award was presented to Leitz's granddaughter, Cornelia Kuhn-Leitz. 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 in an interview, 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 neighbors in Wetzlar."

 

Wetzlar Germany: Home of Leica

Wetzlar, Germany is located south of Frankfurt. The city is known for its medieval town and cathedral. Notable architectural features include the Eisenmarkt and the steep grades and claustrophobic street layout. The sandstone cathedral of St. Mary was begun in the 12th century as a Romanesque building. In the later Middle Ages the construction was continued under a masterplan in Gothic style. The church was never finished, as one steeple still is uncompleted. The cathedral suffered heavy damage in the Second World War by aerial bombing, but was restored in the 1950s. On the outskirts of town exist the ruins of several masonry towers arranged along the river. 

        

The Ernst Leitz Company, Leica, began in the late 1800s in Wetzlar, and at its peak employed over 7,000 employers.  Leica cameras quickly became well known and respected for their excellent quality. 

Medical personnel evacuate severe cases of prisoners of war in Wetzlar

In the Second World War, the town, being an industrial stonghold, also became the target of heavy bombings, which destroyed much of the railway station neighborhood.  The historic Old Town, however, was mostly spared the air raids.

Towards the end of the war, on a "sweep" looking for isolated enemy hangouts, the 393rd Inf Regt discovered a trainload of abandoned American prisoners of war.  Nearly 300 of them had been deserted by their retreating captors on a railroad siding after a desperate attempt to move them from their confinement in Limburg, Germany as the liberating American columns swept eastward. 

 

 

Ernest Leitz: Courage to Care

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.

Source: Guardian News and Media, United Kingdom; published article September 2, 2007.