Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (28 page)
Read Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis Online
Authors: Götz Aly,Michael Sontheimer,Shelley Frisch
Tags: #History, #Holocaust, #Jewish, #Europe, #Germany
Late in March 1946, the company was placed into forced administration, and, three years later, nationalized by the German Trustee Administration for the benefit of the German Democratic Republic in accordance with Edict 124. The bureaucrats did not follow the letter of the law, however, as the ukase issued in October 1945 by Marshal Zhukov of the Red Army provided only for the takeover of property from “chief officers” and “leading members and supporters” of the Nazi Party. The Fromm family plainly did not fall into this category.
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The East Berlin officials were well aware of this. To be on the safe side, they made out Julius Fromm, the inventor and founder of the company, to be a capitalist villain. A 1948 document describing this case contains the following remarks, under the heading “Incriminating Evidence”:
I. Jewish proprietor, capitalist exploiter, antisocial, anti-labor, and pro-Nazi views… Although a Jew himself, J. Fromm—and all parties concur on this point—was one of those capitalist exploiters who used all means and methods at his disposal, in the most unscrupulous manner, to maximize his profit at the expense of others. The primitive production facilities and antiquated or in some cases nonexistent hygienic and other requisite amenities at the plant in Friedrichshagen took a heavy toll on the workforce as a whole, and on the health of the workers employed there. The “savings” he hoped to achieve were coupled with the worst possible piecework wages, which bore no relation
to the prices they commanded, and in just a few short years gave him the financial foundation he needed to construct the factory in Köpenick (1930—turn key price, ca. 6 million marks).
There was no denying that Julius Fromm had “developed and expanded the various amenities in the company.” These changes were now being used against him as “incriminating evidence” of his “active support of National Socialist propaganda.” To add insult to injury, the report also claimed that Fromm had sold his company of his own free will and that he had gone so far as to target the sale to “a reactionary buyer [Göring’s godmother] to make a lucrative foreign currency transaction.”
Sworn statements by four men corroborated this “incriminating evidence.” One of them, Schobert, had written the vitriolic attack against the chemist Genth and the supposedly Polish woman Elisabeth Lipova two years earlier. The four men characterized themselves as antifascists. However, they had been defeated in the workers’ council elections in October 1946, “because,” they explained, “the elections came too early for a company of this kind.” On January 17, 1948, the activists gave more evidence to boost their claim: “The Fromm family brought a large portion of their assets and merchandise to England even before 1933, and when they boarded a plane and flew to England, they weren’t bothered in the least about what was happening to their workers.” In July 1948, Schobert’s brother-in-law Herzog added: “The Jewish owner, Julius Fromm, was an exploiter of the worst sort, utterly lacking in any understanding of social responsibility.” All four regarded their former boss as “nothing but a capitalist,” and they declared: “We cannot stand this sort of person, which is why these companies belong in the hands of the people.”
An administrative report about the Fromms company that Nazi officials had drawn up in 1934 while preparing to strip Julius
Fromm of his citizenship told a very different story: “Most of the workers are paid more than the standard rate” and “the staff facilities are impeccable; all the workrooms are equipped with adequate ventilation, and with heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Washrooms and showering facilities are available to the workers.” This report also noted that Fromm provided for the physical well-being of his employees by making lunch—“soup, meat dish, and stewed fruit”—available at a bargain price.
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However, the German trusteeship was not receptive to these points when considering the case in October 1948. Instead, it incorporated the distinctly anti-Semitic tirades of the workers’ representatives nearly verbatim into its “recommendation for transfer to state ownership.” The “incriminating evidence” evolved into “incriminating facts” that emphasized Fromm’s “anti-humanitarian and anti-labor attitude.” The explanation ran as follows: “After 1933, the attack on the staff was stepped up, in an evident attempt by the Jewish company to ingratiate itself with the Nazi regime.”
One year later, on December 2, 1949, officials in the newly established German Democratic Republic completed the final steps in the nationalization process. The journal of administrative orders for Greater Berlin announced: “In light of the law of February 8, 1949, confiscating property assets of war criminals and Nazi activists, the city council of Greater Berlin has resolved to confiscate without compensation the property assets of the individuals and companies noted in List 3 below as assets of war criminals and Nazi activists and to transfer them to ownership by the people.” The text for reference no. 133 read: “Fromms Act Rubber Company, Inc., Berlin-Friedrichshagen, Rahnsdorfer Str. 153.”
The notice was signed by Friedrich Ebert, the son of the late president of the Weimar Republic. Ebert, a former member of the
Social Democratic Party, was now serving on the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and was the mayor of Greater Berlin. On June 24, 1951, the factory was formally entered in the land registry as “property of the people.” KAUTAS (United People’s Factories for Rubber and Asbestos) manufactured condoms there until the end of the 1950s.
Later on, “Fromms Act—made of pure natural rubber—luxury” was produced by People’s Enterprise Plastina in Erfurt, at the nationalized Richter and Käufer Rubber Factories (formerly Blausiegel). The cost of a three-pack was 1.25 East German marks. Just as in the old days, a coupon printed on the packets that could be slid unobtrusively over the drugstore counter came with these instructions: “Please use this slip of paper for discreet purchases at your specialty store.” Eventually the Fromms brand was renamed Mondos, and this name became synonymous with condoms in the German Democratic Republic.
Condemned to idleness during World War II, Julius Fromm wavered between depression and hope. On good days in his exile in London, he dreamed of rebuilding the company that had been stolen from him. Shortly before the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, he drew up a will “in regard to my assets in Germany and Danzig,” which sketched out two possible outcomes, one entailing reacquisition of the factories, and the other financial restitution. In any case, he made his sons promise to do everything in their power to save the business, and to entrust an “impartial arbitrator” to resolve any disputes about the inheritance that might arise.
The extent to which Julius Fromm retained his faith in the German people and their respect for justice and for upstanding citizens like himself is revealed in a clause that established how the impartial arbitrator was to be appointed, should his sons disagree even on this point. Fromm wrote in his will in December
1944 that the arbitrator “should be chosen by the president of the Berlin chamber of commerce.” And of course it was Berlin that he had in mind when he wrote to his son Max in liberated France on February 6, 1945: “As soon as the war is over, I will begin again.”
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Julius Fromm shortly before
his death in England
That is not how things turned out. On May 12, 1945, three days after hundreds of thousands of people had exuberantly celebrated victory on London’s Trafalgar Square and in front of Buckingham Palace, Julius Fromm got up in the morning, and when he tried to open the curtains, he collapsed. The doctor was hurriedly summoned, but by the time he arrived, the patient had died.
Julius Fromm’s heart had given out, his family said, because he had been so overjoyed about the demise of the Nazis and the prospect of his imminent return to Germany.
AFTERWORD
BY RAYMOND FROMM
Large-handed robbers thy grave masters are, And pill by law
.
—S
HAKESPEARE
,
Timon of Athens
FOR THE GENERATION
of Julius Fromm’s grandchildren, born shortly after the war in the freedom and democracy of Great Britain and France and lucky enough not to have had to endure the Nazi years, Michael Sontheimer and Götz Aly’s work has been a real eye-opener. We naturally got to hear quite a lot through our fathers about the origins and achievements of our relatives, particularly their father, Julius Fromm, but this was mostly anecdotal. So we knew relatively few details about our forebears’ past. One must not forget that—as with many others who lived though the years of National Socialism—it was incredibly distressing for our parents to talk about their experiences. My mother, too, a German Jewess who came to England alone and practically penniless from Hamburg in March 1939, very seldom spoke about her parents, particularly about her mother, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. It was just too traumatic!
As a result, it has also mostly been too painful for my generation to think about what happened before we were born. Finding
it easier and more practical to leave the past to our parents’ generation, we threw ourselves into the modern world, into the present day of a new, more peaceful, and freer Europe. For these reasons, we asked our parents far too little about the Nazi times and thus never learned the details of what had occurred.
It is only as one gets older, however, and one’s parents pass away that one begins to reflect more about the past. One wants to know what happened to relatives, how they fared in the period of assimilation of prewar Germany, how their lives and activities were suddenly shattered through persecution, what suffering they had to endure and what finally happened to them. With our parents gone, though, whom should we ask and where should we begin?
A stroke of good fortune then befell the Fromm family through its connection to Michael Sontheimer. He had always retained a fascination for our family’s history and had for a long time harbored a desire to write a book about it one day. Further luck and events conspired that he would eventually team up with Götz Aly. As a result of their trawling through the archives in Germany and even in Poland, the Fromm family’s original native country, a detailed story began to emerge, considerably more accurate in detail than what the postwar Fromm generation knew. It falls to me to express the whole Fromm family’s heartfelt thanks to Michael Sontheimer and Götz Aly for their undertaking. Without their efforts, none of what had long since drifted into oblivion would ever have been brought back to life, nor as my late father, Edgar Fromm, once requested of Michael Sontheimer, would the name of his inventive father, Julius, ever have been put back on the map.
Some people have asked me what the purpose of this book is: indeed, should one not rather leave the past well alone? I personally cannot subscribe to this view, since this book has a much wider purpose than simply relating another tale of persecution
and Holocaust, for it serves as an example of the fate that befell not only the Fromm family but those of countless other German and Continental Jewish families. These families may perhaps not have been as rich and successful as Julius Fromm but, in the end, the huge, corrupt looting carried out by the Nazis affected all German and Continental Jewish families in one way or another. Consequently, my generation of children of Continental European Jewish parentage have very few items to remind us of the past. This does not necessarily mean a family heirloom of financial value, but mementos from the past—indeed from our family’s
German
past. And in some cases this past was very German: for example, on my mother’s side I can trace our family back over six centuries, generation after generation, seventeen in all, having lived their lives in Germany until the Holocaust. From her family in Hamburg as well as from my wife’s maternal family, also from Hamburg, only very few heirlooms remain because very little could—or was allowed to—be taken into emigration and what remained behind was subsequently stolen, never to be returned. Moreover—quite apart from many items never having been restored, let alone compensated for—where it proved possible after the war to lodge legal claims for documented expropriated assets, the amounts reimbursed bit by bit over the decades have, for the most part, been but a small fraction of their original worth. Indeed, some documented assets have to this day never been restituted. All this has, alas, served only to perpetuate the legalized theft that resulted from Aryanization.
In his well-known book about German Jewry entitled
The Pity of It All
, the Israeli author Amos Elon describes how the assimilation of German Jews began in 1743 with the immigration to Berlin of the famous German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the founder of Jewish Enlightenment, who entered the Prussian capital through the city gate reserved for cattle and Jews. That story
of a noble experiment to assimilate came tragically full circle almost two hundred years later, when hundreds of thousands of German Jews were deported to meet their deaths in the extermination camps in railway trucks—equally designated for cattle and Jews. The poignant symmetry here is as shocking as it is painful. For a period of almost two centuries, most Jews living in Germany tried very hard to assimilate into the German lifestyle. They succeeded, their assimilation blossoming and flourishing during this era and contributing symbiotically to a substantial enrichment of German culture, science, and commerce. That this attempt went so sadly awry and ended in tears is the tragedy not only of our family but that of all German Jewry. Even today, sixty-four years after the end of the Third Reich, we of German-Jewish descent still feel the demise of German Jewry to be not only a great sorrow, but also an unbelievable tragedy and pity.
All of us in the Fromm family hope that, through their detailed account of our family’s story as victims of state-organized plunder, the authors’ sterling work will serve to support George Santayana’s wise warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. It is our sincere wish that this informative, enlightening book will find its niche in the vast library of volumes about the Third Reich so that from it, too, among the many others, the lessons from the past can be learned and thus a repetition of the appalling errors from history may be avoided.
London, January 2009