Curt Herzstark

Born in Vienna in 1902, son of Samuel Jakob Herzstark, who ran a firm making office and calculating machines. Curt grew up in the workshop and worked his way into the design side of the business. Under the Nuremberg laws he counted as half-Jewish, and in 1943 he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald.

There the story took its strange turn. The camp administration found out what he could do, put him to work at the Gustloff factory and let him keep drawing his pocket calculator — the plan being to hand it to the Führer after the coming victory. He worked on the drawings for two years and walked out of the camp with them in April 1945. Prototypes followed in 1946, a licence to Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein, and production at Contina AG in Mauren from 1948. He died in 1988, long aware that the machine which had kept him alive was also the last mechanical masterpiece of its kind.