Recent politically, embarrassing events in Canada’s House of Commons have dredged up the spectre of Nazis and atrocities committed in the Ukraine during World War Two. It should not have happened, but it did. A 98 year old man who had fought as a Ukrainian patriot to free his country from the Russian yoke, was given a standing ovation by Members of Parliament and the visiting dignitary, President Zelensky of Ukraine. The problem was the man fought as a voluntary member of the 14th Waffen-SS Genadiers who have been implicated in wiping out entire villages in Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland.
In the 1950s, hundreds of veterans of this unit were individually screened for security purposes and granted admission to Canada. Presumably they were not Nazis and had committed no war crimes. The bias then might have been individuals with a clear anti Soviet attitude, useful during the Cold War. And look at your typical 17 year old boy today. Is he mature enough to make the right decision. And what exactly was the right decision in 1943? Sit out the war and make no effort to protect your family from being killed by the Red Army?
Observing the public outrage was instructive, in what was absent. The West continues to focus on the Holocaust and the atrocities perpetrated in Europe. But what of the Pacific War? The tripartite Axis of Evil consisted of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy … and Imperial Japan. Those Asian Nazis from another mother. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre was quick to issue a statement that honoring this veteran trivialized the Holocaust. But they did not mention all the other atrocities committed in WW2 in Asia. The millions of Chinese civilians killed. In the most gruesome manner as detailed in the Rape of Nanking. Unit 731. The Korean Comfort Women. Never heard of them, not surprising. Because you see, honoring Nazis is not a new thing. Canada’s was a simple and stupid blunder. But the US welcomed Dr. Wernher von Braun and his retinue of rocket scientists to play a critical role in NASA’s race to the Moon. However, von Braun was an active member of the Nazi Party who also held the rank of Major in the SS Order, and rained down thousands of V2 missiles against the civilian populace of London, Antwerp, Paris and other cities. These V2 rockets were also manufactured by slave labour plucked from concentration camps who were worked to death in a hellish underground factory.
The US continued to honor Nazis with even more aplomb. President Gerald Ford welcomed Emperor Hirohito of Japan in an official state visit that lasted for two weeks as he toured the country in 1975. Academics today agree that Hirohito was never the powerless figurehead fabricated by General MacArthur in order to stay the war crime charges levied at him. What was the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s response in 1975? It’s namesake made a career of hunting down Nazi war criminals to stand justice. Did not honoring Hirohito at such a grand level trivialize all the dead Chinese civilians (and also those dead citizens of all the other Asian countries occupied by Imperial Japan).
The point is, decisions were made in the past to ensure that today Germany and Japan are free democratic countries with advanced economies and vital members of NATO. It’s time to move on past WW2. Most of the world seems fine to ignore the history of the Pacific War. The Holocaust is indisputably the greatest crime of WW2 but that is not a label of distinction or honor. The dead should never be forgotten – but the continued persecution of 98 year old men to stand trial for possible war crimes should.
I had not intended to write such a lengthy and heated introduction to the topic of this blog but events of this nature have a tendency to appropriate a life of their own. Putin is crowing about the proven righteousness of his war in Ukraine which was to deNazify the country. Yet he targets civilians with his missiles. So it’s time to be reminded that there are many more people, even common people through their everyday actions, that resist tyranny and provide humanitarian relief. And then there is the Leitz family, a successful and wealthy German family who used their high social status to seek concessions from the Nazis and save hundreds of Jews before the war started.
Ernest Leitz I founded his microscope and small optics company in the central German city of Wetzler in 1869. The company quickly became a success because Leitz had the business acumen to foster a stable team of skilled engineers and laborers in order to maintain the consistently high level of precision and accurate optics that the company has been renowned for producing. The Leitz management made it a policy to learn about all their employees and maintain a familial relationship with them. They instituted the eight hour work day when 10-16 hours a day was typical. As early as 1885 a company health insurance plan was made available, in 1899 a pension plan and funding to aid workers in building their own homes. During the post World War One period, the Weimar Republic chose to print more money in an attempt to pay off their staggering war reparations debt but they simply devalued the currency and runaway inflation became rampant. Ernest Leitz II strived to stabilize food prices by importing food directly from Denmark using foreign currency earned from camera exports. This food was trucked into Wetzler for distribution through designated merchants and could be redeemed by paper credit issued by the company to its employees at controlled prices.
The company’s first Leica 35 mm camera prototype had been completed in 1914 using the much more compact 35mm sized movie film negative but running in a horizontal rather than vertical direction. The small portable body still needed a breakthrough high resolution lens in the form of a collapsible 50mm f/3.5 with five elements in three groups. Leitz decided to innovate his company out of the economic doldrums and introduced the camera commercially in 1925 and from under a thousand sales in the first year rose to 20,000 as quickly as 1930 and secured the future for its 1500 workers.
Leitz was also politically astute and foresaw the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He knew his camera company was of great value to the Nazis, both economically for the foreign currency it brought in and also politically as Germany being a leader in yet another field of advanced technology. The Nazi propaganda machine used Leica cameras to extensively document and market the rise in the lifestyle of the German family who held adherence to the Nazi ideals of beauty, strength and cooperation. Leitz chose to cooperate with the Nazi while subverting their cause by time and time again negotiating concessions from the regime. There was those that chose to openly defy the Nazis. Hugo Junkers, who was an avowed Pacifist, was arrested and died while his famous aircraft company was seized by the Nazis. Leitz joined the Nazi Party in 1942 to maintain this fiction.
As soon as Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Leitz began sending any of his Jewish employees abroad to Leica foreign offices located in France, Britain, Hong Kong and the US with the company paying for travel and immigration fees. By 1938 the exodus was in full swing with groups of 20 to 30 people arriving every few weeks by the Hamburg Line of transatlantic liners to Leica’s office in Manhattan. Every single person stayed at the nearby Great Northern Hotel on West 57th Street for as long as needed until an employment opportunity could be find somewhere in NYC or further afield through Leica’s network of contacts, at Leitz’s expense. Some became repair technicians, others salespeople, marketers and some began writing for photography magazines as even the hobby of photography began taking off.
Leitz’s deeds extended well past his own employees. He bought the house of a Jewish medical doctor and illegally transferred the funds abroad when the Doctor and his family finally found a safe haven.
These activities came to an abrupt halt when hostilities were declared in 1939 but the company’s actions continued anew. Approximately 700-800 Ukrainian women (and their children) were brought to the factory as forced slave labor in 1942. Leitz’s daughter, Dr. Elsie Kühn-Leitz made sure that extra food was brought to the children and she personally attended to all the infants who had to be left alone while the mother’s were at work in the factory. She also attempted to improve the living conditions for the women. Although these activities were against the SS enforced regulations, Elsie used her high social standing to great effect. Despite the psychopathic personality types of those attached to the SS, they also followed the Teutonic traditions long instilled in the German culture. They might secretly enjoy asking Elsie for her identity papers and making her wait, but they would not dare but engage in but the briefest brushed touch of her gloved fingertips. For the same reason, Leitz hung an enormous portrait of Prussian King, “Frederick the Great” behind his office desk so that when negotiations with the Nazis broke down, all he had to do was turn and reference what Frederick the Great would have wanted and the Nazis would capitulate.
Unfortunately in September of 1943 Elsie became implicated when two women, one a Jew, was caught attempting to cross the border to Switzerland. She was arrested and spent three months enjoying the hospitality of the Gestapo but was finally released after her father paid an enormous bribe. Members of the Leitz household recall with sorrow and terror the unrecognizably thin woman clawing her way slowly stair by stair up to the second floor of the family home where her bedroom lay and spending months in seclusion listening to her phonograph records while her injuries healed. The Gestapo continued to harass her regularly until the war ended.
After the war, Ernest Leitz learned that the Nazis had planned to liquidate the entire family after they had attained victory on all fronts. When he died in 1956, his youngest son Günter respected his father’s wishes and forbade the retelling of this tale until all participants had passed on. It would not be until 2002 that most of the details of Leitz’s attempts to save as many Jews as possible during the war came out.
Jim Chung's Ramblings 
There is a body of thought that Japanese far rightists escaped serious punishment for WW II war crimes as part of an effort to eliminate Japanese Communists and far leftists and to slow or stop the march of the Soviet Union south through the Kuriles before they could occupy Hokkaido. Post-war anti-Soviet efforts made difficult decisions less difficult and Nazis and Nazi sympathizers slipped through. Much of history is a debate.
Leitz and the family were principled and I am glad that their generosity and benevolence are being noted.
LikeLiked by 1 person