Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (6 page)

Salomon and Julius were now solely responsible for their brothers and sisters. They proved equal to the challenge that lay ahead. Eschelbacher characterized the typical Eastern European Jewish cigarette maker, such as Julius Fromm, as “a quintessential ‘entrepreneurial proletariat’ [who hoped] with some justification to become a manufacturer some day.”
¹⁴
As the manual assembly of cigarettes gradually gave way to machine production, Julius Fromm sought an alternative career. “Rolling cigarettes forever wasn’t good enough for him anyway,” his son Edgar recalled, “so he started taking evening courses in chemistry in 1912—especially in rubber chemistry—and hit upon the idea of making condoms.”

Max, Julius’s eldest son, with wooden hoop and playmates, in the Bötzow
section of Berlin–Prenzlauer Berg, ca. 1915

Two years later, he founded a one-man company: Israel Fromm, Manufacturing and Sales Company for Perfumes and Rubber Goods. He rented a store at Lippehner Strasse 23, which today bears the name of Käthe Niederkirchner, a communist who was shot at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. From this point on, Fromm considered himself a merchant. In 1914 his business was outfitted with a telephone (“Telephone Exchange: Königstadt 431”). He set up an account at Dresdner Bank, and before long he also had a telegram address (“Frommsact Berlin”). The classified directory carried a listing for his “seamless rubber products,” which in 1915 he expanded to read: “rubber products and perfume factory.” In 1916 a highlighted entry announced: “I. Fromm, Special Manufacturing of Rubber Products. Fromms Act.”

Giacomo Casanova had taken to using condoms back in the eighteenth century; in his memoirs he referred to them as “English riding coats.” The early condoms, generally made of sheep intestine and fish bladder, were far from satisfactory. They were used primarily by wealthy people who wanted protection against syphilis, then incurable. These condoms offered only limited protection against infection and interfered with lovemaking so exasperatingly that the Marquise de Sévigné disparaged them as “armor against pleasure, and a cobweb against danger.” A set of instructions issued by the Social Democratic Party public health spokesman Alfred Grotjahn in the 1920s makes it clear that contraceptives made of animal innards left a lot to be desired in their reliability and ease of use: “The condom, pulled over the penis, has to be moistened with water, after which it fits snugly. For added peace of mind, a second condom is pulled over it, and its outer side is lubricated with some fat. After sexual intercourse the condom can be washed out and reused, provided there are no holes.”
¹⁵

The technical prerequisite for modern condoms was the rubber vulcanization process that Charles Goodyear had invented in
1839. When the sap of the rubber tree (
Hevea brasiliensis
) is formed into rubber, then treated with sulfur and heated to a high temperature, it forms a mass that is both elastic and durable. Soon the rubber produced in this manner was being made into raincoats and shoes. The major product was, of course, tires. In the United States, condoms were made this way as well, and “rubber” became a synonym for condom. But these early condoms were like bicycle inner tubes with bulging seams, which understandably limited their popularity and sales. A special dipping method that would produce seamless and sheer condoms inexpensively was eventually developed, and sales took off. Engineers at Goodyear appear to have begun manufacturing the first condoms with this method in 1901, but it took quite a while for the product to attain industrial maturity.

Julius Fromm was the one to accomplish this in Germany. A child of a penniless immigrant family, he put the right product on the market at the right time and in the right place. In 1995 his son Edgar summed up his path to success: “Shortly before World War I, my father tried to make reputable brand-name merchandise out of a product that had been regarded as shoddy and virtually taboo. It was designed to provide protection against virulent sexually transmitted diseases and at the same time aid in family planning. He succeeded perfectly. Julius Fromm was endowed with a fabulous knack for business.”

T
HE
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ORLD’S
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IRST
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ONDOMS

IN LATE
1906, Julius and his fiancée, Selma Lieders, the daughter of a shoemaker, took a rather hurried trip to London. They got married there on December 27. The twenty-three-year-old listed his profession as “cigarette maker” and his bride’s as “cap maker.” Julius’s brother Salomon was the best man. Salomon had emigrated to the British capital some time earlier—in part as protest against his mother’s religious strictness. Now going by the name Sally, he worked in the cigarette business and also became editor of a Yiddish-language newspaper.

The crucial factor in Julius’s decision to get married far from home was Selma’s pregnancy. Their son Max was born in Berlin just four months after the marriage ceremony. Five years later, they had a second child, Herbert, after which a full seven years passed until Edgar was born in 1919. Although Julius’s parents do not appear to have practiced birth control, contraception was evidently of personal as well as professional interest to Julius Fromm.

“He did not suffer fools gladly,” says the London textile agent Raymond Fromm about his grandfather Julius. Julius Fromm was purposeful and meticulous, and he expected the same level of professionalism and devotion from his staff. If people let him down, he could become quite merciless.

Julius Fromm comes across as an enormously diligent man whose world revolved around work and his company. In the few remaining photographs of Fromm, he seems serious and focused even at family gatherings. He read and spoke fluent Hebrew, but his education was otherwise minimal. In Berlin he had briefly attended the Eighth Community Elementary School. He acquired on his own the chemical and business skills he needed to establish his company, and he had no capital to invest. This modest foundation was all he had to build on when he went into business in 1914, the year the Great War began. The war increased the demand for condoms. Fromm hired several workers, and the business soon outgrew his shop-plus-apartment in the Bötzow area of Berlin. He then rented a new set of rooms in one of the standard industrial complexes at Elisabethstrasse 28/29, near the Spree River in the Berlin-Mitte district, where he manufactured
his condoms from 1917 to 1922. The adjoining businesses included a corset factory, a children’s clothing maker named Cohn-Meiser, and Friedländer & Grunwald, a manufacturer of feather dusters.

Julius Fromm’s identity
card photograph, 1918

As the “widely known, well-established Fromms Act hygienic and surgical rubber goods” grew ever more popular, Fromm added more rooms at Landsberger Strasse 73, directly at Alexanderplatz. He proudly described his factory rooms, which were still modest in size at that time, as “workplaces adapted to the modern large firm.” He invited “prospective buyers in the rubber goods trade” to have a look at his “large permanent showcase.”
¹⁶
To meet the growing demand, he occasionally produced additional inventory at Hatu Rubber Works in Erfurt.

It was in 1916 that the young entrepreneur chose the name “Fromms Act” for his company. Although there is no record of how he came to include the English spelling of the word “Act” in the company name, it seems likely that he got the idea from his older brother, Salomon, who had developed an eye for the international market while in London.

Julius Fromm tended to rely on Salomon for business advice. The two of them may have figured that “Fromms Act” sounded appealing, even a tad risqué, and that the cosmopolitan connotation would spark sales. In both German and English, the word “act” (
Akt
in German) means “action” as well as an “act” of a theatrical or sexual nature, and in German it also refers to the painted nude, and thus to the naked body. Moreover, the German word suggests the seriousness of a near-homonym,
Akte
(dossier), and sounds like an abbreviation of
Aktiengesellschaft
(corporation), thereby conveying the impression of a well-established, prosperous enterprise. In reality, of course, Fromm was running a humble operation in Berlin, but in no time at all, Fromms Act became such a household name that when Ruth Fromm was a teenager,
she turned bright red with embarrassment when asked about her uncle’s company.

One of the first advertisements in the trade journal
Der Drogenhändler
, 1917

For the packaging, Fromm chose small striped cardboard boxes in his favorite colors, green and purple. Each box contained three condoms. At a price of seventy-two pfennigs per box, Fromm’s condoms were not inexpensive, but they offered better value and quality than any of his competitors’ products. “Attaching our own name to this article,” Edgar explained, “was my father’s bright idea.” It was a bold move for Fromm literally to put his name on the line for a product whose failure could be devastating. He inserted his full name, Julius Fromm, into the sweeping upstroke of the A in “Act,” which curled back onto the word “Fromms.”