Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (25 page)

Henri, who is now a psychoanalyst in Paris, gives this sober account of his father: “He was a melancholy man. After the war he never spoke German again, and he was often depressed.” Max Fromm traveled to the Federal Republic of Germany a total of three times, and panicked whenever he saw a German in uniform. Friedrich Hollaender, who returned to Munich from Hollywood after the war and performed in a cabaret, offered him a job there. But Paulette and their two sons were French. Max Fromm neither could nor would leave France.

He waited for major film roles to come his way, but he was assigned only bit parts. His main source of income was film dubbing, which he found tedious. In 1949 he was offered a role in
Le Silence de la Mer
, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, and he later appeared onscreen with Peter Ustinov in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s
Les Espions
. Max Fromm played the Gestapo officer in the internationally acclaimed war film
Le Train
. Since he was blond, spoke German, and looked quite Germanic, he was soon typecast as a Nazi, playing Gestapo agents and SS officers. At one point he came close to getting a plum role opposite Brigitte
Bardot, but he was considered too short to be cast with this new star of the French cinema. In 1950 he wrote to a friend from his earlier years in Berlin: “When all is said and done, I have accomplished very little.”
⁸⁶

Max Fromm never truly considered himself French. German culture remained his spiritual homeland—not Germany per se, his son Henri recalls, but rather the Berlin of the 1920s: “He had achieved a certain degree of fame as an actor there. That was his life, and then it was over.”

Edgar Fromm, Julius’s youngest son, had to report for military duty with the British Pioneers in December 1941. Right from the start, he was asked to adopt a British name—in case he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He refused. The basic military service consisted of digging trenches: “One day, we were digging away as usual when a brigadier general from the War Office and our colonel came by. The brigadier general asked me: “You’re not an Englishman, are you?” I said: “No.” “What are you then?” “German.” He stepped back, and I said, “Sir, you needn’t be upset. I am on your side, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” He laughed and asked me: “So you speak German?” “Yes, sir. And French, too.” Then he turned to our colonel and asked him “Why is this man digging here?” The colonel replied, “He didn’t tell me anything about this.”

Three weeks later, Edgar Fromm was summoned to the War Office in London. “Two men from the Special Air Service were waiting for me there, dressed in casual clothing; they were smoking cigarettes and looking me over. They figured I could parachute down for espionage missions in France or Germany. I replied: ‘I have just gotten married. I’m willing to do anything but that.’ They accepted my demurral, and soon I was trained as an interpreter.”

Ten days after Allied troops landed in Normandy, Edgar’s unit crossed the English Channel, and was caught up in heavy fighting.
The unit traveled from Belleville to Brussels. Toward the end of 1944 he first set foot in Germany again, near Aachen, as a sergeant in the military secret service.

Sergeant Edgar Fromm in
the British Army military
intelligence, 1945

Thinking back to his time with the occupying forces, he had especially vivid memories of a visit to Baroness Thyssen, the wife of a famous steel magnate. “She wasted no time in declaring: ‘I was never a Nazi.’” “Listen, madam,” Edgar Fromm replied, “it is not my job to determine that. I just need to draw up an inventory of your possessions.” When he returned from this mission, a fellow British officer asked him, “Did you bring home a nice souvenir?” The otherwise amiable Edgar Fromm seethed with indignation as he replied, “The Nazis did that to us, and that is exactly why I will not do so!”

Edgar Fromm never felt hatred for the Germans—perhaps because most members of his family survived the Holocaust. In contrast to many of his Jewish refugee friends in London, he travelled
to his native country on a regular basis. He even toyed with the idea of moving back to Germany, but his wife, whose parents had been murdered in German death camps, balked at the thought of doing so. “I felt rather sorry for most Germans after the war,” Edgar Fromm said. “They went along with their holy Führer and paid such a heavy price for having done so.”

Ruth Fromm likewise insists: “I do not hate the Germans. Even so, I no longer think of myself as German, although I did grow up in Berlin.” Just after the war ended, she signed on with the United States Army, which needed a large number of bilingual staff members. On the way from England to Germany, she sought and found her cousin Max, his wife Paulette, and their son Henri, who had just turned one. The family was living in Paris “in appalling conditions.” Her next stop was Munich, where, she recalls, “They fired shots at us. The people of Munich did not like the Americans at all, and thought the British had started the war.”

In Nuremberg she translated documents, including descriptions of experiments on humans that had been conducted in Auschwitz on behalf of I.G. Farben, for use in the criminal trials. She had the impression, though, that the investigative and prosecutorial zeal demonstrated in the first spectacular trial took a nosedive in subsequent efforts to prosecute Nazi criminals. The case of Göring, one of the men sentenced to death, wound up casting suspicion on her and her American coworkers. When Hermann Göring poisoned himself, they were accused of having helped him get hold of the cyanide. American soldiers had taken Göring into custody on May 9, 1945, at his castle, Mauterndorf. Before they led him away, this man, who had profited most from the Aryanization of Fromms Act, summed up his feelings about National Socialism in this matter-of-fact statement: “At least I lived a decent life for twelve years.”

After working with National Socialist files in Nuremberg for six months, Ruth Fromm had had quite enough, and applied for a transfer to Berlin. In the demolished city of her birth, she tracked down her uncle Siegmund and her cousin Gerhard, the son of Alex, who had fled to London. She brought Siegmund and his family food from PX stores, which were restricted to U.S. military personnel. Gerhard, who had just been liberated from years of racial persecution, could not accept the fact that Ruth was working for the American occupiers. He and his wife, who had lived in the Fromm villa at one point, now returned to the house, and discovered that old family photographs were still in the basement. A concierge in a neighboring building recalled the day that Ruth’s mother, her aunt, and her aunt’s husband had been taken away. Ruth’s father, Salomon, was shattered by this news.

Salomon Fromm died on February 19, 1947, in London. He lies buried in a northwestern suburb of the city. His tombstone
carries the English-language inscription: “Also in memory of his wife and son Ella Fromm and Berthold Fromm, who both suffered death in German concentration camps.”

Ruth Fromm in the U.S. Army, 1947

Siegmund was the only one of Julius Fromm’s brothers and sisters to have survived National Socialism and the war while remaining in Berlin. A joint owner of Fromms Cosmetics, Siegmund had spent a long time weighing the pros and cons of fleeing to England, but he was quite attached to his charming apartment in Berlin. By the time Germany started the war, it was too late. His wife, Elsbeth, was “of German blood,” but had converted to Judaism before the wedding. In 1932 she gave birth to Alfred. A year later, she converted back to Christianity, and was classified as an Aryan. She also had Alfred baptized in May 1943. Even so, the authorities in Berlin labeled him a
Geltungsjude
(legal equivalent of a Jew), because of his Jewish religious instruction, and forced him to wear a yellow star.

Helene, Siegmund, and Elsbeth Fromm in Berlin, 1947

The four weeks Siegmund spent in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp took a severe toll on his health. After his release in late 1938 he was required to report to the police daily for a full year. “Only someone who has experienced this,” he wrote in November 1945, “can appreciate what it means.” After the attacks on Poland and the Soviet Union, he was imprisoned in the police headquarters at Alexanderplatz, and suffered a mild “tension-induced stroke.” In March 1943, he was again taken into temporary custody, this time on Rosenstrasse. “This is why I often stayed away from my apartment for days or even weeks on end.”