Doppelfernrohr 7x50H Carl Zeiss Septar, Reichsmarine, circa 1936

Doppelfernrohr 7x50H Model SEPTAR, produced by Carl Zeiss around 1935, to be destined for the Swedish Navy. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed strict limits on the German navy and prohibited it from designing and building submarines, aircraft carriers, naval aircraft and heavy coastal artillery; the displacement of the new ships could not exceed 10,000 tons.

But on 18 June 1935 the Anglo-German naval treaty was signed which, while limiting the strength of the German navy to 35% of that of the English, allowed Germany to have submarines and other types of ships that the Treaty of Versailles had prohibited. In the same year, Hitler, Führer and Chancellor of the Third Reich, with his new program of economic restructuring and military rearmament, imposed pressing requests in order to equip the reconstituted Navy with new high-quality optical equipment.

The enormous material requirement was primarily requested from Carl Zeiss, the largest German optical instrument manufacturer. This situation also led the company to have to interrupt all supplies of optics and instrumentation commissioned from other countries.

These binoculars were therefore certainly part of a lot which, as the presence of the royal crown of Sweden and the assignment number indicates on them, should have been destined for the Swedish Navy: this did not happen as Zeiss had to comply with the pressing internal requests, and the lot to which these binoculars belonged was reassigned to the German Navy when they were still within Zeiss.

The marks with the relative military acceptance numbers by the Reichsmarine (starting from 1935 it was called Kriegsmarine) demonstrate irrefutable proof of what happened in that precise historical moment: Hitler's Germany was consciously preparing to trigger what would soon become the second World War.

Although the binoculars are in excellent condition, from the right side you can only see them by looking from the objective towards the eyepiece, with a microscope effect.

We are currently not aware of any other binoculars with these same characteristics.

Carl Zeiss takes its name from its founder, Carl Zeiss, who on November 17, 1846 chose the small city of Jena, in Thuringia, as the location for his precision optical equipment factory. Thanks to the strict quality control that Carl Zeiss imposed on its products, going so far as to personally destroy the microscopes that did not pass the tests, the newborn Zeiss became the official supplier of the University of Jena and received the gold medal of the industrial exhibition in 1861 of Thuringia as the best research instrument produced in Germany, awarded to the Stand I microscope of 1857.

In 1866 the thousandth microscope was produced and the name Zeiss became known throughout European scientific circles. Thanks to studies on the Porro prism, in 1893 Abbe patented double prism binoculars, which accentuated the perception of depth. The mass production of Zeiss binoculars began in 1894, already at the beginning of the twentieth century more than 30,000 were made, by the beginning of the First World War the figure had risen to 500,000 and, by the end of the Second World War, 2,260,000 were produced binoculars for the civil and military market. Models were made starting from 4x11 mm to 12x40 mm, up to real giants such as the 80 mm and 100 mm.

Thanks to studies conducted on the perception of light in low light situations, it was shown that the average dilation of the pupil in an adult is about 7 mm. For this reason, the 7x50 mm model was introduced in 1910 and remained on the market until 1917 with few changes to the materials used. In 1926, following the post-war crisis of the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles which bankrupted many important German companies, Zeiss purchased "C.P. GOERZ" and founded Zeiss Ikon in 1926.

In 1937 Zeiss had commercial contacts and factories in more than 29 countries around the world. From '33 Zeiss acquired interest from the Nazi regime, which balanced production towards military instruments. It successfully produced binoculars with wide-angle optics for military use, pressure resistant optical systems for U-boats, periscope binoculars for targeting tanks. Furthermore, Zeiss cameras were mounted on the V2s for remote sensing operations of the English coasts.

On November 1, 1935, Zeiss, in the person of Alexander Smakula, patented a process for the treatment of optical glasses with extraordinary results in terms of light transmission. Remained a military secret until 1939, it was adopted on binoculars to reduce ghost images and internal reflections. During the Second World War, there were numerous bombings against the Zeiss factories. Jena was bombed several times by the Allies starting in 1944. Stuttgart was razed to the ground, although the Contessa-Nettel factory suffered little damage. The bombing of Dresden, in addition to devastating the city, also caused considerable damage to the Zeiss Ikon headquarters.

On April 13, 1945, American military forces entered Jena, surprising themselves that the bombing had not caused any significant damage. The main planetarium was in ruins, while the factories remained operational.