The NATO Chronograph Story
In 1984, at the height of the quartz crisis, the German military rejected electronic watches and commissioned a mechanical chronograph. Tutima built it.
By 1984, the Swiss watch industry had lost two-thirds of its workforce to quartz. Mechanical movements were considered obsolete — relics of a slower century. The future was digital, battery-powered, and cheap.
That year, the German Air Force issued a solicitation for a mechanical pilot chronograph. The Bundeswehr did not trust quartz in combat. They needed something that would function after electromagnetic pulses, at extreme altitudes, under sustained vibration. Tutima won the contract.
The result was the NATO Chronograph, Ref. 798, bearing NATO stock number 6645-12-194-8642. Inside sat a Swiss Lemania Caliber 5100 — one of the last great mechanical chronograph movements, known for its reliability under stress. The case was pearl-blasted titanium with a mu-metal inner shield — a magnetically soft nickel-iron alloy, the same material used to block interference in MRI machines. The sapphire crystal measured 2.5 millimeters thick, anti-reflective on both sides. Pushers and crown sat flush with the case, a military requirement to prevent snagging under flight gear.
The watch was flight tested at 1,500 meters and 15 kilometers altitude. It received a NATO acceptance certificate. It spent one week aboard the MIR space station.
When Dieter Delecate offered the watch to the public in 1985, his own salespeople called it impossible to sell. "Japanese quartz watches were exciting," Delecate recalled. "Mechanical chronographs were not very popular." They were wrong. The NATO Chronograph found an audience among collectors and professionals who understood what the military had specified and why.
The connection to aviation was not invented by a marketing department. Ernst Kurtz, Tutima's founder, had a brother — Dipl.-Ing. Walter Kurtz — who was a test pilot. In 1941, the Kurtz factory produced the Fliegerchronograph for the Luftwaffe, powered by Caliber 59. Around 30,000 were built between 1941 and 1945. The NATO Chronograph was a direct descendant, separated by four decades but driven by the same question: what does a pilot need on a wrist?
In 1994, Delecate relaunched the Flieger as a civilian watch. It became a symbol of the mechanical revival. The German military still maintains two workshops in northern Germany devoted to repairing the original NATO chronographs.
The Lemania 5100 was eventually discontinued. Tutima responded by developing in-house solutions, including Caliber 521 with a patented central minute hand. Today, the M2 line carries forward the specifications that started with Ref. 798 — titanium case, mu-metal shielding, and a central minute counter readable at a glance.