Tutima

In 1927, after the collapse of an earlier Glashütte watch company in the inflation crisis, two new firms were founded in the town: Uhren-Rohwerke-Fabrik Glashütte AG (UROFA), which made movements, and Uhrenfabrik Glashütte AG (UFAG), which made finished watches. Their chairman and managing director, the lawyer Dr Ernst Kurtz, saw that the future lay with the wristwatch rather than the pocket watch. The best of their watches were given the name Tutima, from the Latin 'tutus', safe or secure.

The most famous of them is the pilot's chronograph of 1941, built around the UROFA calibre 59 — a robust flyback chronograph movement — and supplied to German air-force crews. In the closing days of the Second World War the Glashütte factories were bombed, and after the war the firms were expropriated and merged into the state watch combine GUB. Kurtz went west and continued making watches; the Tutima name was carried on in West Germany, and from about 1960 the company was run by the Delecate family in Ganderkesee, near Bremen.

In the 1980s Tutima supplied a military chronograph using the Lemania 5100 movement — robust, with a central minute counter and day-date — which was adopted by German armed-forces pilots and is the best known of its modern watches; the catalogue's reference 798 example dates from 1985. From 2008 the company began setting up again in Glashütte, opening its manufacture there in 2011, the year it presented the Hommage minute repeater, which it describes as the first minute repeater developed and made entirely in Glashütte. Since 2013 its collections (Saxon One, Grand Flieger, M2 and Patria) have again been made there.