Doing the Right Thing
Bookworm at Bookworm Room on Oct 24 2006 at 10:00 am | Filed under: Feature Article, Heroes of the Past
Despite the fact that more than 60 years have past since the end of the Nazi’s deranged regime, stories about survival and decency still crop up. Here’s one that came through my email:
Here is an unknown story that I believe will be of interest and that you might like to pass on. I carry your Leica camera a bit more proudly these days. The reason? A story I had never heard before - a tale of courage, integrity and humility that is only now coming to light, some 70 years after the fact.
The Leica is the pioneer of 35mm cameras. From a nitpicking point of view, it wasn’t the very first still camera to use 35mm movie film, but it was the first to be widely publicized and successfully marketed. It created the “candid camera” boom of the 1930s. 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 George Gilbert, a veteran writer on topics photographic, told the story at last week’s convention of the Leica Historical Society of America in Portland, Ore., Leitz Inc., founded in Wetzlar in 1869, had a tradition of enlightened behavior toward its workers. Pensions, sick leave, health insurance - all were instituted early on at Leitz, which depended for its work force upon generations of skilled employees - many of whom were Jewish.
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.
