La Nostra Storia

In 1926, a 27-year-old lawyer named Ernst Kurtz arrived in Glashütte — a town in the Ore Mountains of Saxony that had been the heart of German fine watchmaking since Ferdinand Adolph Lange trained fifteen straw-weavers as watchmakers in 1845. Kurtz had a doctorate in law, not engineering. His entry into watchmaking was administrative, not mechanical.

Within a decade, he transformed the town. His UROFA-UFAG complex employed 1,000 people — Glashütte’s largest employer. He personally developed twelve calibers. His factory supplied movements across the industry; even A. Lange & Söhne was a customer. The name “Tutima” was reserved for the most precise instruments — from the Latin tutissima, most secure. His brother Walter was a test pilot. In 1941, Kurtz’s factory produced the Fliegerchronograph for the Luftwaffe — Germany’s first chronograph wristwatch. Around 30,000 were built.

On the 17th of April 1945, Allied bombs fell on Glashütte. The Soviets dismantled what remained — machinery, tools, raw materials, shipped east. The watch industry Kurtz had built over two decades was gone in weeks.

Kurtz fled to Bavaria, then moved to Ganderkesee near Bremen. In 1954, he hired a 19-year-old named Dieter Delecate. “He talked a lot about Glashütte,” Delecate remembers. “Even on the first day.” Kurtz became his mentor.

When Kurtz’s company failed in 1959, Delecate — age 25 — acquired the Tutima name, hired Kurtz’s remaining staff, and started again from nothing. His salespeople thought he was making a mistake: “Why use this brand? Nobody knows it.” His answer: “We must use it. It’s a Glashütte brand. It has a foundation. It has a history.”

Kurtz never married and had no children. He died on April 9, 1996, at age 97, in Ganderkesee — the same town where Delecate ran Tutima. He was alive when the 1994 Flieger replica was produced. He lived to see his creation reborn.

By the early 1980s, the mechanical watch was considered finished. Quartz — battery-powered, a hundred times more accurate, a fraction of the cost — had swept the industry. Swiss factories closed by the hundreds. Most people assumed mechanical watchmaking was over.

In 1984, the German armed forces needed a pilot chronograph. They chose mechanical — Tutima’s Ref. 798, designated NATO stock number 6645-12-194-8642. A mechanical watch, selected over quartz, for people whose lives depend on their instruments. It was flight-tested to 1,500 meters and 15 kilometers altitude. It went aboard the MIR space station.

When Tutima offered it to the public in 1985, the market was indifferent. “Japanese quartz watches were exciting,” Delecate says. “Mechanical chronographs were not very popular.” His salespeople called it impossible to sell.

In 1994, Tutima relaunched the 1941 Fliegerchronograph — a faithful reproduction using an ETA Caliber 7760. Die Welt ran a lead story about the comeback of mechanical watches. The photograph was the Tutima Flieger. The mechanical watch revival had begun, and the instrument that proved it was a Tutima.

The Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Within days, Dieter Delecate drove from Ganderkesee to Glashütte. “I had to go,” he said. “I was Mr. Tutima.”

Everything looked poor. The houses were unpainted. But Delecate had not come to sightsee. He had come to see what was possible. It would take sixteen years.

In 2005, a real estate agent drove the Delecates through town. They passed a heritage-listed former railway building on Altenberger Straße 6. In the window hung a sign: “I COULD BE YOURS.”

He bought it. By March 2008, production had begun. On May 12, 2011, Delecate cut the ribbon. The first watch completed in the new manufactory was the Hommage minute repeater — Caliber 800, over 550 components, the first ever developed in-house in Germany for a wristwatch. He wanted the most difficult watch Tutima could build to be the first one finished in Glashütte.

Sixty-six years after the Soviets dismantled the original. Tutima was home.

Today, Jörg Delecate serves as Geschäftsführer — a role he has held since 1998. Together with Ute Delecate, Director of PR and Marketing, they are co-owners: the third generation to carry the conviction that what Ernst Kurtz started is worth continuing.

35 people work in the Glashütte manufacture. 55 more at the headquarters in Ganderkesee, near Bremen. Tutima watches reach authorised retailers in more than 25 countries. A new building is under construction in Glashütte — consolidating two locations, expanding capacity. Demand exceeds supply.

Still independent. Still family-owned. Still in Glashütte.

In 2027, the company marks its centenary. One hundred years from the day a 27-year-old lawyer walked into a valley in Saxony and decided to build watches.