Here's a fun bar-trivia fact before we get into the optics: the Hektor line — this lens included — is named after a dog. Max Berek, Leitz's longtime chief lens designer, gave us the Elmar, the Summar, the Summitar, and reportedly named his own "fast" and long-focus lenses Hektor after his pet. It's the kind of detail that sounds too good to be true, but it's corroborated across enough Leica-history sources that it's become accepted lore, even showing up in Leitz's own marketing copy this past year when they revived the name for a new cinema lens set.
The lens itself has a more serious backstory. Leitz introduced the 2.8cm f/6.3 Hektor in 1935, and by most accounts it was a direct response to Zeiss's 2.8cm f/8 Tessar, which Contax had gotten to market first. Leitz's answer wasn't just competitive, it was better on paper: a half-stop faster than the Zeiss, packed into five elements in three groups with cemented outer pairs, and impossibly light. We're talking around 100 grams — barely more than a few coins in your pocket. For roughly two decades this was the widest lens you could put on a Leica screw-mount body, full stop, until the Summaron 28mm f/5.6 finally replaced it in the mid-1950s.
Production is where things get genuinely collectible, and also where sources start to disagree — a good sign you're dealing with a lens people have argued about in forums for twenty years. The first couple hundred units, made before 1937, came in nickel and are the ones serious collectors chase today. After that, Leitz switched to chrome, and production continued through the war and into the postwar years, with coated versions appearing after 1950. Exactly when it stopped and how many were made depends on who you ask — some sources put total output around 9,700 units ending near 1952, others push total production past 11,000 units with an end date anywhere from 1950 to 1955. Either way, this was never a mass-market lens the way the 50mm Elmar was.
I'll also flag something we couldn't nail down: a story circulates in some corners about a small wartime batch of these lenses bearing German Navy inspection marks, but I wasn't able to independently verify the details (a Berlin delivery date, a Kriegsmarine contract, or a specific surviving-unit count), so I'm leaving that thread out rather than repeating an unconfirmed provenance tale. Likewise, I didn't find any solid, verifiable documentation tying this particular lens to a famous name-brand photographer, and I'd rather tell you that honestly than invent a story — the Hektor's reputation was built by working photographers of its own era, not celebrity association.
So why do collectors still want one at $995 in good glass condition? Partly nostalgia — this is, quite literally, the lens that established the 28mm focal length in the Leica system before Summicron-grade sharpness existed to spoil us. Partly the pre-war/postwar nickel-vs-chrome rabbit hole that keeps Leica-forum threads alive a decade after they're posted. And partly the fact that a clean, honestly-priced Hektor is a rare thing: a genuine piece of 1930s optical history you can still mount on a working camera and shoot through today.