Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (2 page)

J
ULIUS
F
ROMM
, S
EX, AND
F
AMILY
P
LANNING

THERE IS ONLY ONE REMAINING MEMBER
of the Fromm family who knew Julius Fromm well—and she did not like him. This person is Ruth Fromm, born in Berlin in 1919, a daughter of Julius’s older brother Salomon. Diminutive and delicate at the age of eighty-seven, and ebullient despite her arthritis, she lives in Manhattan and speaks a wonderfully old-fashioned Berlin-tinged German. Of course she often switches back to English, and then, out of nowhere, punctuates descriptions of her diet and the dangers of bird flu with a high-pitched giggle. Although she never had children, she is the glue that binds the Fromm family—a family “scattered all over the planet.”

Ruth knows a great many stories about the living and the deceased relatives in Johannesburg, Berlin, Paris, Munich, and London. She enjoys chatting about Aunt Helene, a merry widow, and the most high-spirited of Julius Fromm’s seven siblings. Before the war, Helene ran an optician’s shop in Berlin. Indulging in a bit of word play with the family name Fromm, which in
German means “pious,” and throwing in a reference to the title of a famous German poem by Wilhelm Busch, Ruth declares that this aunt was anything but a “pious Helene” (
fromme Helene
): “She knew how to deal with men.”

There is one member of the family Ruth does not want to speak about: Uncle Julius. She does not have a single picture of him in her photo collection. It feels as though you have to grill her to unearth any information about him. She eventually volunteers that he was a cold individual, in marked contrast to her many other kindhearted uncles and aunts. He was fixated on his business, on money, on the company. “There is nothing more to be said about him.” We will come back to the reasons why Ruth still bears a grudge, but there is certainly a great deal more to be said about Julius Fromm.

A rosier view, albeit along similar lines, was offered in a March 1933 public tribute to Julius Fromm on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, a scant few weeks after the Nazis came to power in Germany. This tribute appeared in the drugstore trade journal
Der Drogenhändler
: “It has taken him exceedingly intense, single-minded devotion to his work to get to where he is today. We all pay tribute to his impressive and brilliant lifetime achievements. The untimely death of his father drove him to seek his own way at an early age, and to give his life a meaning and a direction of his own design.” He was the kind of businessman, the tribute went on to say, who understood the importance of “keeping the company permanently under his control,” and the firm’s “colossal modern buildings” conveyed a sense of “the international status that German workplaces enjoy.” “Ample publicity, exceptional customer service, and, above all, consistent high quality have earned the ‘Fromms Act’ brand the complete trust and satisfaction of customers.”
¹

A more permissive attitude toward sexuality had begun to develop during World War I, and grew more pronounced during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. Symptomatic of a newfound tolerance for physical intimacy was the dance mania that swept through every social class in Germany. Even the 1919 memorial service for the murdered communist Karl Liebknecht was followed by a “tea dance.” As part of a new trend in science, institutes outside the walls of academe founded the modern field of sexology. The historian Walter Laqueur’s book on this era describes a “new sex wave” that extended “to nude shows and hard-core pornography.” Berlin began to copy Paris; small French-style nightclubs shot up out of nowhere, and erotic pulp fiction was all the rage, with topics including nights in a harem, women and whips, courtesans’ erotic apprenticeships, luscious ladies, boys’ love letters, gynecologists’ diaries, lesbian women (“feminine eroticism swinging the other way”), and vicissitudes in the garden of love.

Julius Fromm, late 1920s

The Reich Business Machine Dealers’ Association held a beauty contest for stenographers, and “Berlin’s latest attraction” debuted in the early 1930s: a sexology bookshop on Wittenbergplatz. A protest pamphlet was quick to report: “The word ‘sexual,’ in huge blue-and-silver Roman-style letters, stares passersby in the face. All day long, people crowd around the display windows.” This “prominent feature of the shop” quickly resulted in “repeated visits by the police.” In December 1932, a court sentenced the owner to eight months for “distributing lewd literature.”
²

It was at this time that Julius Fromm was advertising his new “select brand.” While this innovative contraceptive device, sheerer and less intrusive than earlier products of its kind, had been developed for personal use, it had far-reaching consequences for the fabric of society as a whole. The condoms helped to eliminate the traditional unity of sexuality and reproduction, and facilitated promiscuity, sexual experimentation, and eroticism liberated from the confines of everyday family life.

Consequently, the chairman of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, Adolf Cardinal Bertram, launched an attack on this contraceptive device in 1921, calling it “an incentive to fornicate.” Condom advertising, he inveighed, would “obfuscate or obliterate the moral precepts of our nation,” and result in “a plummeting birthrate” and “the loss of the noblest strength of our nation.” Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the founders of modern sexology, saw the matter quite differently, and expressed his great admiration for Fromms Act: “This is a leading company in Berlin; day after day, no fewer than 144,000 prophylactic devices are produced, and even then the company can barely keep up with the demand for this product.”

Magnus Hirschfeld emphasized the menace posed by venereal diseases—syphilis in particular—and expounded on all the misery, “the diseases and germs [that had been] ‘nipped in the
bud’ by these products.” Few companies had had “such a profound impact on human sexuality and social interaction” as Fromms Act, the legendary factory with the proud (if somewhat ambiguous) name. After taking a tour of Fromm’s factory in 1926, Hirschfeld concluded: “To the best of my knowledge and principles, and in the light of my practical experience and theoretical deliberations, the prophylactics distributed under the Fromms Act label optimally fulfill all prerequisites for a suitable protective and preventive prophylactic device.”

A modest dip in the birthrate in Germany was recorded beginning in 1875. This decline accelerated rapidly after the turn of the century, and was generally attributed to the “rationalization of sexual life,” a phrase coined by the economist Julius Wolf in a 1912
study bearing that title. Wolf concluded that “increased awareness of birth control methods, improved technological ‘advancement,’ and greater accessibility to birth control have provided considerable momentum for the plummeting birth rate.”

Advertisement in a
pharmaceutical trade
journal, 1930

An increasing number of Germans in urban areas began moving to a “two-child system” (and after World War I even to a “one-child system”)—to the dismay not only of Catholic dignitaries, but also of many demographers and politicians. This shift was soon evident in rural areas as well. The German Jews were at the forefront of the new demographic pattern. The 1927 edition of the
Jewish Lexicon
reported: “Despite a 29 percent increase in marriages over the last 50 years, the number of births in this period has fallen by over 43 percent.” Maintaining the Jewish population of Berlin at the same level would require “a constant influx of Jewish people from outside the city.”
³

In the early 1930s, an alliance formed between National Socialists bent on “maintaining the nation’s strength into the next generation” and churchgoing fundamentalists committed to chastity and marital fidelity. Kurt Gerstein became the strident voice of this motley collaboration. A dedicated member of the Confessing Church, a Christian resistance movement in Nazi Germany, who joined the Waffen-SS and attained the rank of Obersturmführer, he began spying on Nazi operations, and as early as August 1942 sent the Swedes a highly detailed report about the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, accompanied by a request to relay this information about these murders to the Allies. Just a few years prior, though, in 1936, Gerstein had issued an anti-Semitic statement on the need to protect minors, which included the following remark about condom advertisements: “One need look no further than the brand name ‘Primeros’ (meaning ‘first love’) to grasp the skulduggery of this disgraceful business cooked up by the Jews… Furthermore,
there should be a ban on the sale of these devices in vending machines, which are doing a brisk business. These machines, which have sealed the fate of many a curious young person, were also introduced in Germany by a Jewish company.” Incidentally, Primeros condoms were manufactured by a Saxon-Bohemian company named Emil Schuran.