A documentary telling the little-known story of how the son of Leica’s founder, Ernst Leitz Wetzlar helped Jews escape Poland has just been released on Arte TV. Despite being a member of the Nazi party, Ernst Leitz II helped hundreds of Jews to safety between 1938 and 1939 by hiring them as Leica “employees” and sending them around the world to work in his showrooms.
Between 1920 and 1956, Ernst Leitz II was head of the Leica company, a company which supplied the German military with the cameras which they used in propaganda campaigns. In many ways, Leitz was a walking controversy, but he personally helped hundreds of Jews and their families to safety, helping them get jobs and making sure they had money to live off.
