[Leica] There's something about German design ...

[marcsmall at comcast.net (Marc James Small)]

At 04:25 PM 1/15/2007, B. D. Colen wrote:
 >:-)
 >By the way - Has anyone thought about the fact that the American industrial
 >enterprise, and the fact that it, unlike Germany's manufacturing effort, 
 >was
 >not being bombed out of existence, had allot to do with our being 
 >ultimately
 >able to prevail over the Nahzees?

BD

This had a significant effect but German 
production just wasn't on par with ours or, for 
that matter, with that of the British.  Bear in 
mind that a standard tool at Wetzlar through the 
life of the mechanical Leica cameras and in 
Sweden through the life of the Hasselblads was a 
rubber hammer, to bend everything to fit.  Such 
never took place in Rochester, New York, I suspect, or in Delaware, Ohio.

The British were outproducing the Germans in 
everything -- aircraft, guns, ammunition, 
submarines, surface vessels, tanks, und so weiter 
-- before the Battle of Britain and kept up this 
lead through the War.  The addition of the US 
industrial base -- weakened as it was by the VERY 
late turn to mobilization and the neglect of 
factories caused by a decade of Depression-era 
idleness -- simply ensured an Allied victory.

Speer attempted to turn Germany from an industry 
of excellent, hand-fitted products to one of 
mass-production but his efforts were late and 
were often thwarted by his political rivals such 
as Goering and Himmler.  One example:  shortly 
after he was appointed the Minister for 
Armaments, Speer placed the head of Zeiss, Heinz 
K?ppenbender, in charge of the German optical 
industry.  Speer then told K?ppenbender to 
rationalize EVERYTHING optical within the German 
sphere, to include French and Czech and Roumanian 
companies.  In the end, K?ppenbender stopped 
Leitz lens production and restricted camera 
production to small runs of IIIc cameras for 
export to Sweden and Switzerland and Spain to pay 
for Swedish ball-bearings and Spanish Wolframite 
and the like.  Zeiss then had excess lens 
production capacity, so K?ppenbender directed 
that Carl Zeiss Jena produce Contax RF BM lenses 
in LTM to be sold with these export 
cameras.  Leitz spent the later War years 
cranking out artillery gunsights and rangefinders 
and, of course, those prized "blc" 
Dienst-fernglass binoculars.  Speer and 
K?ppenbender increased German optical production 
four-fold and more over its 1940 levels, which is 
why so many of these "blc" binoculars appear in 
the US market as their original owners, who had 
captured them on the field of battle, die off.

Speer made similar efforts in every aspect of 
German industry but his efforts were thwarted by 
the "round the clock" bombing of the "Mighty 
Eighth" and Bomber Command.  Still, he managed to 
have German aircraft production reach its highest 
levels in late 1944 but, by that time, the 
destruction of the German transport grid ensured 
that airplane motors remained at one location, 
airframes at another, and guns at a third, and 
mating them up became impossible in a world of 
collapsed tunnels and bombed bridges.  An 
interviewer once remarked to Speer that one of 
the great issues in the Allied air war had been 
the US insistence on having a central office for 
selecting targets, something which "Bomber" 
Harris found impossible to accept.  Speer's 
response was to point out that he did not know 
whether Germany would have benefited more from a 
US-dominated central-targeting office or a 
British-dominated one, as neither air force 
seemed capable of understanding what hurt Germany 
the most, the destruction of the transport grid 
and the elimination of the artificial fuel 
factories, until the closing days of the War.

Marc


msmall@aya.yale.edu
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!