The history of humanity is full of terrible injustices. And killing someone just because of their ideas or where they come from deserves the most absolute rejection. Within those cursed moments we can always find people who tried to improve the situation of the victims. We will talk about Ernst Leitz II, owner of the famous Leica during Hitler’s terrible years in power, who saved more than 200 Jews from the Nazi clutches.
Hitler came to power after an election in 1933. The Nazi party began to rule with the idea of dominating the world and ending all those who did not represent his Aryan ideal. The Jews were his victims. And the world was stunned as one of the cruelest episodes in history came to pass.
But in this article we will talk about a good person: Ernst Leitz II, who devised ‘the Leica freedom train’ to get more than 200 Jews out of Germany. In some modern chronicles they call him the Oskar Schindler of photography.
Like all these stories, you have to understand them in context and study them very carefully because there are lights and shadows that are difficult to understand without knowing the context or the situation in which they lived during the years of the Nazi terror.
This was the first USB memory in history
The story of ‘the freedom train’
I have come to this story through Bernardo Pérez Tovar’s Facebook wall. It has been known for a long time. The writer Goerge Gilbert brought it to light in an article and Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith wrote the book ‘The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train’, after fifteen years researching a story that had been buried in time .
Between 1933 and 1939 Ernst Leitz II managed to create a network to remove Jewish workers from his company as destined for offices in France, Great Britain, Hong Kong and the United States. And not just your employees, but friends and family to escape the Nazi madness.
It became known as ‘the Leica freedom train’. The Jews who managed to escape thanks to his company arrived in these countries with all the guarantees and with a guaranteed job.
The most curious thing about this whole story is that the Leitz family was respected by the Nazi government and even the minister Joseph Goebbels sang the virtues of the brand and hired its services for the Nazi army given its enormous quality.
And despite everything they were heavily guarded. The Nazis needed their rangefinders and their optics, as well as the good name they had in the Western world, but they monitored all their suspicious movements. They even jailed the businessman’s daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, for helping Jewish women escape across the Swiss border.
Let’s not forget that she was a personal friend of Henri Cartier Bresson, who wrote the introduction to her biography, where she recounted everything this woman did for others.
Apparently this whole story is not well known due to the express wish of the family, who asked that it not be disclosed until the last member of the Leitz family died. As recounted in an article by the Photographic Association of Canada, where they say that this story was discovered by George Gilbert:
Long after the war ended, the story of the Freedom Train program was first featured in Reader’s Digest with its more than 12 million readers. Leitz directors regrettably refused the permit while the people involved were still alive and possibly at risk of retaliation. By 1987 the last of the protagonists had died and George wrote a short half-page article that was published in several photographic chronicles. A decade later, the story was briefly covered in the book Illustrated World Wide Who’s Who of Jewish in Photography (see review in the May 1997 issue of Photographic Canadiana). George sent a shortened version of the story to the various photographic societies for publication; we published the story in our May 2002 issue. Unfortunately, efforts to find someone with relatives who were helped by Leitz have failed to find anyone to date. The history of the Freedom Train and the role played by Norman Lipton, George Gilbert, and Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith in bringing it to light, are covered in Rabbi Smith’s 2002 pamphlet The Leica Freedom Train published by the American Photographic Historical Society. In New York. A copy was provided to each attendee of this presentation.
It may not be a 100% photographic story, and surely there are many nuances, as with Oskar Schindler, but from today I will look at Leica with different eyes. At least in the horrible times he proved to have humanity.