Est. 1946 · Oberkochen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany · 7 lenses
In April 1945, U.S. forces evacuated 126 Zeiss managers and senior optical scientists — together with the company's research files, optical-design notebooks, and key glass-melting expertise — from Jena to Heidenheim in southern Germany. The new operation was incorporated as Opton Optische Werke Oberkochen GmbH in October 1946, and renamed Carl Zeiss in 1947 once the Oberkochen group reasserted the Zeiss trademark in the Western markets. By the early 1950s a parallel optical-design organization, including Ludwig Bertele, was producing fresh designs at Oberkochen that the East German Jena works could not legally call 'Zeiss' outside the Eastern Bloc.
Bertele's Oberkochen-era output was prolific: the Biogon 21 mm f/4.5 (US 2,721,499, 1955) — a near-symmetric ultra-wide for the Contax rangefinder — and successive Sonnar revisions established the company's optical credentials in the West. The Contarex SLR (1958–1971) was Oberkochen's flagship body, paired with the Distagon (retrofocus wides), Planar (high-aperture standards), Sonnar (short telephotos), and Tele-Tessar lines. Erhard Glatzel and Günter Lange worked at Oberkochen on the Hologon 15 mm f/8 (DE 1,241,637, late 1960s) ultra-wide and the Distagon 15 mm f/3.5 — designs that defined the technical limits of retrofocus and symmetrical wide-angle photography for the next two decades.
From 1974 Zeiss Oberkochen partnered with Yashica (later Kyocera) for the Contax SLR system, designing the Planar T*, Distagon T*, Sonnar T*, and Vario-Sonnar lenses while Yashica handled body manufacture and most lens production in Japan. The T* multilayer coating, introduced in 1972 and applied across the entire catalog, became Zeiss's signature anti-reflection treatment. Subsequent partnerships took the Zeiss name onto Hasselblad medium-format bodies (the Carl Zeiss Distagon, Planar, Sonnar, and Tele-Apotessar series for V-system Hasselblads) and onto Sony cameras (the ZA-branded Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar and Sonnar T* lenses for α-mount and E-mount).
Reunification with the Jena works was completed in 1991, with Oberkochen retaining headquarters status for the consolidated Carl Zeiss Foundation. The 2010s saw a renewed wave of in-house Zeiss-designed photographic lenses for the high-end market: the Otus line (Otus 55 mm f/1.4 in 2013, 85 mm f/1.4, 28 mm f/1.4) of no-compromise apochromatic primes for Canon EF and Nikon F; the Milvus all-purpose primes; the Loxia compact rangefinder-style primes for Sony E; the Batis autofocus primes for Sony E; and the integrated ZX1 fixed-lens full-frame compact (2018). Zeiss Oberkochen also continues to produce Compact Prime, Compact Zoom, and Supreme Prime cinema lenses widely used in feature production.
Notable designs: Biogon 21mm f/4.5, Distagon 35mm f/1.4, Planar T* 50mm f/1.4, Hologon 15mm f/8, Otus 55mm f/1.4, Loxia 50mm f/2 Planar T*, Batis 25mm f/2, Milvus 35mm f/1.4