Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (27 page)

Production in Zeven began in December 1948, with male workers’ wages set at seventy-eight pfennigs an hour. Women were paid hourly wages of fifty-two pfennigs. In 1991
Gummilinse
(Rubber Lens), the company newsletter, ran a piece recalling the “enormous and now-unthinkable” benzene fumes that plagued the workers, and the “horrid, back-breaking work … of setting up the dipping frames” on which the glass mandrels were mounted. Many workers developed tendinitis.

The quality of the product was also erratic. Reject rates approached 8 percent, and a trade show for hairdressers in Bremen turned out disastrously for the inexperienced condom manufacturers. A chronicle of the company’s history tells the story of a prospective buyer who suddenly showed up at the booth, “filled
a condom with water right in front of everyone, and the water poured out in a steady stream, making the condom look like a watering can.”
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At this point, the former plant manager from Fromms Act tracked down Herbert and Edgar Fromm in London, who had also opened a small condom factory there, and proposed a license agreement. The old familiar trademark, they reasoned, could help them on the road to glory. Herbert and Edgar Fromm gave their consent, since they were facing overwhelming competition from London Rubber’s Durex condoms in Great Britain. In January 1949, they signed a mutually beneficial twenty-five-year license agreement with the Hanseatic Rubber Company.

The only problem was that the sons and heirs of Julius Fromm no longer owned the trademark. Fromms Act in Berlin, which, since the death of Elisabeth Epenstein, had belonged to her heir, Otto Metz-Randa, now held the rights to this brand name. Metz-Randa, using the fact that he was from Vienna to his advantage, quickly transformed himself from a pan-German profiteer of Aryanization into a persecuted Austrian, a paragon of innocence. He even tried to pass himself off as a victim of National Socialist tyranny.

Bachmann, the founder of the postwar incarnation of the company, traveled to Vienna with Sally Jaffa, Julius Fromm’s old attorney in Berlin, who had survived the war in London, to meet with Metz-Randa. Edgar Fromm recalled that Metz-Randa “was fully expecting to hear from us.” The Demographics Division of the Municipal Administration of Vienna now listed Metz-Randa as a retiree, but he saw—and seized—his chance yet again to reap a handsome profit from his shady inheritance.

Metz-Randa refused to hand over the company and the trademark. He contacted the “Trustees of the American, British, and
French Military Government for Assets Transferred Under Duress” to contest the Fromm brothers’ demands. Metz-Randa argued that “because the sales contract at that time was not in the nature of a ‘forced contract,’” the claim was “not defensible.” This was the brazen argument of a Viennese businessman in 1951, whose role in Elisabeth Epenstein’s life, first as her consultant and then as her heir, had enabled him to take over at least three formerly Jewish companies (Fromms Act, Fromms Cosmetics, and a castle hotel plus estate in Gösing in Lower Austria).

Otto Metz-Randa instructed Walter Fuhrmann, an attorney and notary public in Berlin, to put a stop to any possible return of the company to the Fromm family. Fuhrmann characterized the sale of Fromms Act to Elisabeth Epenstein as “a transaction completed for purely financial reasons [and] unrelated to the Nazi regime.” He claimed that Fromm had “already decided in 1933” to emigrate, and he sold his company “so that he could enhance the new life he had already begun to build abroad, that is, in England.”
The attorney also reported that there had been other offers to buy the company, including an offer by a “German Briton named Koch.” He alleged that “of all these bids [Fromm] favored the one from … Frau v. Epenstein.”

Testing Fromms condoms in Zeven, 1965

The attorney representing Fromm’s sons in Bremen vehemently denied this allegation. Fuhrmann fired back by speculating that “it appears absolutely out of the question that the seller—if he were still alive—would have made claims for restitution.” On top of that, he explained that “special directives from the Reich Marshal’s chief of staff had granted extraordinary currency and transfer relief far exceeding those in any other case.”

In the summer of 1951, after several months of this wrangling, Fromm’s sons realized that they would be forced to agree to a settlement, and signed the papers with Metz-Randa after driving a hard bargain at the forty-fourth restitution tribunal of the district court in Berlin. The settlement stipulated that Metz-Randa, the consultant to and heir of the Aryanizer Elisabeth Epenstein, would transfer his share of the business to them. In return, the heirs of Julius Fromm, who had been stripped of his company, would remit the “sum total of 174,300 West German Marks” to Metz-Randa.
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At the time of this settlement, which came so soon after the war and the currency reform, this was an astronomical sum of money.

When the Hanseatic Rubber Company set about advertising its condoms, the emphasis was on their protective function. The first advertising brochure, “Sun of Life, Health of the People,” cited statistics on the increase in gonorrhea and syphilis, and provided this explanation: “An uncertain past” that posed “obscure perils” had made “many people go the way of folly” and “become reckless,” making them “a danger to people today in the truest sense of the word.”

The product line also included “tried and true” Fromms rubber sponges and hot-water bottles. The following pointer was intended to reassure buyers of condoms: “Fromms has come to stand for this kind of prophylactic, and its name is a guarantee that you are getting the very best. You should insist on Fromms, and make it clear that you will accept only genuine Fromms products from the Western occupation zones.”
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The key message here is “Western,” with its suggestion of quality inherently superior to products manufactured in East Berlin.

The Fromms factory in Köpenick was nearly obliterated by bombs on December 24, 1943, and on January 17, 1945, days on which the Allied air force launched strategic and highly effective attacks on the entire German rubber industry.
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On April 23, 1945, the Red Army marched into Köpenick. One day later, Berthold Viert and Karl Lewis, the two long-term directors of Fromms Act, committed suicide. The motives behind their decision to end their lives remain a mystery. However, their despicable treatment of the three Fromm family members who were forced to work in the factory would seem to suggest that they had less to fear from the Soviet soldiers than from the return of their former boss.

The machines that had remained intact through the air strikes were immediately dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union.
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By contrast, the older factory in Friedrichshagen, which had survived essentially undamaged, was readied for operation to supply the Red Army soldiers with condoms immediately needed. On orders from the Soviet military commander of the city, Fromms Act’s head chemist, Dr. Wilfried Genth, got the factory up and running again just seven weeks after the capitulation of the German Reich. Raw materials were on hand, and, according to a report submitted by the industrial union Chemicals, Paper, Stones, and Earth on July 15, 1946, “the Russians bought our products without delay.”

The author of this text was Reinhold Schobert, the head of the staff association at Fromms Act, who had been appointed by the Friedrichshagen employment office. In this report he expressed his views about Dr. Genth and Genth’s girlfriend Elisabeth Lipova. “Genth,” Schobert wrote, “and his assistant, Fräulein Lipova, a Polish woman, [acted] as though the company belonged to them, and as though nothing whatsoever had happened in Germany.” Unfortunately, Schobert explained, Genth’s position was unassailable, “because the Russians have opened a testing division with us … and the Polish woman, Lipova, is assisting him.” This “Polish woman” was actually a Czech woman who had been deported to Germany in 1941 as a forced laborer. Schobert, an unelected proletarian functionary who had not been active in the company since he was fired in 1933, until his appointment as head of the staff association, vented his frustration in this report: “I cannot get it through my thick worker’s skull how something like this is possible in a free Germany; it is as though a person were irreplaceable.” Not so very long ago, this same worker’s skull had belonged to a Nazi Party official. In this regard, he was not so very different from Genth, who had become a member of the Nazi Party in 1933.

According to the regulations of the Potsdam Agreement, Julius Fromm or his heirs, as victims of the Nazi dictatorship, should have had the factories in Berlin-Köpenick and Friedrichshagen returned to them. In September 1945, the district court judge in charge of the Berlin company register confirmed that “in view of the political constellation … Herr Julius Fromm is to be reinstated as the true owner.” But the German communists in the Soviet zone (and then in the German Democratic Republic) prevented this from happening.

The district office in Berlin-Köpenick began by putting the Köpenick factory premises and buildings under trustee administration. It then registered the real estate with the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) as “unclaimed property” and delegated
it to the Köpenick district authority. The SMAD handed over both the company and the factory in Friedrichshagen to the district office for trustee administration. Siegmund Fromm fought in vain to “reinstate” Julius Fromm’s previous “rights as the sole proprietor of Fromms Act Rubber Company, Inc.”