Some examples of the world of counterfeiters.

[dubois pierre]

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An example of testing a "Reichsadler" engraving on a Nikon sole. This engraving could be found on certain military Leicas or twins used by the German navy.

A Summitar n ° 577757 (1941) with the "Heer" engraving of the German army. A detail means that this engraving is false. which?.

 

Pierre

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[UliWer]

vor 8 Stunden schrieb dubois pierre:

A Summitar n ° 577757 (1941) with the "Heer" engraving of the German army. A detail means that this engraving is false. which?.

Well, for the Summarex which was only produced for military purposes during the war, they used the international sequence of f-stops. Perhaps someone at Wetzlar tried if this worked also for the Summitar.

Or it was a clandestine device to irritate members of the „Heer“.

[dubois pierre]

Indeed, a detail that the forger did not know allows this conclusion. The Summitars of the war period had the following apertures: 2, 2.2, 3.2, 4.5, 6.3, 9 and 12.5. From 1946 these apertures  became 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 and 16. The engraving  "Heer" could therefore not be found on a lens from 1946. The forger had simply put a front lens with a serial number from 1941 on a Summitar body from the post-war period. Too bad the engraving was successful. 

On the left the Summitar produced from 1946.

On the right, the war-time Summitar which replaced the Summar from 1939.

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[jc_braconi]

There is also too much distance from the letters Heer

[luigi bertolotti]

On 11/12/2024 at 10:11 AM, dubois pierre said:

 

 

A Summitar n ° 577757 (1941) with the "Heer" engraving of the German army. A detail means that this engraving is false. which?.

 

Pierre

 

 

 

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f/stop scale (entered afterwar)

(Edit : sorry, didn't notice it was already answered 🤔)

Edited November 14, 2024 by luigi bertolotti

[dubois pierre]

There was, I think, another detail between the two versions: the first had 10 blades for the diaphragm and the second 6 blades. Fortunately, some counterfeiters did not have all the necessary elements to make real fakes. But unfortunately, not all buyers are passionate and keen like the majority of this forum.

[dubois pierre]

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Another oddity from the world of counterfeiters or not?, A Leica IIIc N°375305 (1941/42) currently offered by Catawiki with strange "Reich" engravings, note that the double SS has been scratched while the one I had in my possession in my collection a few years ago N°375229 had the 2 engravings visible.

I had pointed out in a previous post the following: Many unofficial devices were used during the Second World War. Some soldiers used their personal device. It is therefore not impossible that a soldier wanted to transfer the signs of an ideology onto his device or that within a Unit an engraver wanted to personalize some of his comrades' cameras. There is no shortage of examples of our soldiers during the First World War on various objects .

Pierre
 

 

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[Anbaric]

On 11/17/2024 at 1:08 PM, dubois pierre said:

Another oddity from the world of counterfeiters or not?, A Leica IIIc N°375305 (1941/42) currently offered by Catawiki with strange "Reich" engravings, note that the double SS has been scratched while the one I had in my possession in my collection a few years ago N°375229 had the 2 engravings visible.

I had pointed out in a previous post the following: Many unofficial devices were used during the Second World War. Some soldiers used their personal device. It is therefore not impossible that a soldier wanted to transfer the signs of an ideology onto his device or that within a Unit an engraver wanted to personalize some of his comrades' cameras. There is no shortage of examples of our soldiers during the First World War on various objects

Position and lettering style look similar to yours - if genuine, perhaps something done by the unit (maybe this one) rather than the individual soldier? It's understandable why someone would want to erase the most notorious two letter logo of the 20th century after the war, of course. What's that extra screw on the defacement? Something to do with the third party flash sync, perhaps?

[dubois pierre]

15 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

The position and lettering style resemble yours - 

My opinion, if we found this engraving on a copy of IIIc we could indeed think that it could have dated from the war period. This coincidence of finding a second copy with these engravings leaves me perplexed because they are similar and therefore made by the same individual. For me someone "had fun" diverting this dark period by engraving these IIIc.

[Anbaric]

1 hour ago, dubois pierre said:

My opinion, if we found this engraving on a copy of IIIc we could indeed think that it could have dated from the war period. This coincidence of finding a second copy with these engravings leaves me perplexed because they are similar and therefore made by the same individual. For me someone "had fun" diverting this dark period by engraving these IIIc.

Perhaps these weren't done by an individual. Many organisations engrave equipment belonging to them to make it clear who it belongs to, and to deter theft. Maybe all the cameras assigned to that unit were similarly engraved? 'SS-Reich' appears to be one of the earlier names by which the division linked above was known and the timing fits with the serial numbers:

'In January 1941, the SS-Verfügungs Division was renamed SS-Reich Division (Motorised), and was renamed as the 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" when it was reorganised as a Panzergrenadier division in 1942.'

i.e., I'm suggesting that 'SS Reich' on these cameras may not be a random combination of 'SS' and the German word for empire, but rather the name of a specific military division (one which I am afraid was responsible for multiple war crimes).

Edited November 18, 2024 by Anbaric

[dubois pierre]

1 hour ago, Anbaric said:

 

40 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

"In January 1941, the SS-Verfügungs Division was renamed the SS-Reich (Motorized) Division and was renamed the 2nd SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" when it was reorganized as a Panzergrenadier Division in 1942."

Dear Anbaric, this is the real story, for these engraved IIIc it remains random and can only be the subject of suppositions😏.

[LeicaIIIfContaxIIa]

I don't know... Somehow this engraving looks a bit strange to me. 🤨

Theoretically, a member of the SS division ‘Das Reich’ could have come up with the idea of engraving a camera in this way - or an official agency of the SS could have done so.

I suppose it would have been unusual for the SS to assign certain cameras to a specific troop unit. It would have meant tying mass-produced military equipment to a single unit. I can't imagine, for example, that a machine gun or a cannon would have been engraved with the name of a troop unit. And I can't imagine that happening with a camera either.

And an SS man who privately engraved the name of his division - to which he was possibly only temporarily assigned before swapping over to another unit - on his camera? That sounds pretty unlikely.

The abbreviated designation in capital letters would also be unusual. It doesn't really fit with an official engraving of the camera.

The typography of the ‘SS’ runes is also unusual - it is (so to speak) in bold type. The runes were used in this form on flags, for example, which had a representative meaning. But not, for example, in the (official) correspondence of the SS during war years: in the documents there, the runes appear in normal print. The engraving of such a camera body is not about representational functions, but primarily about clarifying who owns the camera.

To me, this looks a bit like a forgery with which someone wanted to make money fraudulently. If this is indeed the case, then it would be (in my opinion) a rather tasteless way of forging historical objects.

[romanus53]

The only one of this category in my small collection so far:

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Late forum member Pecole posted years ago a story of finding a post-war Leica with such engraving in Belgium and he found some proof that it was authentic. The shown IIIc sharkskin was delivered to Belgium, Leica-Archiv wrote to me "Die Leica IIIc mit Sharkskin-Bezug Nr 463774 wurde am 22 Dezember 1948 nach Brüssel versendet und sie war bei uns zur Reparatur am 28. August 1953." The body shows two small stamps "db" which can be read as Douane Belgique. Until someone could find a listing in some Italian archive that this camera was bought after 1953 for the Italian air force I still consider it as a fake ;-). One could see differences in how the engravings were made. I don't know why somebody added this engraving as otherwise it's still a nice early IIIc sharkskin. I bought it in Belgium, it was claimed to be some fake and I paid about what a normal IIIc would be worth, came without lens.

[Anbaric]

18 hours ago, LeicaIIIfContaxIIa said:

I suppose it would have been unusual for the SS to assign certain cameras to a specific troop unit. It would have meant tying mass-produced military equipment to a single unit. I can't imagine, for example, that a machine gun or a cannon would have been engraved with the name of a troop unit. And I can't imagine that happening with a camera either. ... The typography of the ‘SS’ runes is also unusual - it is (so to speak) in bold type. The runes were used in this form on flags, for example, which had a representative meaning. But not, for example, in the (official) correspondence of the SS during war years: in the documents there, the runes appear in normal print. The engraving of such a camera body is not about representational functions, but primarily about clarifying who owns the camera.

I've no idea, of course, whether any of these things are really authentic, including the cameras, but other items with 'SS Reich' on them, such as this cutlery, this plate and this cup have been auctioned, and the pieces of crockery also have the SS runes in a bolder style than the 'Reich'.

Edited November 19, 2024 by Anbaric

[LeicaIIIfContaxIIa]

That is very strange. I have never seen pieces like this before.

It is striking that some of the engravings contain a hyphen. It is only missing on the fork of the cutlery.
In professionally set German-language texts, the hyphen was important for a long time. Attention was paid to its correct use. It is only in recent decades that Germans themselves have become rather sloppy in their use of the hyphen 🙄.

Ultimately, a historian more familiar with the history of the SS could probably judge whether the Leica engravings "SS REICH" are genuine. Perhaps the Leitz Museum Solms could also provide more information. They might know where such engravings could have been made.

 

[Anbaric]

Leitz was a important military contractor during the Second World War, supplying many cameras and other optical devices to various branches of the German armed forces. Ernst Leitz II, the head of the company, was a social democrat who rejected Nazi values but was obliged to join the party to retain control of the company. He did what he could to help Jewish workers in various ways, sometimes at significant risk to himself. He facilitated their emigration to the US in the late 1930s, and he and his daughter Elsie were involved in an attempt to help a Jewish woman escape to Switzerland in 1942, which ended in Elsie's arrest and torture by the Gestapo (a bribe eventually secured her release). See this short conference paper and other articles by Frank Dabba Smith:

https://choosemosaic.org/leica-jews-and-germans/

While a fair number of military Leicas were no doubt captured by the Soviet Union as they were by the other Allies, nearly all 'Nazi marked' cameras from the former USSR are not Leicas at all, but Soviet cameras that started as fairly close copies of the Leica II (the FED 1 from Ukraine and the Zorki 1 from Russia), refinished by forgers with fake Leica and fake Nazi engravings. These are quite easily detected, and are mostly sold to people with no experience of genuine screwmount Leicas (or who know they are getting a kitsch fake). Wetzlar, the home of Leitz, ended up in West Germany after the war, but the Zeiss Ikon factory was in the East and the Soviet government moved the captured Contax production line to Kyiv. Kiev-branded rangefinders were then made in Ukraine for decades. It's relatively easy to make a convincing fake Contax from an early Kiev because you are starting with a more or less authentic camera. Fakes made from later Kievs, after the design had evolved, are easier to spot.

The more subtle forgeries are genuine Leicas with fake military engravings, including at least some of the gear in this thread. These are intended to fool more experienced collectors, so they tend to eschew symbols like the swastika that were rarely if ever found on the genuine article, and instead copy engravings like 'Heer' and 'Luftwaffen-Eigentum' that were used on some real military cameras.

Edited November 24, 2024 by Anbaric

[pippy]

18 hours ago, Anbaric said:

...It's relatively easy to make a convincing fake Contax from an early Kiev because you are starting with a more or less authentic camera...

Indeed. The very earliest KIEV II cameras were (wholly?) assembled from genuine Contax parts which had been taken to the Arsenal plant in Kiev along with all the original tooling (as well as some of the Contax technicians who were taken to set-up the plant and tooling!).

Here is a link which features the auction of a very early (1947) KIEV II camera. As can be seen in the photographs although, from the outside, the nameplate has been engraved 'KIEV' when the rear of this plate is examined traces of the original 'Contax' stamp are plainly evident on the inside;

https://www.leitz-auction.com/de/Kiev-II-1947/AI-38-39390

Mind you; considering the value of these early cameras to convert one to a 'Contax II' would be a very foolish act......😸......

Obviously there was only a limited quantity of genuine Contax parts which had been taken but once tooling had been sorted and was up-and-running it was a simple matter to phase-in Arsenal-made parts as neccessary until such time as Kiev-manufactured materials accounted for the cameras in their entireity.

The earliest KIEV that I have is from 1950 and even at this late date there are still genuine Contax parts which have used in it's assembly.

Philip.

[Anbaric]

48 minutes ago, pippy said:

Here is a link which features the auction of a very early (1947) KIEV II camera. As can be seen in the photographs although, from the outside, the nameplate has been engraved 'KIEV' when the rear of this plate is examined traces of the original 'Contax' stamp are plainly evident on the inside;

https://www.leitz-auction.com/de/Kiev-II-1947/AI-38-39390

We might almost call that one a 'fake Kiev'!

Although the circumstances are very different, it reminds me a little of this 'Zorki':

https://kosmofoto.com/2020/07/the-flea-market-zorki-with-a-special-secret/

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Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[pippy]

7 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

We might almost call that one a 'fake Kiev'!

Although the circumstances are very different, it reminds me a little of this 'Zorki':

https://kosmofoto.com/2020/07/the-flea-market-zorki-with-a-special-secret/

That's a great story! A rather skilled piece of engineering into the bargain.

Thanks for the link!

Philip.

[alan mcfall]

I always assumed this was some kind of fake.  A Leitz logo applied to a product not made by Leitz.

 

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