FOREIGN TRADE: Shell Game

When the Justice Department's Office of Alien Property got ready this year to sell Manhattan's E. Leitz, Inc., the U.S. distributors of Leica cameras, it took pains to see that E. Leitz did not fall back into the hands of its German parent, Ernst Leitz of Wetzlar (TIME, June 16). The Justice Department remembered what had happened after World War I. Then Alfred Traeger, the former manager of the U.S. branch of Leitz (also seized by the Government in World War I), bought the company from the Government's alien property division. By the mid-1930s, Germany's Leitz again owned the...

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