Leica Freedom Train

As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II, son of the founder and head of the company from 1920 to 1956,[3] began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for help to get them and their families out of the country.

The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks until the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, when Germany closed its borders.

Also, the Nazi government urgently needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.

[4] After the war, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palmes Académiques from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s and Courage to Care Award from the Anti-Defamation League.

It is the subject of a book, The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train (American Photographic Historical Society, New York, 2002) by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born rabbi currently living in England.