Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (24 page)

Left to right: Gerhard Fromm with his mother, Anne Fromm, and Willy
and Else Brandenburg, ca. 1940

There was evidently method to the madness of making them work in the factory that had so recently been taken away from their brother and brother-in-law. Siegmund Fromm, who had also stayed behind in Berlin, had to perform particularly hard forced labor in that very factory as well. According to witness testimony, the plan was “to humiliate” the family of the former owner by assigning them “the most menial manual labor for a paltry wage.”
⁸²
The strategy was meant to highlight the social decline of the former manufacturing family for the permanent staff at Fromms Act, and in doing so would show that the new point of pride was not wealth, but the privilege that comes with lineage in the master race.

Elvira Fromm, née Silbergleit, was born in Berlin in 1897. Her husband had left her behind in 1939, her daughter Ruth had emigrated, and her son Berthold had been executed in 1942. Her
“Aryan” sister-in-law Elsbeth recalled that Elvira remained “unclear about her situation right down to the final days.” She lived “only in the hope of being reunited with her relatives” and built “her entire life on this single hope.” According to the concierge who lived next door, Elvira Fromm and her in-laws Willy and Else Brandenburg were taken away by the police early on the morning of March 3, 1943, “with nothing but a small bag and a blanket.” Afterward, tax officers sealed the doors of the villa—which did not stop neighbors from breaking in and walking off with items they found useful.
⁸³

Elvira Fromm, ca. 1940

On March 6, 1943, Elvira Fromm and the Brandenburgs joined the thirty-fifth
Osttransport
, the transport headed east to Auschwitz. The Chief Finance Authority evidently had an unusual agenda in mind for this transport. The standard procedure was to ship about a thousand people “to the East,” but in this case there were 665 people (183 men and 482 women and children). In all
probability the idea was for these deportees to move out of attractive apartments that were slated to go to special favorites of the Nazi state as quickly as possible.
⁸⁴
The train arrived in Auschwitz on the morning of March 7, 1943. One hundred fifty-three men and sixty-five women were assigned to forced labor, and the others perished in the gas chambers the day they arrived; among them were Elvira Fromm and Else and Willy Brandenburg.

Once the seven occupants of the Villa Fromm had been evicted and murdered, or were on their way to their deaths, the Hagemanns could settle in comfortably. On April 21, 1943, the Gestapo in Berlin informed the Chief Finance Authority: “The apartment in Berlin-Schlachtensee, Rolandstr. 4, in which the following Jews were living … has been allocated by the city planning office in Berlin to Colonel Hagemann, holder of the Knight’s Cross. There are no objections to clearing out the apartment.”
⁸⁵
By “clearing out,” the Gestapo officers were referring only to the remaining furniture. As described in the previous chapter, it was then auctioned off in May.

The Hagemanns fled from the advancing Red Army in the spring of 1945. The transfer of the house back to the Fromm heirs took place on January 10, 1952. Two years later, they sold it to the mother of the current owner. In 1965 Frau Hagemann rang the doorbell and requested permission to dig in the garden for gold she had previously buried there, particularly a gold statuette of Cupid. She found nothing.

S
URVIVAL IN
P
ARIS
, L
ONDON, AND
B
ERLIN

WHEN FRANCE DECLARED WAR
on the German Reich on September 3, 1939, Max Fromm, Julius’s eldest son, was interned in Paris as an enemy alien. The actor wound up in a camp named Villerbon, not far from Blois, and lived in fear that in the event of a Wehrmacht attack on France he would fall into the hands of the Gestapo. He therefore volunteered for the Foreign Legion of the French army, which sent him to Morocco. His wife, Paulette, and her mother fled Paris in the chaotic weeks that followed the German invasion in June 1940. They reached Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the Pyrenees, a place that attracted many Jewish refugees because of its proximity to the Spanish border.

In March 1941, Max was discharged from the French army and given enough money to tide him over for two days. The Moroccan authorities, who were under Vichy France control, were now beginning to arrest Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Max and Paulette figured it would be best to flee to Algeria. But Paulette and her mother did not make it over the
“green border” (the favored illegal crossing point) to Spain, so Max returned to France. In an attempt to ensure their safety, Paulette forged papers for herself and her husband. She changed their family name Fromm, which was doubly problematic because it sounded both German and Jewish, to Fromin. Supported by wealthy Jews, they lived in a small house in Bagnères-de-Bigorre and were active in the French Resistance, hiding partisans—although they were themselves essentially in hiding. They built a secret trapdoor to enable Resistance fighters to disappear into the cellar.

As the situation in Vichy France became increasingly dangerous for the Jews, Max Fromm decided to try crossing the border into Spain on his own and continuing on to England, where he would then arrange for Paulette and her mother to join him. On his first attempt, Spanish soldiers caught him and sent him back. For his second attempt, he paid a professional escape agent to bring him over the border on a secure secret route. However, the agent turned out to be cooperating with the Gestapo. Max was arrested and imprisoned in Noé, a camp in Haute-Garonne.

After a few months, he was transferred to a Todt Organization work camp near Marseilles. Along with other forced laborers, he had to build bunkers for the Wehrmacht, to protect the Mediterranean coast from a possible Allied invasion. Luckily, his German guards did not discover that there was a Jewish compatriot in the group. Max could not count on keeping his identity secret for long, however. Roll calls to single out circumcised men could occur at any moment. Paulette did everything in her power to save him, and persuaded a group of Resistance fighters to attempt a risky operation. One foggy night, they were able to sneak up to the small camp, knock down the guard, and free Max.

Max, Paulette, and Paulette’s mother fled to Tulle, Dordogne, in central France, where Max worked as a charcoal maker in the
forest until German units combed through the area in the summer of 1944. Again he wound up in Gestapo custody. His captors were unaware that he was Jewish, and that he spoke German. The prisoners were asked to line up in a row and the Gestapo chief shouted: “Jews, step forward.” Max stayed put, understanding full well what his German tormentors were saying about him: “That guy is sure to be a criminal. Let’s let him go, and see where he takes off to.” They did so, but they soon lost track of him.

At this time, Paulette, who was nearing the end of her first pregnancy, was an inpatient at the local hospital. On June 7, 1944, Resistance partisans, emboldened by the Allied invasion in Normandy, attacked the German occupiers in the town, locked up most of the security regiment in a munitions factory, and liberated Tulle, albeit for just a few short hours. Units of the Second SS Panzer Division Das Reich intervened at once. After they had trounced the Resistance fighters and taken back the city, Brigadier General Heinrich Lammerding ordered ten Frenchmen to be killed for every fallen German.

Max Fromm with the French
Foreign Legion in Morocco, 1940

The SS men rounded up the residents on the market square and forced them to witness the massacre. They hanged ninety-nine prisoners, aged seventeen to forty-five, from balcony lattices, lampposts, and trees. Paulette Fromm later told her son Henri, “On that day, the Germans made widows out of quite a few of the patients in my hospital. They were weeping over their husbands; they were screaming.” Paulette feared for Max’s safety, but he had found a hiding place in time.

The farther the Allies advanced through northern France, the more the German occupiers’ control of the country slipped from their grasp. Max, Paulette, and her mother managed to get to Paris with little Henri, who was born just a few weeks after the massacre at Tulle.