Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (26 page)

His wife, Elsbeth, was “put to work as a washerwoman at Bergmann Company laundering soldiers’ coats, on orders from the Gestapo.” She contracted jaundice. Siegmund was no better suited for a prolonged period of hard labor, and he suffered “a complete physical and mental breakdown.” Beginning in 1942, he was forced
to work as a packer for a printing press. “We watched him wither away with each passing day,” Elsbeth recalls.

Alfred Fromm, foreground center, with the Schmidts, who hid him
,
summer 1944; his mother, Elsbeth Fromm, is behind him to the right

Sunniva Graefe, a Finnish woman who had moved into Paulsborner Strasse 8 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1941, struck up a friendship with the couple. To “declare [her] solidarity” with them and their son, Alfred, she accompanied them “into the special air-raid shelter for Jews.” She, too, watched “Herr Fromm grow more nervous by the day.” He had “crying fits,” and “later [gave] the impression of a man who was deeply tormented, both physically and mentally.” He died in 1952 at the age of fifty-nine.

Alfred often played with the two sons of Max Schmidt, a shoemaker who lived nearby on Paulsborner Strasse. As the air strikes grew ever more intense, the Schmidts decided in early 1943 to move to their house near Balz-Süd, in the vicinity of Landsberg on the Warta River. Gertrud Schmidt, a warmhearted
working-class woman from Berlin, liked Alfred and understood the danger he faced in having to wear a yellow star, so she passed him off as her son, and took him with her to the country. He had to hide in the barn whenever there were visitors. However, he was quite a bit safer there than in Berlin. The eleven-year-old boy wrote to his mother in the spring of 1943: “I wish you a happy birthday and hope you are not bothered by any air-raid sirens. Too bad I wasn’t able to come.”
⁸⁷

Alfred Fromm’s future wife
,
Ilse Haacke, ca. 1945

Only once, in the summer of 1944, did Elsbeth Fromm dare to visit her son. Late in January 1945, Alfred set off alone for Berlin. The roar of gunfire on the front could be heard on the night that the boy, who had just turned thirteen, joined the refugees heading west. He and two German soldiers crossed the Oder River, which had frozen over. After stealing a uniform jacket from a boy in the Hitler Youth and discovering valid papers in it, he managed to find his way to his parents in Berlin. Alfred Fromm wrote an autobiographical account of this experience in 1996, and recalled the moment of liberation: “On May 1, 1945, at about 8 p.m., Red Army soldiers liberated us. When they came into our cellar, I hugged and kissed them, one after the other.”

He later married Ilse Haacke, a Jewish woman from Berlin. Before being deported to Theresienstadt, her mother had brought Ilse to stay with the Christian adoptive parents of her husband’s second wife in southern Germany. They passed her off as an “Aryan,” and in this way she was able to survive the Holocaust. Today she is a widow living in Munich. She shudders at the memory of having to make coffee for SS men in Bavaria: “We were both traumatized as children,” Ilse Fromm recalls, “and we were plagued by complexes. We always had the feeling that we were worthless. Alfred suffered from anxiety his whole life. It would have been better if our parents had not brought us into this world.”

“P
ROPERTY OF THE
P
EOPLE” IN THE
N
EW
G
ERMANY

THE MACHINES THAT PRODUCE CONDOMS TODAY
are called chains. Three of these production chains, each over a hundred feet long, turn out condoms bearing the brand name Fromms FF in a factory in the industrial zone of Zeven, situated between Hamburg and Bremen. The MAPA manufacturing company is part of Total, a multinational energy company based in France. With a market share of over 13 percent in 2005, Fromms ranks as the brand with the second-highest sales of condoms in Germany.

A pungent odor of ammonia suffuses the production area. Adding ammonia to the latex prevents curdling during shipping from Malaysia to Germany. For about ten days, the latex, enhanced with all kinds of undisclosed additives, undergoes a swelling process in Zeven, and is then ready to be placed on one of the chains, each of which holds approximately one thousand glass molds, commonly called mandrels, mounted at intervals of 2.75 inches. In 1995 a European norm (EN 600) was introduced to standardize condom sizes at 6.69 inches in length and 1.8 to 2.2 inches in diameter.

The glass mandrels are cleaned in a tank, then dried and drawn—one by one—through a small basin filled with milky latex. A thin (0.0011-inch), virtually transparent coating adheres to the mandrels. Then the chain runs through a drying chamber, and a second round of dipping and drying follows, after which brushes roll up the open ends of the raw condoms to form a rim. Once the condoms have been sprayed off the mandrels with high-pressure jets of water, they are placed in large washing machines, where denatured cornstarch is added. Then the condoms dry at 140 to 194 degrees Fahrenheit, and undergo quality testing. Only two condoms are inflated per hour. They have to be able to hold at least 4.75 gallons of air before bursting; many can take in more than 13 gallons. Individual testing with air has now been replaced by quality control using electrical current. Each condom is mounted onto a metal form and rotates between two rods charged at two thousand volts. If the condom has a hole or a thin area, the current passes through, and the defective item falls into a container for rejects.

Like so many twenty-first-century factories, the hall is eerily devoid of a human presence. One worker monitors the computers that control the chain, and loads the washing machines and dryers. A second worker places the condoms on the testing equipment, which has yet to be fully automated. In the course of three shifts, six workers produce about a hundred thousand condoms. A staff of twenty-eight manufactures an annual total of about 80 million units.

In the 1960s, the benzene process Julius Fromm had employed was discontinued and replaced by a new latex-manufacturing process. Apart from that innovation, and an increasing degree of automation, the technology has remained unchanged.

Condom production in Zeven began in the summer of 1947. At that time, Hannes Bachmann, a businessman in Bremen, and
Bruno Engelhardt, a former chief executive at a rubber factory in Hildesheim, decided to form a company to produce rubber products. Bachmann and Engelhardt intended to center their business on manufacturing waterproof aprons. They applied to the British military administration in Hanover for permission, but were turned down for this product. The occupying forces were troubled by the steadily rising number of cases of venereal disease after the end of the war, and by the fact that both the Fromms Act factories (in East Berlin) and the Blausiegel factories (in Erfurt and Leipzig) were part of the Soviet zone. The British wanted an independent condom factory to provide this necessary product for the three Western zones.

The two businessmen lacked any experience in condom production, but a lucky coincidence brought them in contact with a former production manager at Fromms Act when they attended the first postwar Leipzig Trade Fair. This production manager was
looking for work, and had the expertise and professional experience they were seeking.

Production of the FF Fromm brand of condoms in Zeven, 2006

Bachmann and Co. Hanseatic Rubber Factory, Inc., was granted an operating license by the British military government on October 1, 1947. The industrial site near Zeven, where a large army munitions factory had just been dismantled, was well suited for use as a production plant. This factory, referred to as the Muna, had been making artillery shells and mortar bombs for the Wehrmacht since 1940—increasingly by Soviet prisoners of war.

Since the factory lay well-camouflaged in a dense forest, the buildings as well as the electrical and water supplies had remained intact during the war. A workforce could be assembled readily from the refugees from Germany’s eastern territories. The bigger challenge was to acquire the requisite machinery. As luck would have it, Engelhardt, the cofounder of the company, had run a large rubber factory in Lodz during the war, and as the Soviet troops were advancing, he dismantled a rolling mill for rubber and brought it to the West. This looted machine would come in quite handy.