Ernst Leitz Jr. took over the family company Leitz after his father’s death. The company developed optical equipment and produced the Leica compact camera from the 1920s. Leitz was a democrat and a member of the Reich Banner Black-Red-Gold republican defense organization. In 1941 he joined the NSDAP to protect the company from being taken over by the National Socialists.
The Leitz company was categorized as important for the war. Ernst Leitz used the scope he had to protect Jewish employees from persecution by transferring them to branches in Britain and the United States. This meant they could leave Germany with their families. He helped up to 80 people in total to emigrate and provided financial support for persecuted Jews.
His daughter Elsie Kühn-Leitz helped the Jewish Hedwig Palm to attempt escape across the Swiss border in 1943. The attempt failed, and the Gestapo arrested Elsie Kühn-Leitz. Through contacts and bribery, Ernst Leitz got his daughter released.
Ernst Leitz was awarded the Federal Republic of Germany’s Great Cross of Merit in 1952. In 2007 he was posthumously granted the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage to Care Award.
Ernst Leitz Jr. with his daughter Elsie, Wetzlar, 1926. Source: Ernst Leitz Stiftung, Wetzlar
Apprenticeship contract for Kurt Rosenberg, whom Ernst Leitz employed in April 1933 as an apprentice precision engineer, enabling his emigration to New York in 1938, issued in Wetzlar, 1933. Source: Ernst Leitz Stiftung, Wetzlar
Cornelia Kühn-Leitz at the posthumous ceremony granting the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage to Care Award to her grandfather Ernst Leitz (left to right: Glen Lewy, Cornelia Kühn-Leitz, Abraham Foxman), Palm Beach, Florida (USA), 2007. Source: Ernst Leitz Stiftung, Wetzlar
