Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (17 page)

Interior view of Alexander Fromm’s shop, 1927

Julius rented a house at Canons Park in Stanmore, at the extreme northwestern end of London, for his relatives, but remarked in a rather businesslike manner a year later, “Unfortunately, I have provided a house for the whole family in order to keep the costs down. But because only Helene and Sally have moved in, it is now costing me a great deal of money.”
⁵⁴

When World War II began, the already precarious situation of most Jewish refugees in Great Britain deteriorated still further. After the Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and both France and Great Britain declared war on the German Reich two days later, the British resorted to a security measure that had been widely implemented during World War I, the internment of enemy aliens. They were not alone in doing so. In France, all Germans were arrested indiscriminately; in the United Kingdom, however, it took several weeks for the Home, Foreign, and War Offices to agree on a course of action.

Soon 120 tribunals throughout the country were classifying enemy aliens from Germany and Austria (and then from Italy as well) into three groups. Class A was made up of people about whom there were serious doubts regarding their loyalty; they were interned immediately. Class C comprised refugees who did not arouse suspicions. Those who were neither overtly suspicious nor above suspicion were placed in Class B.
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Their freedom of movement was restricted; for example, they were not allowed to go farther than five miles from their place of residence without police permission, and were barred from owning automobiles, cameras, binoculars, or weapons.

Nearly all of the 62,244 registered Germans and 11,989 Austrians, roughly 90 percent of them Jewish refugees, were summoned to the tribunals, which began their work in September 1939. Only 569 people were put into Class A, and 6,782 into B. The great
majority, about 66,000, were classified as nonsuspicious and placed into Class C. Of those, 55,000 were granted the status of political refugees persecuted by the National Socialists.

Since the large majority of the tribunal staff members had no legal training, mistakes were bound to be made. Raimund Pretzel, who later became a renowned journalist under the name Sebastian Haffner, was assigned to Class A because he was not Jewish and thus could not prove that he had suffered persecution in Germany. In February 1940, he was interned in the county of Devon on the southern coast of England. There he met Jürgen Kuczynski, a Marxist historian, and Peter Jacobsohn, whose father, Siegfried, had founded the magazine
Die Weltbühne
. They had to spend the winter in unheated huts in a vacation complex patching up fishing nets.
⁵⁶

Most of the Fromm family members were deemed nonsuspicious and were placed in Class C, aside from Sally and his daughter Ruth. “The chairman of the tribunal,” Ruth Fromm explained, “accused my father of having started out as an Englishman, then letting his citizenship lapse and eventually becoming German.” He was therefore placed in Class B, and so was Ruth, in what amounted to guilt by familial association.

After German troops invaded Poland, they went on to occupy Denmark and Norway, and then overran Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The British faced a disaster in Dunkirk. Fortunately, 226,000 soldiers—nearly the entire British professional army—were able to escape across the English Channel to their homeland, but most of their equipment fell into the hands of the aggressors. Now the fear took hold of the otherwise stoic Britons that for the first time since 1066, invaders could occupy their island.

The fear of the “enemy from within,” or of a “fifth column” of Nazi spies, assumed panic proportions.
The Daily Mail
, a mass-circulation
conservative newspaper, ran a headline on April 20, 1940, declaring: “Act, Act, Act—Do It Now.” The text read, in part, “All refugees from Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, men or women alike, should be drafted without delay to a remote part of the country and kept under strict supervision.” Other newspapers followed suit, and once Winston Churchill had succeeded Neville Chamberlain in the aftermath of Chamberlain’s disastrous policy of appeasement, mass internments began—at first only along the English Channel and the North Sea, but soon throughout the country.

Early one morning, three policemen came to take Edgar Fromm from his parents’ apartment. They brought him to barracks outside London. His cousin Ruth ended up in strict solitary confinement in the infamous Holloway Prison in North London. Only after six weeks and a hunger strike were she and her fellow sufferers allowed a few hours’ daily recreation. Helene, Alex, and Bernhard Fromm were brought to an improvised camp; Herbert was deemed unable to withstand the rigors of detention and sent home to London after seven weeks. Fortunately for Julius, his wife, Selma, and Salomon, their doctor certified that at their age they could not be detained.

Edgar, who had just turned twenty and had recently fallen in love, was taken to Huyton, a transit camp near Liverpool.
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Many of the internees were still teenagers; most were unmarried. Word soon got around that they would be sent overseas. Most volunteered to do so in hopes of escaping life in the camp. Edgar actually wanted to join the British army to fight against Nazi Germany, but the camp commander was adamant: “If you do not get on board of your own free will, we will force you to do so.” Edgar later recalled, “They never let on
where
‘overseas’ we would be heading.”

After ten days in the transit camp, about eight hundred camp inmates, of whom about two hundred were German prisoners of war, were brought to the Port of Liverpool, where they boarded
the troop transport ship HMT
Dunera
. The guards made it quite clear from the outset that this would be no pleasure cruise. With calls like “Move, you bastards!” and prods with rifle butts, they were herded onto the ship. The prisoners had to hand over their possessions, then submit to a body search. Whatever the guards considered worthless was thrown overboard. Edgar Fromm asked whether he could at least keep a picture of his fiancée. “In reply,” he wrote in a 1957 report about his deportation, “a sergeant tore it out of my hand and pushed me down a spiral staircase.”

No sooner had the
Dunera
pushed off to sea than a rumor that was as gruesome as it was true began to circulate. The first contingent of enemy aliens had sailed ten days earlier, at dawn on July 1, 1940, on the
Arandora Star
, a passenger steamer that had been turned into a troop transporter. After only twenty-seven hours at sea, the ship was hit by a torpedo fired by Günther Prien (who was later hailed as a submarine hero in Germany), and it sank off the west coast of Ireland. It took just a half hour for it to vanish in the waves of the Atlantic. Over six hundred Italians and Germans drowned, among them a former communist Reichstag representative, Karl Olbrich, who had fled to Great Britain by way of Czechoslovakia after spending three years in German prisons and concentration camps.

One of the 229 German survivors (most of whom were sent off a second time on the
Dunera)
was Peter Jacobsohn. Edgar Fromm was now on the
Dunera
, one of 2,646 prisoners cooped up behind barbed wire on a ship built for eight hundred passengers and bound for parts unknown. Two-thirds of the prisoners were Jews, but 200 Italian fascists and 250 German National Socialists and prisoners of war were also on board.

The internees slept in hammocks, on tables, in overcrowded cabins, or on the floor. There were no blankets. Soon a mixture of vomit and urine was dripping from the overflowing latrine
buckets onto the decks below. Food and drink were limited to tea and bread in the morning and afternoon, and there was cold soup for lunch. Two internees succumbed to disease en route, and another, overwhelmed with desperation, leaped overboard to his death. “At first we thought we were headed for Canada,” Edgar Fromm recalled. “But when it kept getting hotter, and then we passed Sierra Leone, it dawned on us that they were bringing us to Australia.”

The
Arandora Star
, sunk by a German submarine

Most of the guards on the
Dunera
were convicts released on parole. They looted the internees’ luggage, and during a stopover in Cape Town, quite a few of them made off with their loot. Some were sadists who made the prisoners walk barefoot over broken glass. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Colonel William Scott, was unperturbed by this abuse, as documented in a message he telegraphed shortly before arrival to the Australian army department responsible for the prisoners of war. “The German Nazis,” in his “personal view,” had “exemplary” behavior, the message
read. They are “of a fine type, honest and straightforward, and extremely well disciplined.” By contrast, the Italians, Scott contended, “are filthy in their habits, without a vestige of discipline, and are cowards to a degree.” The Austrian and German Jews, he declared, “can only be described as subversive liars, demanding and arrogant.”

An impressive aspect of British democracy is that even in times of war it allows for criticism. Once the details of the “hell ship” voyage had come to light, journalists and politicians were heated about what was now being called the “
Dunera
affair,” and about discrimination against Jewish refugees in general. The distinguished economist John Maynard Keynes spoke out on behalf of interned colleagues and declared that he had “not met a single soul, inside or outside government departments, who is not furious at what is going on.” Victor Alexander Cazalet addressed the House of Commons on August 22, 1940, to condemn the “tragedies” on the
Dunera
, which he deemed both “unnecessary and undeserved”: “No ordinary excuse, such as that there is a war on
and that officials are overworked, is sufficient to explain what has happened,” he fumed. One year after the
Dunera
affair, William Scott and several guards stood trial. Scott was court-martialed and his deputy sentenced to a year’s detention.

The British troop transport ship
Dunera