Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (12 page)

Although the Reich Economics Ministry generally gave Fromm’s company favorable treatment, since it made such a positive contribution to the German balance of trade, the company nonetheless became an ongoing target of harassment. As early as March and April 1933, an “in-depth” special audit of foreign currency regulations was conducted by the tax office. However, “no violations of any kind” could be detected. In addition, a
“pure Aryan” competitor called Blausiegel, based in Erfurt, attempted to use the new anti-Semitic state doctrine to its own advantage. Fromm had made plans—later abandoned—to establish a branch in England, and these plans had been approved by the Reich Economics Ministry some time earlier. In 1934 Blausiegel protested this initiative, using a combination of vicious racism and a heavy emphasis on “German know-how”: “Up to now, the German production of condoms and pacifiers has had little real competition in most European nations; it would be dealt a serious blow if alien elements succeeded in establishing businesses of the same kind abroad by taking advantage of German know-how.”
³²

Julius Fromm was hoping not to have to emigrate, but he laid the groundwork just in case. The first step was to convert Fromms Act to a corporation in which he held 98 percent of the shares and his plant manager Alfred Hausding the remaining 2 percent. Fromm’s role in the company he had founded was henceforth
restricted to the status of consultant. He drew an annual payment of 200,000 Reichsmarks plus 300,000 Reichsmarks from the firm’s net profits, and retained possession of the buildings and machines.

Directors Berthold Viert
(left) and Karl Lewis
,
ca. 1935

The next order of business was to bring his two younger sons to safety. (Max had already fled to Paris in April 1933.) He sent Herbert, the designated successor to his company, to London in 1934, where he marketed condoms imported from Berlin, and in the same year he enrolled Edgar in a Swiss boarding school.

On December 20, 1933, the chief administrative officer in Potsdam filed an application with the Berlin police commissioner to review Fromm’s naturalization process, which had taken place back in 1920. The legal basis for this review was a law enacted on July 14, 1933, to the effect that citizenship awarded to “Eastern European Jews” between 1918 and 1933 would be revoked if the naturalization was deemed undesirable “with regard to racial and national principles.” This routine procedure was applied to some 15,000 Jews who had been granted citizenship during the years of the Weimar Republic.

The official questionnaire on file referred to Fromm by his birth name, Israel. The Berlin police commissioner reviewed the records on December 13, 1933, and noted in the margin:

The overall assessment was less harsh: “He has not displayed behavior inimical to the welfare of the people and state in any civic, political, cultural, or economic context.”

A senior civil servant ordered that “Fromm be given the opportunity to make a statement.” Fromm responded immediately with a letter to the chief of police dated January 4, 1934, reaffirming his loyalty to the state:

He also pointed out that he had donated ten thousand Reichsmarks to the Winter Relief Fund, and that even back in the days of the Weimar Republic, he had advocated requiring community service in place of “unsatisfactory volunteerism.”

Fromm appended to the document an endorsement by Dr. Paul Stuermer, an avowed right-wing conservative and member of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League). Stuermer emphasized “the great popularity Fromm enjoys in the workforce and among experts” as well as his loyalty to the state, and the host of economic and personal consequences Fromm’s loss of German citizenship would entail: “In view of Fromm’s emotional rootedness in his wholly German family, denaturalization would do untold mental and physical harm not only to him personally, but to the German public interest, which would suffer significant material damage.”

On January 19 and 20, 1934, the District Factory Cells Division of the Berlin Nazi Party also sided categorically with Fromm “because of our interest in maintaining and creating new jobs.” The Nazi officials at this location feared for the future of the factory and drafted a detailed report about Fromm’s plan to set up a heavy-duty rubber factory producing tires with outstanding traction. The plant would employ two hundred workers on opening
day. The report, dated January 19, 1934, states: “The company can be regarded as exemplary in both its technical and its social facilities. Director Fromm is the executive of the entire business. In the course of a single generation, he has brought this factory from very modest beginnings to its current prominence. Nearly all the machines and facilities in the plant were built to his own specifications, and most are patented… Stripping this man of his citizenship poses the risk that slowly, but surely, this factory will lose its standing, and if F. sets up factories abroad, the market for German exports will be lost there.”

Advertisement in
Der deutsche Drogist
, 1934 (text reads: Fromms—
German quality products, manufactured by German workers)

The response by the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Berlin was decidedly unreceptive to this argument. Motivated less by job concerns than by class envy of a successful Jewish businessman, and possibly by a prickle of anticipation about getting their hands on the booty themselves, the gentlemen disclosed their take on the issue “in strictest confidence”: “We are having particular difficulty seeing why denaturalization of Herr Fromm would represent any serious danger to the continued success of his business, let alone that it would make the company go under.”

Advertisement in
Der deutsche Drogist
, 1937 (text reads: Celebrating our
anniversary—25 years of service to the health of our nation)

In the end, the chief administrative officer in Potsdam ruled in favor of Fromm. He emphasized Fromm’s “impeccably German way of thinking,” and voted “to uphold naturalization in this specific instance.” On April 21, 1934, the Prussian secretary of the interior decreed, in consultation with the Reich authorities, that “the plan to revoke Israel Fromm’s citizenship is being dropped.” Furthermore, it was found that strictly speaking, it was unlawful to force Fromm to resume using his first name Israel, and the Berlin police department initiated proceedings to rescind the “change in first name of the Jew Julius Fromm.” However, the matter was still pending when he emigrated in 1939.
³³

Apparently undaunted by all these dealings, Fromm kept at his business. Evidence of his calculated optimism was a major new marketing campaign with an array of advertisements he and his staff (whom he referred to as his “propaganda department”) designed for the pages of the
Drogisten-Zeitung
in 1933 and 1934. The sweeping curved lettering used in these ads proclaimed that this product was “Heat vulcanized / Storable for 3 years / Transparent.” The company sought to appeal to the journal’s rather conservative readers with slogans in old-fashioned German cursive script; these ran the gamut from jingles (“Fromms Rubber Products are the ones to get—because this brand’s the best one yet”) to lists of selling points (“Admired, Reliable, Popular!”). A 1934 advertisement declared with simple pride: “World-Famous Brand: Fromms Rubber Products.”

In 1935 Fromm marketed his sheer condoms as “The Winning Quality Brand!” During the Olympic Games in 1936, he distributed a mass transit map to foreign guests with the “authorization of the Propaganda Committee for the Olympic Games.” This map bore the title Nahverkehrsplan, a clever pun on the double meaning
of the German word
Verkehr
(“transportation” and “sexual intercourse”), and thus a tie-in to his leading product.