[rollei_list] Re: OT: Post-War T coated Sonnar 2/50 lens
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:23:39 -0400
At 06:52 AM 9/4/2010, CarlosMFreaza wrote:
>2010/9/4 Marc James Small
>> Didn't I send you one of my LTM lens books? Argh! I thought I had!...>
>
>BTW I had read the Appendix A, pages 90 and 91 of your book and I
>recalled about your camera, my comment was like a reasoning to myself
>to reinforce the facts during a stormy historical period.
Well, it was indeed "a stormy historical period",
Carlos. But look at the front cover of my LTM
lens book. There is a shot of an LTM 2/5cm CZJ
Sonnar T from the next batch after yours. I can
send additional pictures of that one and of the
one I have in Contax RF BM from your batch, if you wish! <he grins>
Carl Zeiss Jena kept rolling along through the
War through desperate measures but things really
fell apart after APR 1945 when the plant was
taken by the US 80th Infantry Division (my unit,
years later). There was no real currency in
circulation and mere survival was the name of the
game. The Reichsmark became worthless (though it
was later revalued, in 1949, when the Bundesmark
replaced it). So it became an exchange economy,
where products were not sold but traded. A
carton of cigarettes, for instance, earned you a
month with a courtesan, a loaf of bread got you a
couple of Pickelhaube helmets.
The survival of the VW auto works at Wolfsberg
are really illustrative. The company was owned
by the Nazi Party, and, so, ceased to have any
legal ownership after VE Day. But the British
Army needed cars, so a very improper deal was
struck: the British Army got steel and the like
to VW, and VW made Kübelwagen cars for the
British Army. And the VW management went to
local banks and, quite improperly, guaranteed the
pay to its workers, so the banks arranged for
landlords to be compensated and grocers to be
paid. It was all quite illegal -- but VW
survived. (My daily driver is an '84 Audi 4000S,
and I am a loyal VW consumer!) Similar events
occurred at Jena, though the burden fell on
middle management, as the US Army had kidnapped
the senior management to Heidenheim and Oberkochen.
We just do not know for whom these early
3,xxx,xxx lenses were made. A noted wartime
Leica scholar has suggested to me that these
lenses were produced as part of a coöperative
deal with Leitz at Wetzlar to provide lenses for
the final run of IIIcK cameras, but he and I
differ on whether there ever was a final run of
IIIcK cameras -- I believe that the primary Leitz
product after V-E Day was the basic
one-roller-bearing IIIc. I simply cannot imagine
the management of either company at that time
having such a reasoned approach to a marketing
plan. The late Charlie Barringer and I discussed
this at great length but never came to any sort
of conclusions. At this remove, we just do not
know, though then-Sergeant Emil Keller, who ran
Leitz for the US Army from 1945 to 1948, denied
that Leitz and Zeiss had any contact at all during this time.
Most of these lenses were made for the Contax RF,
but that camera had been out of production since
the last O model in 1942. Perhaps CZJ was
looking forward to the Jena Contax, which would
come on the scene in 1946 for its brief
flourishing before production shifted to the
Arsenal Works in Kiev, and the IIa and IIIa were
only distant gleams on the horizon in 1945.
It was an interesting time, in many regards, but
most records have been lost. The factory
production records only survived through
Proletarian Inefficiency, as it was simpler just
to shove closed files into closets than to throw
them away -- both Zeiss Ikon in Stuttgart and
Carl Zeiss in Oberkochen were much more
efficient, actually taking pride in "recycling"
their production records. And the production
records from Jena have gaps and errors in them,
which we are only sorting out slowly through
comparison with the real-world Zeiss Lens List,
presently unavailable. (I am on the committee
slowly moving this to a web presence: stay tuned for developments!)
Trying to figure out the details of CZJ
production in 1945 is akin to trying to meditate
on the exact time when the "recomputed" Tessar
was actually put onto the Postwar Contaflex SLR.
Marc
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
---
Rollei List
- Post to rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Subscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'subscribe'
in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org
- Unsubscribe at rollei_list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with
'unsubscribe' in the subject field OR by logging into www.freelists.org
- Online, searchable archives are available at
//www.freelists.org/archives/rollei_list
Other related posts:
