Storehouse Studio

I bought a very large collection recently and at the back, with a couple of old German wind-up Berning Robot Stars, was something really odd. Branded Robot, a large long roll body with a big wind spring on top and a pre-war Robot II at the core. I'd just finished my book on half frame and reduced format 35mm cameras and I knew a bit about Berning Robots so I had a vague suspicion of what it might be - the legendary Robot 375. I set about researching it. After I finished dancing.

I discovered with difficulty that there may be as few as 10-15 survivors as it had been made as a strike recording camera, mounted in the tailplane of the JU87 Stuka dive bomber. Berning made a number of military version cameras for the Luftwaffe as the clockwork mechanism was very useful in some situations. The Stuka was one of the classic WW2 attack planes and had sound vanes attached to the wings so that it screamed as it dived - for terror effect. The plane had to drop its large, single bomb or it couldn't pull up out of the dive and the camera would be triggered as it pulled away, recording the accuracy of the strike. The rare (but not as rare) Leica 250 was also used. The Robot 375 could take 375 images on a 10m roll with one full wind, hence the name. There were 200 made, it seems and #1 is on display in the Berning museum in Munich. This one has the serial # 047008 - perhaps the eighth made. 

Strangely, it was wearing a Ross 53mm f1.9 lens in a basic but well made focussing helical with the small Robot screw mount. The original lens would have been a Zeiss Biotar 4cm. It would seem to have been a war salvage item used with whatever lens could be pressed into service. How it came to be in Australia is anyone's guess. It went straight off to Fritz Kergl (Kameradienst) in Germany, the acknowledged master of Robot repair and holder of the parts repository - the shutter was just running through on winding and as it is at heart a relatively common 1930's Robot II, repair is not difficult. 

It is probably the rarest camera I'll ever handle and I soon realised that I have a family connexion. My father served in the Royal Navy in WW2 and was a gunnery rating on HMS Scylla in the early 1940's, a light cruiser modified to defend the PQ convoys to Murmansk against Stuka bombers flying off the Norwegian coast. His task over two covoy trips was to shoot them down and so, ironically, my family may be partly responsible for the rarity of the camera.