The messy political conclusion to World War II had an interesting and beneficial impact for photographers. With four nations occupying the ruins of Germany, each country quietly began attempts to loot the decimated Nazi empire of all its valuable scientists and technology. While the majority of their efforts were focused on trying to capture high-value German military scientists in the field of rocketry, aeronautics and nuclear research, there was also a campaign of direct seizures of German commercial designs, industrial trade secrets and manufacturing equipment.
The Soviets, having overrun a Carl Zeiss factory in Jenna, claimed the existing designs and tooling to all the pre-war Zeiss optics as war reparations and began manufacturing copies of Zeiss lenses and rangefinders at their own factories, Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod in Krasnogorsk just outside of Moscow and Zavod Arsenal in Kiev, Ukrane. While the quality control and finish details of Soviet manufacturing were far below the German Zeiss standard, the Zenitar and Kiev photographic lines they turned out eventually found a secondary market in the west with quirky and adventurous photographers.
