The Fliegerchronograph: Germany's First (1941)

A Saxon bank sent Dr. Ernst Kurtz to Glashütte in the mid-1920s. He was a young lawyer. The assignment was debt restructuring — the town's pocket-watch industry had collapsed during the First World War, and the market never returned.

Kurtz did more than balance the books. He consolidated failing workshops into UROFA-UFAG, pivoted from pocket watches to wristwatches, and introduced machine production. By the 1930s the company employed 1,000 people in Glashütte. He branded his best models "Tutima," from the Latin tutissima — most secure. Over two decades he developed twelve calibers in-house.

The twelfth, Calibre 59, was a hand-wound chronograph with a flyback function. It powered the Fliegerchronograph, built for the Luftwaffe beginning in 1941. Around 30,000 were produced over the next four years. Kurtz's brother Walter was a test pilot — the aviation connection was personal, not just contractual. Germany's first chronograph wristwatch was a Tutima.

In May 1945, Allied bombing destroyed Glashütte's factories. Soviet forces dismantled what remained. Kurtz moved to Ganderkesee in Lower Saxony in 1951 and started again. He hired a nineteen-year-old named Dieter Delecate in 1954.

Thirty-five years passed. In 1989, Tutima produced a brochure for the NATO Chronograph that included a photograph of the 1941 Fliegerchronograph. Jörg Delecate: "People said, 'What a nice watch. I would buy it immediately if you made this.'"

In 1994, Tutima unveiled the Flieger Classic Chronograph — a faithful replica of the 1941 original, rebuilt around a modified Valjoux 7760 movement. Die Welt, Germany's largest newspaper, ran a lead article about the comeback of mechanical watches. The photograph was the Tutima Flieger.

The watch became Tutima's best-selling family. Ernst Kurtz was alive to see it — he was ninety-five. He died in 1996, at ninety-seven, in Ganderkesee. He never married and had no children. The Delecates have run the company since.