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 U.S. company. This time, the Government barred any but U.S. citizens from bidding for the company and sold it last August to Dunhill International, Inc. of New York for $787,000.

Dunhill, which had planned to sell Leicas alongside its pipes and tobacco, ran into trouble the day after it bought Leitz. The German company informed Dunhill that no more cameras would be delivered to it. Last week Dunhill sold the U.S. company to Henri Mann, a wealthy German-born banker who represents the German company in the U.S. One of Mann's first acts was to make a change in Leitz's New York operation. Into the top management slot he again put Alfred Boch, the same man who had been brought to the New York branch in 1935 when Leitz of Germany took over from Traeger.

At week's end, the Justice Department shrugged off the whole matter. Justice was only concerned with the original sale, the department explained. Resales were none of its business.

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