Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (21 page)

On March 15, 1943, District Court Judge Heinrich Feussner certified in the land registry division of the district court of Berlin-Lichterfelde that the property formerly listed in the name of Julius Fromm had been transferred to the German Reich. The section of the land registry marked “owner” now contained the following information: “German Reich, represented by the Berlin-Brandenburg Chief Finance Authority, Berlin.” The court officials explained the basis for this entry as follows: “By virtue of expiration, in accordance with paragraph 3 of the 11th Ordinance of the Reich Civil Code dated November 25 and entered on March 15, 1943.
”
⁶⁹
The process was not regarded as a transfer in the legal sense, but rather as an emendation of inaccurate wording. Paragraph 9.1 of the Eleventh Ordinance provided a justification for this practice: “When entries in land registries expire and are thus rendered inaccurate, they are to be rectified free of charge at the request of the Chief Finance Authority of Berlin.”

Once the sale of the villa to the Nazi official Sommer had fallen through, the Chief Finance Authority looked to Colonel Wolf Hagemann as a possible tenant, at the request of the urban planning office in Berlin. Hagemann, a professional soldier, was living in Berlin-Mitte, at Königstrasse 41. In 1919 he had served in the volunteer corps in Silesia. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1940 as a lieutenant colonel in the mountain infantry at Narvik, and in 1944 the further distinction of Oak Leaves was added to his Knight’s Cross. To give this hero an attractive residence, the Chief Finance Authority approved disbursement of 5,500 Reichsmarks for “work on renovations and additions” to the Fromm villa despite the wartime building embargo then in effect. Throughout the summer, the property was redesigned under the management of Reich Building Bureau II. Hagemann had an air-raid shelter built, and put in an additional bathroom,
an extra kitchen on the upper floor, and other luxuries. Hans Lüders, a senior official at the Asset Valuation Office, had to transfer a total of 8,500 Reichsmarks “from the expatriate’s liquid assets” to cover these expenses. The building inspection department of the Berlin-Zehlendorf district office duly approved the renovations for Colonel Hagemann—on August 14, 1945.
⁷⁰

Before the Chief Finance Authority could begin upgrading the Fromm villa to conform to the wishes of the bearer of the Knight’s Cross, a construction permit had to be secured, and the bureaucrats in this office had to be persuaded to expedite this predatory process. The Chief Finance Authority pressured Bailiff Curt Brückenstein to assess the inventory left behind after the deportation with notes marked “Special Assignment!” and “Extremely Urgent!” By this point, Gärtner had already called upon his colleague, Herr Korge, the civil servant in charge of furniture appraisal, to arrange for the sale of Julius Fromm’s furniture on January 13, 1943.

Wolf Hagemann, awarded the
Knight’s Cross, ca. 1940

The Evaluation Office disposed of the basic furnishings for a two-person household on March 20, 1943, for the price of 2,473 Reichsmarks. The purchaser was Colonel Max Bork, a member of the Wehrmacht general staff residing at Pfalzburger Strasse 15/1. Shortly thereafter he was promoted to general. Bork’s wife, Else, selected the furniture and other items, which included two beds with night tables, a vanity, various freestanding closets, a leather sofa, a leather easy chair, dishes, a cabinet with glasses, fifteen coffee cups, and so on.

“The remaining items,” Kühn, the assessor in charge of this matter, noted, “were brought to Korge and auctioned off there on May 17, 1943.” We can infer from this note that the Chief Finance Authority had taken charge of the auction, instead of following the standard protocol of working with a private auction house. The auction at Korge’s had been announced on the previous day in an advertisement in both the
Völkischer Beobachter
and the
Berliner Lokalanzeiger
. The advertisement made special mention of “1 lge. corner sofa with 12 wooden easy chairs (leather).” The seating was from Julius Fromm’s household. The advertisement also enticed buyers of all social classes with “oil paintings, books, light fixtures, glass, fine china, household items, and many other pieces” for this “public” auction. It began at 9:15 a.m., and the items for sale could be inspected one hour beforehand: “Entrance only with photo identification and as long as seating is available. The Chief Finance Authority of Berlin-Brandenburg, Asset Valuation Office.”

A man named Liebert, who lived at Chausseestrasse 59, purchased the elaborate corner seating unit for nine hundred Reichsmarks. Two pictures and a wall plate went to the family of Gustav Adolf Bächle at Prinzregentenstrasse 4 in Wilmersdorf. There must have been a good number of bids on the grandfather clock, because its price doubled. In the end it went to Otto Sander, a merchant who lived at Adalbertstrasse 14 in Kreuzberg, for the price of two
hundred Reichsmarks. Small pieces of furniture and box springs proved to be hard sells, and went to a bidder named Gartz at Werder 96 for a price far below the appraised value. The family of Richard Piebus, an elevator operator who lived at Kottbuser Ufer, bought just a single round table. Friedrich Schilling, a painter residing at Motzstrasse 17, was out for antique liqueur glasses; he dealt in paintings and antiques. The sewing machine was auctioned to the Hofschulzes from Lüderitz (in the subdivision of Greater Poland the Germans referred to as Warthegau). Four lamps, a chair, and crystal and vases were acquired by Max Fischer, from the same town.

After a fierce bidding war, Franz Knabe carried off a round table, a sofa, a desk chair, and a batch of framed family pictures. The pictures were especially important to him. Knabe had a picture framing and molding business at Oranienstrasse 36 in Kreuzberg. Most likely he threw away the photographs of the Fromm family, polished the frames, and placed them in his showcase for purchase by newlyweds, young widows, and others who were delighted to discover that such nice things still existed.

A bargain-hunter named Hagen from Reichshof (Rzeszów) in occupied Poland bought glasses and a silver-rimmed carafe. Fine china went to the Schumann family at Kottbusser Strasse 6. Paul Gallisch, a postman who lived at Artilleriestrasse 13, paid a hundred Reichsmarks for Julius Fromm’s marble desk set and a few small items. Two cardboard boxes and a basket filled with an assortment of household goods went to F. Marschall on Wassmannstrasse for ten marks. Borokowski, residing on Kirchstrasse, paid fifteen marks for similar items, as did M. Worieki of Lausitzer Strasse 21. The bidders whose identities could not be established in the 1943 Berlin address book (most of whom were evidently women) must have been lodgers, and thus of a lower social status.

The auction of the remainder of the Fromm household on May 17 yielded 2,255 Reichsmarks gross. The purchasers paid cash and hurried off with their loot. The end of the auction log contains the following comment: “The signatures of the highest bidders could not be obtained because they were no longer present at the end of the auction.” The diary of Victor Klemperer gives us some indication of how the day must have “gone wild” in Klemperer’s description of the “auction of the Jacoby possessions” in Dresden on December 7 and 9, 1942, in the “Jew house” in which Klemperer was living: “We have to keep our rooms locked because the place is crowded with people inspecting the goods. On the first day the auction was held in the hall—I looked on (from the gallery), never having seen one. Involved were small household effects, and the bidders were
menu peuple
[common people]. After that more expensive objects and a somewhat better-off crowd.” On September 7, 1942, Jenny Jacoby, the octogenarian widow whose possessions would be sold off three months later, had been forced to leave her villa “with a cane, bent, but intellectually alert,” and was sent to Theresienstadt.
⁷¹

To return to the auction of Fromm’s goods: the moving company Adolf Göritz issued a bill in the amount of 207.20 Reichsmarks for transporting the items from the villa in Berlin-Schlachtensee to the auction site at Kottbusser Ufer 39/40 in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. The antiques dealer Georg Hinsche confirmed in an official statement that there were no “objects of high cultural value or precious art treasures” in the “auction lots of items formerly belonging to the Jew Fromm, Julius” that would be of special interest to the state. In the end there was a net profit of 2,047.80 Reichsmarks.

On this same morning, in this same location, the furniture and the household effects of sixteen other Jewish families that were
listed by name were auctioned off, as was the remaining property of an unspecified number of deportees, collectively designated as “O 5205—General,” who were evidently so impoverished that the bureaucrats in the finance department did not deem them worthy of individual mention. The yield from the morning’s transactions in this single auction house was 25,594.57 Reichsmarks; this money was deposited into the central treasury in Berlin-Brandenburg. From there, the money was transferred to the Reich budget for the 1943 fiscal year, and recorded as “General Administrative Revenues” in Itemized Plan XVII,
chapter 7
.

These kinds of transactions were the order of the day. For May 21, 1943, the auctioneer Fritz Roth announced in the
Völkischer Beobachter
“on official instructions” that he was selling to the highest bidder—in the same auction rooms that were used for the sale of the Fromms’ furniture—“individual pieces of furniture, grand pianos, linens, china, crystal for immediate cash payment.” Bernhard Schlüter, a “certified auctioneer for the Greater Berlin area” who resided on Leipziger Strasse, was one of many who catered to discriminating tastes. Also citing “official instructions” that dictated sales to the highest authorized bidder, he was offering “on Tuesday, May 18, at 10 a.m., in his auction rooms at Panoramastr. 1, for immediate cash payment: 1 living room set, 1 bedroom set, 1 child’s room set, Biedermeier furniture, corner glass cabinet, rococo suites, individual pieces of furniture, 1 iron fireplace grate, 3 golf bags with clubs, china, crystal, pictures, household effects, etc.”

Nowhere near all the loot from the Jewish households was auctioned off, however. A substantial portion was bought up by secondhand and antiques dealers and then offered for sale on the retail market. Other items were sold to privileged individuals with high-priority identification cards, as well as to large families. Victims of bombing raids received preferential treatment from the
state, including cash compensation for their losses, which enabled them to stock up on necessities.
⁷²

In the case of Julius Fromm, fifteen
Volksgenossen
(German national comrades) enjoyed a nice little spending spree. Because the auction on the morning of May 17, 1943, comprised the inventory of additional Jewish households, the proceeds totaled eleven times the amount Fromm’s estate yielded. We can therefore infer that on this morning, about eleven times as many Germans, a total of 165, cheerfully and cheaply enhanced their households to the detriment of exiled, deported, and often already murdered Jews. During the war, about five hundred of these kinds of auctions took place in Berlin, so roughly eighty thousand Berliners must have taken part in them. If the proceeds of May 17, 1943, represent an average yield, the auctions of household goods in Berlin alone would have generated additional revenues of 13.5 million Reichsmarks for the state treasury—the equivalent in today’s currency of 130 million euros.

Since quite a few of the Fromm household effects were sold in advance directly to Frau Else Bork, and Colonel Hagemann was given the villa, the government revenues and the number of profiteers need to be set significantly higher. But any upward adjustment of the assessment to compensate for these omissions still understates the dimensions of the massive theft, because the truly valuable items do not appear in any sales lists: the Bechstein grand piano in the parlor, the Blüthner piano for the children, the silver dinner set, the holiday china, the large library, the oriental rugs, the crystal chandeliers, the oil paintings, the film projector, the refrigerator, and the cameras. Fromm had had to leave all that behind in Berlin.
⁷³
Evidently there were still others who had lined their pockets handsomely before the official auctions took place, or the objects were appropriated to benefit Nazi luminaries, young artists, officers’ clubs, music schools, and the like.