Stunning 1938 production Leica IIIa with original lens, picked up from the family of a Jewish veteran from Maryland. It is fully functional, and who knows what it has seen and recorded…

This is a truly iconic camera, introduced in 1935, with a new top speed of 1/1000 (Leica III introduced in 1933). The IIIa established what became a standard shutter speed range from 1 second to 1/1000 in top end 35mm cameras.

To a camera nut, NOTHING looks and feels like a Leica, it is truly incomparable, bristling with knobs and levers, it just screams photojournalist and even though all civilian and sales to foreign countries stopped in 1940, many war photographers on all sides used it.

The famous Raising a Flag over the Reichstag was taken with a Leica that was recently auctioned off.

Yevgeni Khaldei’s Leica to Go Under Hammer | PhotographyBLOG

Interesting aside, the E. Leitz Co had a very clean record the war, rather legendary for the Leica Freedom Train which smuggled employees and their families out of Germany. Quite a story of of compassion and bravery, even though Ernest Leitz II was a member of the Nazi party and the company paid reparations into a compensation fund for slave laborers in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Freedom_Train

https://fstoppers.com/historical/how…olocaust-50656

Shot with a Lumix LX5 with Leica Vario Summicron lens, on a very vintage Tiltall tripod made by E. Leitz.

Click to enlarge the picture