Some of the first Leicas to come out of the new Ernst Leitz plant at Midland, Ontario, were IIIf bodies put together from parts shipped over from Wetzlar. Someone in Midland was proud enough of them to engrave the top plates “Ernst Leitz Canada Limited Midland Ontario”. The plant was short of working capital and wanted the batch sold quickly. According to Hans O. Pieper, writing for the Leica Historical Society of America, the Canadian trade would not take them. Buyers wanted a German Leica with a German engraving, and the wholesaler sent the cameras back, in Pieper’s words “bitterly disillusioned”. By a special agreement with the Canadian government the top plates were changed to read “Ernst Leitz Wetzlar Germany”. Leitz Photographica Auction counts more than 5,000 IIIfs made at Midland and only about 200 with the Canada engraving. One of those, no. 684738 of 1953, has sold for €10,800.
That is a fair introduction to Ernst Leitz Canada. For most of its life the plant made things that did not say where they were made, or said it quietly.
Why Midland
The reasons for going abroad are better documented than the choice of town, and the best document is from the time. In 1952 TIME reported that the American distributing subsidiary of Leitz had been confiscated after Pearl Harbor, that the Alien Property Custodian was auctioning it, and that Leitz was barred from bidding. Rather than run two rival Leitz companies in the United States, the family chose Canada. North America was its largest export market. Heinz Richter, whose history draws on ELCAN’s own, adds that American immigration was too slow for the German staff, and that the company needed German government permission to invest abroad and could bring only $50,000 into the country.
TIME gave a second aim as well: “a share of rearmament’s precision optical orders”. That is narrower than the Cold War motive in later accounts. Leica Camera AG’s 2025 timeline says the move helped the company “become financially independent during the Cold War”, and Bernard Plazonnet, drawing on the Leica historian Rolf Fricke, says the Cold War weighed on Germany when Leitz sent Walter Kluck to Canada. TIME’s report of 1952 says nothing about a Soviet threat. But defence work was part of the plan from the first year, not something Midland drifted into.
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Why Midland in particular is mostly company lore, with one exception. TIME said the site was picked by Ernst Leitz III, the 46-year-old son and namesake of Ernst Leitz II, who judged that Midland’s lake and rivers resembled Wetzlar and would ease the workers’ homesickness. That agrees with the Wild Heerbrugg history, which credits a scouting trip by Ernst Leitz III and Karl Seng. The other versions came later. Richter says the shortlist was Granby in Quebec, Smiths Falls and Midland. In his account Smiths Falls was too hard to pronounce in German or Spanish, and Midland won partly because it has the same number of letters as Wetzlar and could be swapped into the trademarks. A writer for the Photographic Historical Society of Canada heard from the late Bill Belier that the Canadian distributor, Walter Carveth, suggested Midland: a short name like Wetzlar, friendly people, and country not unlike parts of Germany.
The civic record fills in the rest. In March 1952 tenders were called for a plant of 15,000 sq ft, said to represent an investment of $200,000. In May the ratepayers voted the new firm a $10,000 fixed tax assessment, and two days later its machinery and equipment were arriving. The concession ran until December 1962. The Archives of Ontario gives the company’s date of establishment as 28 May 1952. TIME described the arrival: 24 German workmen from Wetzlar, in a town of 6,949 people, uncrating $100,000 worth of optical machinery in a rented curling rink. Richter and the Wild Heerbrugg chronology agree that the first lens components were finished after a week and the first complete lenses and cameras after four. Both call the temporary room the Midland Ice Arena, but TIME’s “curling rink” supports the PHSC writer who puts it in the Midland Curling Rink. The same writer says Bell Canada later used the building to assemble radio-telephone equipment, which he helped install around Georgian Bay one summer. Richter adds that a brick from the Wetzlar works was set into the wall by the main entrance of the new plant.
The plant went up that summer on Ellen Street. In July footings were poured on the edge of town for 20 rental houses on Wireless Hill, built, the paper said, “in anticipation of the needs of newly arrived Ernst Leitz (Canada) Limited workers”. In August, when the building reached its highest point, the German staff held a traditional “richfest”, a topping-out party. More than 200 residents turned out to watch, and Günther Leitz greeted the West German ambassador, Dr. Werner Dankwort. The Archives of Ontario has a photograph of the finished plant from the 1950s, with LEITZ in large letters over the office block.
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One story about Midland needs correcting. Richter says the town was eager for Leitz because its shipyard had closed. It had not. The Midland yards, the largest on the Great Lakes, were still launching ships in 1952 and closed for good in 1957. Nor was Leitz the first optical company in town: Bausch & Lomb had announced a Midland branch plant in 1947.
The Germans who came, and stayed
The president and general manager was Günther Leitz, a son of Ernst Leitz II; TIME gave his age in 1952 as 38. When his father died in 1956 the local paper listed the surviving sons as “Ernst and Ludwig of Wetzlar and Guenther of Midland”.
The family grew in Midland. In March 1956 a son was born at St. Andrew’s Hospital; he was to be named Guenther, and the paper noted that he was “only the second boy born in the fourth generation of the Leitz family”. On 1 March 1959 another son was born, at the same hospital, to “Mr. and Mrs. Guenther Leitz, Ruby St., Midland”. Three months later Günther Leitz went back to Germany for a year to help with a “management re-organization” of the parent company. “I hate to leave this wonderful place,” he said, “particularly in the summertime, but we will be back.” The Neue Deutsche Biographie gives his dates as 1914 to 1969.
He also left a mark on the town plan. In 1959 council agreed to a land exchange so that Hillcrest Lane would not pass close to his house, which “had to be built back from the brow of the hill”; he offered to deed land so the lane could run out to Scott Street instead, which was cheaper for the town. The Huronia Museum’s transcriber added a personal note to that item. In the mid-1980s the transcriber bought lot 20 there for $15,000, a low price because it had no water or sewer. The lawyer and former mayor Ted Symons then found that “the Leitz family, knowing that the lot, if sold, would have no services, had included an easement across the Colborne Street property which they had once owned”. Neither the real-estate company nor the seller had known. “Many thanks to Ted Symons for his research and the Leitz family for their foresight.”
His assistant manager in 1955 was Walter Kluck. Plazonnet, translating Fricke, tells how they met. Kluck had been an interpreter at a US Army camp, and in 1947 he was working at a barter centre set up to fight the black market. Günther Leitz is said to have come in to swap a Leica for a refrigerator and other goods, been impressed by him, and hired him. In 1948 Kluck was sent to start the Saroptico plant in the French-administered Saar, which built Leicas marked “Monté en Sarre”. From there he went to Canada.
In Midland he became a townsman. In late 1958 the Y’s Men’s Club meant to honour Kluck, one of its directors, but he was away on business; the paper added that he had “received his Canadian citizenship papers recently”. Walter and Lily Kluck’s house on Hillcrest Lane stood near a new hydro substation, and in January 1960 Kluck, “manager of Ernst Leitz (Canada) Ltd.”, spoke for a delegation of neighbours at council. They had expected “a cottage-type brick building” like the one on Queen Street, he said. “When we realized just what they were putting up on Scott Street, it was too late.” The museum’s note on the 1959 photograph says the neighbours complained about the noise and a sound fence went up around it.
The plan for the workforce had been large. TIME said Leitz meant to train some 500 Canadians to grind lenses and make Leicas. At the fifth-anniversary banquet in 1957 Günther Leitz admitted that the aim had been six Canadians for every German, trained as tradesmen, and that the company had fallen far short. About 325 people came to the dinner, some 150 of them employees. He called the company’s “inability to induce more Canadians to join the staff” a disappointment. Five years later it had 160 staff. Only in 1979 did a newspaper put the whole workforce at about 500. Not everyone at the top was German: Andy Davidson, the office and personnel manager, had come from the Steel Company of Canada in 1952. In February 1956 he left to become administrator of St. Andrew’s Hospital, where the Leitz boys would be born.
The Germans settled. Leitz employees owned lots in a new subdivision, and in 1955 Kluck told the town council they were anxious to start building and asked for services to be put in as soon as possible. In September 1956 the town let a $48,664 contract for sewers, water mains and roads in the Beauchamp subdivision in Ward Four, where several homes were already going up and “the land is largely owned by Ernest Leitz Co. and H. J. Beauchamp”. After his stay, Horst Siegfried wrote in the Leitz staff magazine Objectiv that Midland “is actually situated in a huge park”, that Hacker’s store had German magazines “not even out of date”, that a car in Canada was like a bicycle or scooter in Germany because “cars cost less”, and that soccer gave way in winter to “fierce ice hockey battles”.
In December 1958 Heinz Kiefer, Ernst Hasenier and Wolfgang Detambel built a section of the company’s float for the Santa Claus parade, and Mrs. E. Keylwerth, Ken Simms and Hans Wiese painted the scenery. Bausch and Lomb entered a “Davy Crockett” in the same parade. That spring a want-ad had read “Found, lighter near Leitz plant.” Six years in, the plant was something you could give directions by.
Assembly, then design
Leica’s timeline says Midland first made lens elements, then whole lenses. The cameras began as assembly from Wetzlar parts. In June 1955 the paper announced that the plant was in full production of “the ‘Cadillac’ of cameras, the new Leica M III”, and the Archives of Ontario has a photograph of M3 assembly at Midland from about then. The Leica Wiki’s M3 list has Canadian blocks of fifty to three hundred cameras slotted between the Wetzlar runs from 1955, and its IIIg list has four Canadian blocks totalling at least 1,780 cameras. Leitz Photographica Auction counts about 1,500 Midland M2s out of more than 76,000, starting at no. 937621 in 1958. The Leica 72 half-frame is mostly Canadian. The auction house gives a “serial production” of 150 Midland cameras, nos. 357301 to 357450, and the Leica Wiki counts 33 from Wetzlar. The same auction house later sold a Midland 72 numbered 357605, “the latest serial number we have ever seen”, so 150 is a floor, not a count.
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The company’s own figures, printed for its tenth anniversary in 1962, give the scale. Sales passed $1 million a year in 1956. The 10,000th Canadian lens shipped in 1957 and the 10,000th Canadian-assembled camera in 1959, and lens output passed 10,000 a year in 1960. An 11,500 sq ft addition in 1957 was, the paper said, 50 per cent larger than the original plant, and by 1962 the plant covered 42,000 sq ft and employed 160 people. The anniversary dinner, in Midland’s new Legion Hall, was to bring in federal officials, photographic manufacturers and the editors of photography magazines. This was a small factory. Even so, the local editorial of 1957 was already saying that the reputation “which was once enjoyed exclusively by the parent plant at Wetzlar has now been acquired in no small part by the Midland factory”.
The reason was the optical department. In June 1955 the paper photographed a delegation from Wetzlar: Dr. Ludwig Leitz, managing director in charge of development, the works manager Paul Henrici and the chief designer Helmut Becker, with Günther Leitz and Kluck. The same week the paper reported that the company had recently acquired ten more acres running east to William Street. A month later the paper reported a research department growing “as senior scientists move here from Wetzlar” and a payroll “now over $250,000.00”, and that September a second storey went onto the Ellen Street building for offices and research. Leica dates Midland’s optical calculation to 1955, and that is when Walter Mandler arrived.
In April 1955 the paper photographed Gudrun Mandler, 8, and Siegrid Mandler, 9, enjoying fresh maple syrup, “recently arrived from Germany with their parents who work at the Leitz plant in Midland”. A church item of December 1956 names “Gudrun Mandler, daughter of Dr. & Mrs. Walter Mandler”, so the girls were his. In November 1958 Gudrun, of Regent School, won the Midland schools’ public-speaking contest, and the paper wrote that “For the second straight year, a new-Canadian from Germany has walked off with public speaking honors”. Plazonnet says Mandler came for two months. He stayed for fifty years.
Mandler’s lenses
Fricke, in Plazonnet’s translation, says Mandler came from a farming family. At about 25 he applied to the Wetzlar works and was offered a job as a salesman. He refused: he wanted to work in optical development, though he admitted he knew nothing about it and wanted to learn. Leitz took him on, and within six months, it is said, five opticians were working with him, calculating ray paths with the indispensable log tables. Fricke adds that he was encyclopaedically cultured and a keen horseman. A photograph in the same bulletin shows Mandler with Otto Geier, a supervisor, in the optical department in the early Canadian days.
The 1962 list dates the first lenses Midland developed and made: the Summicron 90mm f/2 in 1957, the Summicron 35mm f/2 in 1958, and in 1961 the Summilux 35mm f/1.4, which the paper called “the world’s fastest wide angle lens”. The eight-element Summicron 35 is Mandler’s. It went on sale in 1958, the same year as the M2 that could finally frame a 35, and Canadian-engraved examples overlap Wetzlar ones. The six-element second version that replaced it, about 12,400 lenses in two years, was made almost entirely in Midland. The second Elmarit 28mm f/2.8 was redrawn in Midland by Mandler, Garry Edwards and Erich Wagner with no rear element reaching into the body, so it fits the M5 and the CL. The Noctilux 50mm f/1 of 1976 and the Summilux 75mm f/1.4 of 1980 are his too, and Leica’s timeline names the Summicron 50 f/2 among the 45 lenses it credits to him. Asked by Tom Abrahamsson in the early 1980s which design he liked best, Mandler named the Summilux 75 “right now”, for its balance between performance and size.
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Leica calls the relationship with Wetzlar “healthy competition”: two design offices on two continents, drawing lenses for the same mount. Plazonnet records that some people called Midland the “Walter Entreprise”, after Kluck and Mandler. He also says Mandler turned down the presidency of Leitz Canada to stay in optical research. Mandler was vice-president from 1974 and took his doctorate in 1979. When he stopped is unclear: Leica says he led the optical centre until 1980, Wikipedia says he retired in 1985, and a PHSC writer says 1990. He died in Midland on 21 April 2005.
The other Midland
The defence work started early. By June 1955 Midland held its second Department of Defence contract, $55,418 for gun-control equipment. Later contracts reported in the paper were for “further camera work” ($60,000 in 1958), telescopes ($68,588 in 1958), aerial-camera overhaul ($60,000 in 1959 and again in 1960) and precision equipment ($53,341.94 in 1961). The 1960 contract covered “the repair, overhaul, modification and reduction to spares of aerial cameras”, which means taking some of them apart for parts. In June 1962, just after the tenth anniversary, came another $56,000 from the Department of Defence Production for aerial-camera repair. Ingenium, Canada’s national science museum, holds a 1950s Leitz (Canada) N-9 gun camera from a Canadair Sabre 6 and a Midland DA502A aerial camera of the 1960s. Plazonnet, after Fricke, says Kluck created the ELCAN name in the 1950s so that Midland’s products could be sold in the United States without running into the Leitz distributors’ monopoly there.
Later work went well beyond Leica. In 1970 IMAX contracted ELCAN to design and produce the projection lenses for its 70mm system, and Ingenium holds a lens of the first of those designs, the C287. The museum calls Mandler, who designed the IMAX lenses, “a pioneer of computer aided design for optical works”.
The work for the US Navy was stranger. From the 1960s, Richter writes, quoting Joseph A. Schantz of the Naval Photographic Center, Midland supplied a Leicaflex-based “High Resolution Small Format Camera System” built around three of Mandler’s apochromats: the Elcan-R 75mm f/2, 180mm f/3.4 and 450mm f/5.6, colour-corrected from 400 to 900 nanometres. On special Agfa and Kodak films they resolved 550 to 600 lines per millimetre, about twice what conventional film could record, and Leitz modified a Focomat II enlarger with a point light source to print the negatives. The 180 was declassified and sold from 1975 as the APO-Telyt-R, which Leica confirms began as a Canadian design for the US military. The Elcan-R 75 remained a Navy lens; Leitz Photographica says only about 20 were made, and one went unsold at an estimate of €60,000 to €70,000.
There was more. The Elcan 90mm f/1.0, a fixed-focus Navy lens, was completed in perhaps ten examples, the auction house believes; no. 5 sold for €132,000. Richter, without sources, describes an underwater system for the Navy computed for the refractive index of water, with the front element in contact with the sea, and says its lenses could be used at any ocean depth, “including the deepest part on earth, the 36,200 feet deep Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench”.
In 1972 Midland built the KE-7A, a black-chrome M4 for the US armed forces. Leitz Photographica Auction says about 440 went to the military and about 60 overrun sets to civilians, and one of those sets has made €36,000. Its lens, the ELCAN 50mm f/2, had four elements instead of the Summicron’s six. Mandler explained in a letter to the LHSA that the military’s request for quotation gave no points for the Summicron’s high resolution, so a redesign was cheaper than supplying Summicrons. The other famous Midland military lens is the Elcan 66mm f/2, developed in the late 1960s for the US Navy and often associated with the KE-7A; Leica, which brought out a new version of it this year, says about 200 were made. It quotes Mandler: “The Naval Intelligence Service wanted a lens that looked like any other but delivered an unparalleled level of resolution.” The original sets came with a manual explaining how to destroy the camera and lens in the event of capture.
From 1971 to 1984: the M on the edge
This is the part most often told, and the familiar version is too simple.
The background is not in dispute. The M5 of 1971, the first M with a through-the-lens meter, met weak demand, and Leica’s own timeline says its large body was quickly blamed. Wikipedia gives 33,900 made before production stopped in 1975. The CL, which came out of the 1972 agreement with Minolta and was built by Minolta in Japan, sold about 65,000, nearly twice as many. Many collectors believe that is why Leitz stopped it in 1976. Wetzlar’s priority was the SLR: it was moving work to its new plant in Portugal, and its R3 of 1976 was developed with Minolta and Copal. The M4, restarted when the M5 disappointed, ended in 1975 with a jubilee edition of 1,750 cameras. Midland had assembled some of them in the last years. Mike Evans puts the Canadian M4s at about 2,500; the Leica Wiki’s model line says 650, and its own serial rows marked for Canada add up to 1,450.
The rescue story comes mainly from Rolf Fricke, in a tribute written for the LHSA after Kluck died in 1996. Fricke wrote as a friend of the firm. Leica’s blog says he met Günther Leitz as a student in Midland, spent his working life at Kodak in Rochester and was a founding member of the LHSA in 1968. He writes that Wetzlar had made “the painful decision to discontinue Leica rangefinder cameras, retaining only the new line of Leicaflex cameras”. That decision, he says, was about to be implemented when Kluck, made president of Ernst Leitz Canada in 1975, “vigorously campaigned for the transfer of Leica M4 camera production to Canada”. In Plazonnet’s retelling Kluck, known for forecasting manufacturing costs uncannily well, went to see the most important dealers around the world and asked them to “subscribe” to an M4 run at a price he had calculated. To general astonishment the trip brought orders for 9,000 cameras. Stephen Gandy’s CameraQuest reportedly adds that Wetzlar agreed only if he could find 4,000 orders, a condition no other account mentions. Richter writes that Wetzlar gave the venture its “blessing” and full support, and that the M4 tooling was moved to Midland with a great number of Wetzlar specialists to get it going. Fricke ranks Kluck with Oskar Barnack, Ernst Leitz II, and Ludwig Leitz and Willi Stein of the M3.
The result was the M4-2, announced in 1976. The Leica Wiki dates the first hundred bodies to 7 December 1977. One of them, no. 1468059, carries a red Leitz logo, “Wetzlar, Made in Canada” on the top plate and “Made by Leitz Canada” on the back. It was an M4 simplified to cost less. It had no self-timer and a motor coupling in the base. Ryan HK lists a large Leitz stamp in place of the Leica script, plastic covering instead of vulcanite and black chrome instead of black enamel, and a reader of his review adds steel gears where there had been brass and a printed frame counter instead of an engraved one.
The first ones were uneven. Andrew Nemeth says the early Midland bodies varied because the technicians “had to learn from scratch”, and that later ones were sound. His FAQ also quotes John Collier, writing in 2002 after talking to a Leica-trained repairman called Gerry, who said that “some cameras were assembled on Mondays and Fridays” and that he had “recently spent THREE WHOLE DAYS adjusting one M4-2 to get it into spec.” About 16,000 were made, among them the gold Oskar Barnack edition of 1979. The M4-P followed, announced in 1980 and delivered from 1981, with the 28 and 75 frame lines every M has had since. Ingenium gives 23,180 M4-Ps in all, against about 100,000 R4s in the same years, which shows how small the M had become. In 1983 an edition of 2,500 M4-Ps marked 1913–1983 celebrated seventy years of Leica.
There is one report from inside those years. In May 1979 Stars and Stripes, the American forces newspaper, ran a feature on the making of a Leica. It said the Canadian factory “employs about 500 people”, and that “Leica’s rangefinder camera bodies, some lenses and special optical products requested by NATO nations are made there”. By 1979, then, the M was publicly a Canadian camera.
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So what did Midland do? It built the M bodies between the end of the M4 in 1975 and the M6 in 1984, and a Midland manager made the business case that put them there. Leica itself now writes: “Thanks to the development of the M4-2 by Ernst Leitz Canada, Leica was quickly able to build on its previous success.” That much is solid. Without Kluck there might well have been no new M between the M5 and the M6.
Three things keep it from being a simple rescue. First, the formal Wetzlar decision to end the M rests on Fricke’s tribute, which cites no documents, and none of the other accounts quotes a board minute or a Leitz executive of 1975 or 1976. Second, Midland had its own stake. Fricke himself writes that M lens production “accounted for a major portion of Leitz Canada’s business”, that military and specialty work was still too small to replace it, and that Kluck “was also deeply concerned with protecting the jobs in the Midland plant”. Saving the M was also saving Midland. Third, it needed Wetzlar’s consent and dealers willing to buy. The fair wording is that Midland, on Kluck’s initiative and with Wetzlar’s agreement, kept the M in production between the M5 and the M6. To say that Midland saved the M from a Wetzlar that wanted it dead goes further than the evidence.
Back to Germany
The M6 of 1984, which took over the M5’s through-the-lens metering, was designed and built in Germany. The M4-P overlapped it for three years, and Evans says the last thousand, nos. 1691951 to 1692950, were made in Wetzlar. That means camera production went back to Germany. In 1986 the photographic division became Leica GmbH, and in 1988 it moved to a new factory in Solms.
Lens work tailed off more slowly. Two Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 prototypes from about 1987, engraved “lens made in Canada”, sold together for €84,000. A PHSC summary says that by the time the M6 was designed, the manufacture and design of cameras and lenses had moved back to Germany, and that in time most of the work and profit at Ernst Leitz Canada came from American military contracts. A Gale company history is blunter. It says moving half of camera production abroad cut personnel costs by about a third but brought “endless quality problems with the parts manufactured in Portugal and Canada”, and that in the summer of 1988 the new Leica management decided to bring a great chunk of lens production and camera assembly back to Germany. It gives no source and misdates the sale, but it suggests the arrangement did not look like a pure success from Germany.
The plant, the people and the machines
The plant was sold, not closed. In November 1990 Hughes Aircraft of California bought Ernst Leitz Canada and renamed it Hughes Leitz Optical Technologies. PHSC’s verdict is that the sale ended “the storied manufacture of high end cameras and lenses here”. Hughes belonged to General Motors at the time. As a separate company it lasted less than four years: Corporations Canada shows Hughes Leitz Optical Technologies Ltd., still registered at 328 Ellen Street, continued under federal law on 24 May 1994 and amalgamated a week later, on 1 June 1994, into the company now called Raytheon Systems Canada. The Hughes Leitz name stayed in use until late 1997, when Hughes’s defence business, Midland included, went to Raytheon, which renamed the plant ELCAN Optical Technologies. In 2011 optics.org reported that Raytheon would not comment on reports that it meant to auction Elcan. It did not sell, and Elcan is still in Midland under RTX.
Some Leica work outlasted the sale. Even the Gale history says Hughes continued to make some lenses for Leica cameras. The Leica Wiki’s table for the third Elmarit 28 has a Canadian block of numbers dated 1991, though a block is dated when its numbers were reserved, so it does not show that those lenses were made in Midland that year. Ken Rockwell reports that the Noctilux f/1, whose order numbers run to 2008, went on being made in Canada after Leica had sold the plant, under contract to the new owners, until the last technician who knew how to make it retired. None of these sources names the last Leica lens made in Midland, so any single date for it should be treated with caution.
Hughes made its own one-offs. Some time between late 1990 and late 1997 the plant built a 17mm f/2 fisheye engraved Hughes Leitz, weighing nearly 12 kg; Leica Rumors says it was made for the audiovisual firm Electrosonic. A Dutch Leica store has offered one as “one of a kind”. This month Leica Rumors reported that a Hughes Leitz 17mm f/2 had turned up at Goodwill with a starting bid of $35, and sold for $20,001.
After the sale, Leica sales and repair in Canada moved from one distributor to another, landing briefly at Lisle-Kelco, which closed in 2003. Leica eventually left Canada and now runs North America from Teaneck, New Jersey.
On the workers the record is thin. The company’s figures give about 150 employees in 1957 and 160 in 1962, and Stars and Stripes gives about 500 in 1979. It is the last figure on record for the Leitz years. No source gives a headcount for the end of camera production or for the 1990 sale, or says whether anyone was laid off when the cameras went. Heinz Richter, a Minneapolis Leica dealer who visited the plant in the Leitz years, found an interior “very much like that in Wetzlar”: individual workbenches and no assembly lines, a testing instrument on almost every bench, a lens element being ground by hand, and German accents in nearly every conversation alongside the local staff. “The workers were under no time pressure at all,” he wrote. “The whole place had a rather unhurried atmosphere.” What is documented is that many of the Germans stayed. Heinrich Staubach, a Leica design engineer, worked at Leitz Canada from 1954 to 1974. A PHSC writer says his doctor’s father, Mr Holzapfel, who had once sold Leicas to stores, was among those who came over to set up the plant: “Many, like Mr Holzapfel, and others like Walter Mandler, the famous lens designer, never left Canada.” Kluck officially retired in 1980, Plazonnet says, but stayed involved in the company and the town until his death in 1996. Mandler died in Midland in 2005, half a century after his two-month loan began.
On the machinery the record is thinner. No account says what became of the M4 tooling once the last M4-Ps were made in Wetzlar. Under Hughes, equipment moved into Midland, not out: the Wild Heerbrugg chronology says Hughes brought the equipment, machinery and technology of a sister operation in Des Plaines, Illinois, to the plant. What did leave can only be traced object by object. In February 1985 a PHSC writer bought a Leitz Canada 16mm camera gun and “a new, boxed replacement 25mm f/1.4 lens; both made in the Midland factory”. Lenses like it were kept as spares for the RCAF’s camera guns. Fricke built his collection, Leica’s blog says, through a network in Wetzlar and Midland that “included former leading employees of the Leitz company after they had retired”; it is now in the museum at Leitz Park. One Hughes Leitz fisheye went through a thrift shop.
The plant itself is still working. Its best-known product began in the Leitz years: in the late 1980s, European Security & Defence says, ELCAN and the Canadian government developed the C79 rifle sight, and by 2022 ELCAN had delivered some 475,000 sights to customers in 40 countries. In 2021 ELCAN, with Leonardo Germany, won the German army’s contract for 107,929 combat sights, and The Defense Post reported in February 2026 that since August 2024 Germany, Denmark, Lithuania, Spain, Italy and Finland had together ordered more than 100,000 of its Specter DR sights, worth over €193 million. Neither report says where those sights are made, but the company Wetzlar founded on Georgian Bay now sells optics to the German army. RTX’s page calls ELCAN “one of the largest private-sector employers in Simcoe County” and claims “a 160-year legacy of pioneering innovations”, which only adds up if you count back through Leitz to the optical institute in Wetzlar. A photographer who drove two hours from Toronto in 2022 on what he called a pilgrimage to Midland found the building “not pretty” and under defence-contractor security, with “no chance of stepping inside and accidentally uncovering a treasure trove of lost Leica lenses/cameras”. He shot three frames on his M3 and left.
So, plainly: camera manufacture in Midland ended in the mid-1980s with the last Canadian M4-Ps, though no source dates the last body. Leica lens work may have outlasted the 1990 sale: the Gale history says Hughes made some, and Rockwell says the Noctilux was made there until its last technician retired, but PHSC says the sale ended it, and no source names the last lens. The plant was never closed; it passed from Leitz to Hughes in 1990 and to Raytheon in 1997, and still makes optics, much of it for the military. Many of the German founders stayed in Midland for life. What became of the rest of the workforce, and of the M4 tooling, the record does not say.
Midland on the engraving
The engraving those Canadian buyers turned down in the 1950s is now the one collectors pay for. A Midland Summarit 50mm f/1.5 has sold for €3,840, where ordinary Wetzlar examples make a few hundred euros. Canadian-engraved IIIfs and M2s have each made €10,800, and Midland Leica 72s €12,000 and €15,600. A IIIg outfit engraved “Ernst Leitz Canada Limited Midland Ontario” made €96,000, nearly twice the top of its estimate. The Leica Wiki lists an edition of fifty M7s for fifty years of Leitz in Midland.
If you are looking at a Leica made between 1952 and about 1990, look for “Ernst Leitz Canada” or “Midland” on the top plate, “LEITZ CANADA” or “LEITZ LENS MADE IN CANADA” on a lens, and “Made in Canada” on an M4-2 or M4-P. Most Midland work carries no such mark: the first IIIfs were re-engraved Wetzlar, and the Canadian M3s and M2s sit inside Wetzlar serial ranges.
Ingenium holds a 1981 M4-P that belonged to Fred Phipps, a CBC photographer in Toronto. He used it in television studios because its quiet operation was less likely to be picked up by the microphones. With it are his Summilux 35mm f/1.4, stamped “LENS MADE IN CANADA”, and a 1977 Tele-Elmarit 90mm f/2.8 marked “LEITZ CANADA”, which he generally used for portraits. Midland’s own Huronia Museum keeps an M4-P, with a Summicron 35mm f/2; the camera, it says, “was made in Midland at the Leitz plant (now ELCAN) during the 1980-86 period”. Both cameras are now in museums, which is a long way from a batch of IIIfs that Canadians would not buy.
The last word on the engraving belongs to Leica. On 3 September 2026 it launched the Summicron-M 66 f/2, a limited edition of 660 lenses at €9,850 each, based on Mandler’s Elcan 66mm. The press release credits the design to Mandler as “Head of Development and Vice-President of Ernst Leitz (Canada) Ltd. in Midland”. It also says that on the new lens “the ‘Leitz Wetzlar’ engraving on the front ring replaces the previous model name ‘Elcan’, which stood for Ernst Leitz Canada back then.” Seventy-odd years after the first Midland IIIfs had their top plates changed to read Wetzlar, a Midland design has been engraved Wetzlar again. Serial no. 001 is to be sold at Leitz Photographica Auction this month.