I used to buy, play with and then re-sell vintage Zeiss & Contax cameras. I've had pretty much all the range at some time or another and it is my intention to visit their factory museum in Jena at some stage.
Carl Zeiss was a philanthropist in the manner if Titus Salt and Joseph Rowntree. His workers benefited from subsidised company housing and the factory estates also had their own schools and hospitals. His workers also enjoyed the reassurance of sick pay and pensions well before this became the norm in other companies. His business partner Ernst Abbe first developed the mathematical formula to enable lenses to be manufactured by mass production. Previously every lens had to be ground and tested several times to make it perfect.
The Contax range of 35mm cameras were far more sophisticated than the Leica range in the 1930's and I have owned several pre-war Contax II range finders including a mint 1936 model that took these shots.......
At the end of WWII the Russians captured the CZ factories lock, stock and barrel including all the top designers and technicians whilst the Americans and British raced them into Munich and Stuttgart and took possession of some of the Leica factories and scientists. The CZ production lines were put onto trains and carted off to Kiev where they were used to manufacture Contax clones named the KIEV. Unfortunately the Russians did not have the same ideas about quality as the Germans and staffed the factories with slave labour including orphans and war prisoners. As a result each successive generation of Contax clone cameras was worse than the previous ones to the point when in the 1970's you needed hide gloves to protect your hands from the swarf on the winding knob.
The Leica factory captured by the Russians also ended up behind the iron curtain and Zorki cameras were the result. On the face of it, similar to the Leica ii and iii, but in reality far from the same quality. The western Leitz factories went from strength to strength and the Leica M3 became something of an icon amongst many photographers, but never really appealed to me. I remain a Zeissaholic
