Dralowid
Michael
In all this don't forget teutonic logic.
Roman Polanski shoot with a screwmount Leica
- Thread starter easyrider
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tunalegs
Pretended Artist
I think I smell just a tinge of homophobia in those articles. :angel:
MickH
Well-known
Sorry Roger, I didn't use bold type to add emphasis to your use of the words 'most basic survival strategy'. It was that that I was splitting hairs over. Maybe I was being overly cynical when I suggested commercial advantage ...'expediency' might have been a better term.
Anyroad up, it's all history now.
Back to Polanski & Leicas: http://blog.ricecracker.net/tag/roman-polanski/
DominikDUK
Well-known
It wasn't that clear cut in NAZI Germany if you wanted to continue to work as an artist you had to become a member of the Bund deutscher Künstler or if you had the possibility you could emigrate and continue to work. The same with the industry as a company owner you were no longer the real boss the Party especially Göring controlled many companies. Best example Hugo Junkers who hated Göring was blackmailed by Göring to more or less hand over his company (His daughter in law was a jewish or half jewish). The normal worker didn't have to become a NSDAP member in order to survive but if he wanted to have any kind of career he had to be a member. It's also easy to judge those people from today's moral highground but what is often forgotten is the huge amount of homeless, jobless desperate people that lived in Germany and Austria at that time furthermore more than 25% of all males living in Germany at that time were war invalids. And Hitler and the NSDAP promised them change and hope. We still believe and vote for politician using the same promises.
easyrider
Photo addict
Geez!
Geez!
I posted a photo and link of a well-known film director using an old Leica and this turns into all this stuff!
Not sure that I will post anything again.
Does anyone know whether Stalin had a camera? maybe even a Leica 🙂)
What about Saddam?
Geez!
I posted a photo and link of a well-known film director using an old Leica and this turns into all this stuff!
Not sure that I will post anything again.
Does anyone know whether Stalin had a camera? maybe even a Leica 🙂)
What about Saddam?
Al Patterson
Ferroequinologist
Not sure about the Stalin or Saddam, but when you post about an individual you need to know what they maybe known for other than main career. I could mention I admired a former Shutterbug editor who is now in the grey bar hotel, and that would end up as more than a discussion of the merits of his photography and writing style...
zauhar
Veteran
Is it not true that Leitz got a large portion of his jewish employees out of Germany ? Would he be able to achieve that were he not a 'good German' , meaning a member of the nazi party?
Clearly his heart was in the right place?
Randy
Contarama
Well-known
Wonder what Charles Manson would do?...
Rangefinderfreak
Well-known
If you know the history of Nazism the DAP (Deutsche Arbeit Partei) The coup of magazine "Völkische Beobahter" in 1920 , the way the party changed after Mussolini came to power in Italy, you understand how the criminal minds saw their chance to power in Germany. When characters like Heinrich Himmler., Joseph Göbbles, Alfred Rosenberg and the war hero Hermann Göring came to power, the "reasonable" germans like the old nobility, factory owners, WW.I generals shut their mouths. Very early on, you had no future in Germany, if you resisted the Nazis. Ernst Leitz´s resistance was subtle, more so that he kept contacts with leitz USA. If you think about it: Leitz factories were not bombed in WW II, a miracle, but if you consider all the facts available to US intelligence, a direct result in leitz`s activites...
Sparrow
Veteran
... they didn't bomb leitz's factories because we weren't that good at precision bombing, the philosophy of german nationalism goes way back to the 18c with the likes of Fichte, Hitler was elected by popular vote and I don't recall hearing any of this Leitz resistance, Leica train stuff before around 2000 and still have not seen any supporting evidence
sevo
Fokutorendaburando
Neither were the (bigger and strategically more important, as a producer of gun and bomb visors) Zeiss factories in Wetzlar - and nobody would consider Zeiss a Nazi opponent.
While the Army will have saved the optical industry during the invasion, that was obviously not along the lines of nice and nasty companies, but a general policy, to have something to seize as war reparations.
The allies did bomb Wetzlar severely earlier on, in two large scale raids, and that these missed the optical industries won't be a miracle, but a matter of the conditions and more rewarding targets. One attack razed the residential quarter Niedergirmes, on the hills downwind from the city centre and optical industry - this is supposed to be a miss due to wind drift of the marker incendiaries (Wetzlar is located in a river valley, difficult to bomb), the other raid successfully hit and destroyed the Buderus iron works.
As far as saving Jews goes, according to most publications Leitz did arrange the emigration of 41 Jewish workers into an employment at Leitz branches abroad. But it happened early on at a time when the Nazis were actively pushing the German Jews to emigration, so he was not acting against official policies.
Rangefinderfreak
Well-known
There is a belief that Leitz was saved because American GI shops wanted somthing expensive to sell, so that the soldiers in Germany had something to save for, and not spend all their money in hookers and booze. This can be as accurate as to what you say...
EdwardKaraa
Well-known
Saddam didn't use Leicas because they're too feminine. He preferred Canons, especially with chemical heads 😉
I heard Bachar Assad is the same.
Terry Christian
Established
Bryan Fischer, the author of the first article, is the leader of the American Family Association, which is certified as a hate group (by the Southern Poverty Law Center) because they tell outright lies about LGBT people. His book on gays in the Nazi party was also widely discredited.
And as someone else said, the anti-gay bias of the second article is rather obvious. There may be many homosexual assaults in the military, but most of them are being perpetrated by heterosexual individuals.
semi-ambivalent
Little to say
zauhar
Veteran
Stewart, I never take Wikipedia as a primary source, but are you saying this article is not based on fact? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Freedom_Train)
In particular, these two passages have the ring of truth:
"Leitz's daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s."
and
"After the war, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palmes Academiques from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s. According to Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the "Leica Freedom Train" finally come to light. It is the subject of a book, The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train (American Photographic Historical Society, New York, 2002) by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born rabbi currently living in England."
Randy
Sparrow
Veteran
... that may well be the case, I know the era quite well and was aware of many other philanthropists but only first heard of the Leica-train thing in the mid 1990s around the time of Schindler's List was being popularised, which was surprising given my interest in the period and the cameras ... so being the cynic I am I've always been a little sceptical of the claims, sorry
kbg32
neo-romanticist
FYI -
Hitler was not elected by popular vote. He became president when Hindenburg died. Hitler then proceeded to abolish the office and replaced it with the position of Führer und Reichskanzler ("Leader and Reich Chancellor"), cementing his dictatorship.
The US, like other western nations knew of the concentration camps and exterminations by escaping refugees and what (little) intelligence they had then.
Roger Hicks
Veteran
On the other hand, there is nothing inherently unbelievable about them. Consider the following scenario: you did a lot, but you are ashamed you did not do more...
If these stories were untrue, we might have expected some (quite enthusiastic) debunking. I have not seen this.
Cheers,
R.
Rodchenko
Olympian
I find them plausible. I also read of similar activity by the management of Zeiss, which may or may not be true, but is less widely reported.
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