Zeiss and Leitz after WWII

Monito · Aug 13, 2011

[Moderator's note: The initial posts in this thread were split from another discussion where they were off topic.]

georg16nik said:
A lot of countries from the WWll "wining" ally got their hands onto Zeiss, Leitz and lots of other top brands data and tools around the war time, so thats how You have canons, nikons and other new comers that initially copied Zeiss and Leitz.

Nope. If you look at a little history, you will see that Japan was not a "winning ally" from WW II.

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

Monito said:
Nope. If you look at a little history, you will see that Japan was not a "winning ally" from WW II.

After the war, Japan was placed under international control of the American-led Allied powers in the Asia-Pacific region through General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.
Indeed, the info gets to the Japs with the help by US, latter on the Japs outsource some to China, so yeah..
The americans failed to copy most of the Zeiss, Leica, Rodenstock, Schneider-Kreznach.. and many others, so they were open to handle the task to some of their new friends..

Mustafa Umut Sarac · Aug 14, 2011

US : I want to kill remaining of you with A Bomb
Japan : Kill me but I love you

Do you watch spanish soap opera Georg You cant find this love even at Shakespear.

benjiboy · Aug 14, 2011

georg16nik said:
After the war, Japan was placed under international control of the American-led Allied powers in the Asia-Pacific region through General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.
Indeed, the info gets to the Japs with the help by US, latter on the Japs outsource some to China, so yeah..
The americans failed to copy most of the Zeiss, Leica, Rodenstock, Schneider-Kreznach.. and many others, so they were open to handle the task to some of their new friends..[/QUOTE

The Japanese ( who were our allies in WW1) got their optical expertise from cooperation with there allies the Germans between the wars, the Russians took the plant and machinery and most of the workforce from the Zeiss plant at Jena to Russia after WW11, but they didn't take the stocks of glass, the Americans took some of the workers in trucks to Oberkochen in West Germany and started Zeiss AG there was subsequently litigation in international courts for many years to decide which company was the real Zeiss

P.S. WW11 has been over for sixty five years, this is an international forum and we have several Japanese members who may object to be referred to as "Japs".

Mustafa Umut Sarac · Aug 14, 2011

In 15 years , Russia sent first satellite , first man and woman to space and built the hydrogen bomb and A Bomb. They did not disassamble the rockets from Zeiss factory , did they ? I think Russian friends may object this.

benjiboy · Aug 14, 2011

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:
In 15 years , Russia sent first satellite , first man and woman to space and built the hydrogen bomb and A Bomb. They did not disassamble the rockets from Zeiss factory , did they ? I think Russian friends may object this.

The Russians put the first man and woman in space first and developed nuclear bombs because the the German Scientists and engineers they captured after WW11 were better than the ones the Americans captured.
Many of the optical and electronic devices used in the Soviet space programme were devised and manufactured at the Zeiss Jena Plant in East Germany, indeed the western powers banned the export of electronic components to communist countrys who had to start from scratch and do the the research and development work to produce the necessary electronics that were freely available in any corner electronics store the West were manufactured at Zeiss Jena.

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:
US : I want to kill remaining of you with A Bomb
Japan : Kill me but I love you

Do you watch spanish soap opera Georg You cant find this love even at Shakespear.

Umut, no, but I trust You are right
The love and hate relationships of the few infamous interceptor nations is a total romance

Ben, lots of *international* friends are perfectly ok with shorthands like Japs, Brits, Yankees.

So, we were talking about the Jupiter 3, that is pre-war Zeiss Sonnar.
In 35mm focal, the Jupiter 12 might be the closest in character to J 3 - both are pre-war designs with a very good performance.
There is a pre-war Fed 28mm.. made for the NKVD bodies but it costs more than Leitz 35mm from the same vintage and it have to be adjusted to 28.8..
The asian alternatives in the 35mm focal might not worth the extra bucks and I don't mean only Konica hexanon 35mm f/2

Monito · Aug 14, 2011

georg16nik said:
After the war, Japan was placed under international control of the American-led Allied powers in the Asia-Pacific region through General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.
Indeed, the info gets to the Japs with the help by US, latter on the Japs outsource some to China, so yeah..
The americans failed to copy most of the Zeiss, Leica, Rodenstock, Schneider-Kreznach.. and many others, so they were open to handle the task to some of their new friends..

The patents were public knowledge. Nikon and then Canon were using them as the basis for lens designs in the late 1930s before WW II.

After the war, Japanese manufacturers came out with new fast designs and photographers like David Douglas Duncan took them up and used them for the Korean War and other photojournalism. Those lenses had better contrast and were more useful to them. It wasn't until about 1961 that Leica caught up.

The racist term "Jap" (not your intention) still has potency echoing from WW II and the abhorrent internment of American citizens of Japanese descent. Probably best to avoid it. If typing is difficult, you can type Jpn for Japan and Jpns for Japanese.

benjiboy · Aug 14, 2011

georg16nik said:
Umut, no, but I trust You are right
The love and hate relationships of the few infamous interceptor nations is a total romance

Ben, lots of *international* friends are perfectly ok with shorthands like Japs, Brits, Yankees.

So, we were talking about the Jupiter 3, that is pre-war Zeiss Sonnar.
In 35mm focal, the Jupiter 12 might be the closest in character to J 3 - both are pre-war designs with a very good performance.
There is a pre-war Fed 28mm.. made for the NKVD bodies but it costs more than Leitz 35mm from the same vintage and it have to be adjusted to 28.8

The asian alternatives in the 35mm focal might not worth the extra bucks and I don't mean only Konica hexanon 35mm f/2

some of these terms are more offensive than others I doubt if any Japanese people likes being being referred to as "japs", any more than Germans like the term Krauts, all of which are demeaning and reinforce racial stereotypes .

Monito · Aug 14, 2011

georg16nik said:
Ben, lots of *international* friends are perfectly ok with shorthands like Japs, Brits, Yankees.

Just because you have a few friends who are "ok" with it doesn't erase the racist echoes that many people are reminded of everytime they read it. By avoiding it, the writer won't be confused with people who are ignorant of the awful history behind it.

benjiboy · Aug 14, 2011

My father spent two years in the Burmese jungle fighting the Japanese, and fought the German Army from D Day to the end of the war when he ended it in Lübeck in North Germany and I never heard him use the term "Jap" or "Kraut" and although he wasn't a professional soldier he always said what good soldiers they were and he respected their courage even when faced with overwhelming odds.

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

Something to read, for Umut and everyone who haven't came across this article..
LEITZ INVESTIGATED BY BRITISH INTELLIGENCE 1946 -

After WWII the Americans & British sent a team into the Leitz factory in Wetzlar to examine construction techniques of the Leica camera. The British party took away the Leica IIIb drawings & then produced the Reid camera to that design. Taylor Hobson manufactured the lenses and Sigrist & Reid the body. This is the account of their findings. :

http://www.angelfire.com/biz/Leica/page26.html

benjiboy · Aug 14, 2011

georg16nik said:
Something to read, for Umut and everyone who haven't came across this article..
LEITZ INVESTIGATED BY BRITISH INTELLIGENCE 1946 -

http://www.angelfire.com/biz/Leica/page26.html

The company was called Reid & Sigrist not the other way round,they were an engineering and aircraft manufacturer in Desford Leicestershire England unfortunately I'm old enough to remember, the British Government imported Leica cameras from A Swedish export company who bought them from Germany,the British built three very fast unarmed speedboats especial for the purpose of collecting them from Sweden and beating the German naval blockade.

Diapositivo · Aug 14, 2011

Not an expert but I suppose that industrial "espionage", patent circumventing, and even ignoring on patents (from countries which did not belong to exchange treaties that force patent observation) were going on since before WW II.

Good engineers can easily buy some copies (of Leica cameras, BMW motorcycles, etc.) and "reverse engineer" them. "Design" is not so difficult to copy. Quality is another matter, especially in countries, like the USSR, where "elitist" production was not welcome and everything had to be build with reasonable "affordability". I don't doubt the Soviet, or the Japanese, had any difficulty in building cameras like the Leica and with the same quality.

The Japanese probably didn't try the adventure for commercial reasons, or just tried and failed, because people buy "names" not just "products" and it's not easy to establish yourself in the Leica market where Leica already has the fame and charm.

I think the "made in Germany" badge meant a lot in commerce then as now. It was, and it is, very difficult to establish yourself as a credible mechanical watchmaker if you are not Swiss. Prejudice makes the world go round...

The Soviet, for different reasons, did not try because it probably would have been politically unacceptable. I can visualize (maybe a fantasy of mine) an engineer presenting a project of high-quality high-cost professional tool being welcome by all the firm and vetoed by the people's commissar embedded in the factory observing that it might lead to firm to a decadent elitist production and away from the Party recommendation of building cameras "for the people", blah blah blah.

Where affordability is the first "ideological" must, quality must suffer.

BrianL · Aug 14, 2011

My understanding from my military history classes was that Germany shared with Japan the formula for their optical glass. The Japanese could make decent lenses but their glass quality was lacking. The principal reason for this sharing was for submarine periscope lenses and mirrors. The Japanese were in an active war before most countries and therefore industrial development of such items as photography equipment was based on military needs and wants so there were few civilian cameras of quality prior to the end of WWII from Japan. During the occupation, the US involvement in development of the Japanese industrial complex was to help in setting priorities for improving overall economic development and broadest use of the limited resources. An example would be to prioritize steel production and distribution for the creation of infrastructure and buildings over automobiles, cameras, etc. While likely there were individual companies with political clout that could get favorable results over the competition, it was not the stated goal of the administration to prefer one company over another.

The General had seen what the Allies did to Germany and had the lessons from WWI under his belt and was determined that Japan would suffer the same fate and leave open the possibility of long term hatreds between the peoples.

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

During WWl, there were sharing of info between Russia and Germany as well. Not only Germany and Japan..
Japan have always had problems with glass, one thing is to have the formula for the glass.. completely different is to have the glass as a nature resource and to be top grade.. Even the Germans had problems with that, at times.
In Russia, they have enormous resources of top quality glass and earth resources, most countries dream to possess.
That might be one of the reasons, the russians are depicted in the west as bad..
The early japanese lenses, they had to descend them in sets at the bottom of the sea in order to test them for cracks and such defects..
So the ones that survived the tests were let to be used for lenses.
There is one company that goes by the name Vixen that makes something unique but in the field of telescopes (they make good binoculars and spotting scopes.. as well)
They make 8 inch aperture modified Sixth-Order Aspheric Cassegrain (VISAC) that is based on a Cassegrain design with a "sixth order aspheric" primary mirror like a hyperbolic mirror but able to be manufactured using mass-production techniques. To compensate for the aberrations the mirror design introduces, a "field corrector lens" - actually a three element corrector in the draw tube of the focuser which also reduces field curvature for wide field applications. The design results in an image that is free of coma and astigmatism.
Also, this design is unusual in that it is a Cassegrain design that has a fixed primary and refractor style rack and pinion focuser which removes the image shift issues seen with other catadioptric designs.

Those features make for a telescope that is very well suited to astrophotography either at the native f/9 or using the optional focal reducer at around f/6.3.

Very wicked!

Diapositivo · Aug 14, 2011

georg16nik said:
During WWl, there were sharing of info between Russia and Germany as well. Not only Germany and Japan..

I find this hard to believe, as Germany and Russia were enemies during WWI, and Germany and the Soviet Union were enemies for most of WWII, and not so friendly after all during the less than two years of war in which they were not enemies (September 1939 - June 1941). (I mention WWII in case your mention of WWI was a typographic error).

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

On March 3, 1918 The Bolsheviks reached a peace treaty with Germany, the peace of Brest-Litovsk.
For a short period of time as a sign of good will, there was exchanges between Russia and Germany.
The end was still far away... the treaty of Versailles signed on 28 June 1919.

Diapositivo · Aug 14, 2011

I didn't know about this technological exchange, was it, itself, part of the treaty? I say this as I don't think, ideologically speaking, the new regime would appeal much as an allied to Imperial Germany and so both parties would be more interested in reciprocal compensations rather than in long-term friendly relationship.

It seems that Germany denounced the treaty already in November 5, 1918 (the Emperor had just de facto fallen I suppose) so its effects ceased much before the Treaty of Versailles. But as far as the exchange of information for optics making is concerned, it was easily sufficient.

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

Fabrizio, to step even further, the second treaty was signed guess where?
In the Italian town of Rapallo on April 16, 1922 between Germany's Weimar Republic and Bolshevist Russia under which each renounced all territorial and financial claims against the other (following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and World War I).
Now back to the Versailles Treaty in 1919.. one of the major goals of the Versailles Treaty was to suppress Germany from development of technical equipment that could be used for military purposes..
So, the Versailles treaty 1919 had stripped Germany of an Air Force, Navy and most of its Army. Naturally in 1922 the Treaty of Rapallo inspired the birth of widely used glider clubs training a nucleus of clandestine air force pilots. These pilots had to be trained at some point on real powered aircraft which took place at secret locations in the Soviet Union...
It is interesting to note that the Germans were also the first to use Gliders in Warfare, most famously during the assault of the Eben Emael fortress on the 10th May 1940.
So, back to photography stuff .. after the spring of 1922, between Leitz from the German side and GOZ (State optical factory) from Russia side, there was cooperation (VOOMP camera). In 1932 GOZ takes the name GOMZ/OGPU, in 1934 OGPU becomes NKVD...(later KGB)
Around the lines is the FED NKVD camera.

Diapositivo · Aug 14, 2011

Georg, this recalls to my mind that Paulus, the General who was leading the VI Army toward Stalingrad, actually participated in one of those military exchanges with the Soviet in previous years.

I went to Wikipedia for a quick check but didn't find information about this. I more or less recall having seen on a TV documentary that the Soviet had a high esteem of him as they had known him during this peace-time military collaboration.

georg16nik · Aug 14, 2011

Yes, the events timeline around the war is, at best, tricky..
Wikipedia could be edited by anyone with computer and Internet connection, so its a wild goose chase to count on the Wiki

John Koehrer · Aug 14, 2011

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:
In 15 years , Russia sent first satellite , first man and woman to space and built the hydrogen bomb and A Bomb. They did not disassamble the rockets from Zeiss factory , did they ? I think Russian friends may object this.

First dog, first humans. OK what do the bombs have to do with this? The technology for the bombs was "borrowed" from the US.

WRT photo stuff, the Japanese were doing OK with the industry prior to WWll maybe not as good as the Germans, but neither was anyone else.

benjiboy · Aug 15, 2011

John Koehrer said:
First dog, first humans. OK what do the bombs have to do with this? The technology for the bombs was "borrowed" from the US.

WRT photo stuff, the Japanese were doing OK with the industry prior to WWll maybe not as good as the Germans, but neither was anyone else.

Some of the technology was "borrowed from the U.S." but the means of delivering the weapon was obtained from the German scientists and engineers who were very quickly captured by special units of the US Army who were set up for the purpose, as the Russians did as well, and as soon as they were captured they were sent to the US, or the USSR
The Germans technology in WW11 in this and many other fields was at least ten, if not twenty years ahead the allies and their expertise in ballistic missiles was urgently required by both powers because at that time there was a real and imminent danger of another war between the USA and the USSR , this was also the origins of both countrys space programmes, so it was really down to if the captured Germans the US had were better than Germans the Soviets had.

georg16nik · Aug 15, 2011

I might add (but do not insist on that), a bit broader than just US and USSR..
Anyone remembers those events and who attended, supposedly?
Cairo Conference (codenamed Sextant) - November 22–26, 1943
Tehran Conference (codenamed Eureka) - November 28 and December 1, 1943
Yalta Conference (codenamed Argonaut) - February 4–11, 1945
Potsdam Conference (codenamed Terminal) - 16 July to 2 August 1945

Zeiss and Leitz after WWII

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