Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (23 page)

WHEN ELVIRA FROMM’S HUSBAND
, Salomon, and their daughter Ruth fled to England in the spring of 1939, she could not bring herself to accompany them. She was in poor health, and did not want to be financially dependent on her brother-in-law Julius. Above all, she did not want to abandon her only son, Berthold. Berthold had been born with a clubfoot and had failed to measure up to the high academic standards that Salomon had set for him, and was therefore frequently beaten by his father. Many members of this ambitious family separated themselves from its ostensibly weakest link—Berthold. “They always spoke harshly about my brother,” Ruth Fromm recalls bitterly.

So Berthold, his mother’s fretful problem child, stayed behind with her in Berlin. Until 1939 he earned his living as an optician and precision mechanic in Berlin-Schöneberg. When he was offered the opportunity to escape to Shanghai, he turned it down, because he was afraid of emigrating to the Far East all alone.

In 1939 Elvira Fromm moved into the villa on Rolandstrasse, sharing the house with Willy and Else Brandenburg. Before long, though, city officials turned it into
a judenhaus
(Jew house), and Elvira Fromm and the Brandenburgs were required to take in an elderly widow, Jenny Steinfeld, and a married couple, Wolf and Charlotte Malinowski, who had been forced to vacate their apartments to create more living space for Aryans. In addition, Willy Brandenburg brought his unmarried sister Lisbeth to live with them. Berthold Fromm still had his own apartment at Hohenstaufenstrasse 50, but he visited his mother as often as possible.

None of these people forced to live in such close confines in the Fromm villa left written records of their ordeal. Official files offer our only glimpse into the tragedies that befell them from 1940 to early 1943.

Berthold Fromm, ca. 1940

Berthold Fromm was arrested on November 20, 1941, for undisclosed reasons and brought to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. On May 28, 1942, the civil servant on duty at the municipal bureau of vital statistics entered the notation: “Shot on command.” He recorded the time of death as seven p.m.
⁷⁸

At the noon roll call in the concentration camp, there had been a sudden order: “Jews, step forward!” Several hundred prisoners in this category complied, whereupon they were checked over by an SS commission that had come to the camp for this express purpose. The elderly, infirm, and frail among them were separated out; the others, as an SS man put it, “were restored to life.”

All ninety-six of those selected had to go before the firing squad in the evening in the camp’s industrial area. On the same day, 154 Jewish men—rounded up specifically for this purpose—suffered the same fate at the same spot, thus adding up to the specified quota of 250. The mass murder had been carried out on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. The record of his telephone calls from May 26 reads: “Jewish hostage execution in retaliation for the arson attack on the Soviet Paradise exhibit.” On May 18, 1942, a resistance group led by the Jewish communist Herbert Baum had staged an essentially ineffective act of arson at “The Soviet Paradise,” a propaganda exhibit at the Lustgarten in Berlin.
⁷⁹
In retribution, the SS executed 250 Jewish men by firing squad, among them the disabled Berthold Fromm. He was twenty-eight years old.

Lisbeth Brandenburg, born in Kolberg, Pomerania, in 1885, had been living at Rolandstrasse 4 since November 1941. On July 5, 1942, she was transported to Theresienstadt with the twenty-second Berlin
Alterstransport
, a transport for the elderly. The Chief
Finance Authority sold the paltry possessions she had left behind (“1 suitcase with underwear and shoes, various items of clothing, lingerie, and table linen”) to E. Gartmann, a shop owner in Berlin-Kreuzberg who dealt in secondhand goods, for the price of 219.20 Reichsmarks. Wilhelm Noack, the High Court bailiff, had tallied up the value of these items, but there was still more to be gained for the German war chest from the bank account of Lisbeth Brandenburg. All in all, the national treasury was enriched by 5,638.52 Reichsmarks.
⁸⁰
Lisbeth Brandenburg died in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in April 1943.

Jenny Steinfeld had to vacate her modest little apartment at Freiherr-vom-Stein-Strasse 6 on September 29, 1941—“with a heavy heart”—and move to a room in the Fromm villa. On the very same day, she drew up her will, and presciently noted that she was “most likely moving to the last place I will ever have on this earth.” She stated in the will: “I wish to be cremated and buried in the family tomb in Weissensee.”

The daily newspaper
Reichsanzeiger
carried the news of her demise on September 17, 1942, reporting that the assets of “Steinfeld, Jenny Sara” had been “confiscated for the benefit of the German Reich.” These assets were fairly substantial. Her family’s restitution files encompass thirteen volumes. Born Jenny Blum in 1865, she married Gerhard Steinfeld, a banker in Il” awa (then Deutsch-Eylau, part of western Prussia), and was widowed in 1915. She was driven to take her own life on August 27, 1942. The Gestapo reported to the Chief Finance Authority: “Steinfeld is a suicide.”
⁸¹

Three of her children—Robert, Paul Gerhard, and Ilse Margarete (whose married name was Hamburg)—survived the Holocaust. Her daughter Hertha (whose married name was Birnbaum) was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and murdered there. In accordance
with her last will and testament, Jenny Steinfeld is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee—near the main entrance, at burial ground J1, family tomb # 513.

Charlotte Malinowski and her husband, Wolf, an attorney, lived at Am Schlachtensee 38, not far from the Fromms. They, too, had to move to the “Jew house” on Rolandstrasse in 1942. Charlotte Malinowski, née Citron, was born in Berlin in 1890, and Wolf Malinowski was born in 1882 in Pleschen (Pleszew), near Posen (Poznan), which was under Prussian control until 1918. Prior to his deportation, Wolf Malinowski worked as a forced laborer at a company named Daimon in Berlin-Wedding. In late February 1943, the couple were told that they would have to vacate their room on Rolandstrasse. On April 21, the Gestapo informed the Chief Finance Authority: “Charlotte Sara and Wolf Isr. Malinowski, a married couple, are being evacuated shortly. Confiscation instructions to follow.” Brückenstein, the court bailiff, inspected the remaining inventory, which was only a small fraction of the assets already “secured” for the state treasury, and set its value at 3,790 Reichsmarks.

On May 18, together with about a thousand other prisoners, the two of them were forced to climb aboard a freight train bound for Auschwitz. They perished there in the gas chambers on the following day—along with more than eight hundred deportees from the same transport.

Willy Brandenburg and his wife, Else, were taken into custody on March 4, 1943. On the questionnaire they were required to fill out in the transit camp, Willy, a former businessman whose company had been taken from him, listed his profession as “worker.” He had been forced to work in the Fromms factory in Köpenick for weekly wages of twenty-six Reichsmarks. The same applied to Else, who was paid twenty-three Reichsmarks.