Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (8 page)

In February 1922, Julius Fromm bought a larger lot for his business in the quiet suburb of Friedrichshagen at the extreme eastern end of Berlin. He wanted to expand production as quickly as possible, but lacking sufficient capital of his own, he mortgaged his residence to the allowable limit. Benefiting from the tremendous inflation in Germany, he was able to pay off his debt-secured mortgage in the amount of 200,000 Reichsmarks a mere ten months later.
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He submitted an application to renovate a small existing factory building and to construct a factory workroom in Friedrichshagen, thus adding a second location to the business. However, the site was zoned as Construction Category F, for which this standard regulation applied: “Factories that create a disturbance are forbidden in this location.” Despite this regulation, the building control authority issued him a building permit, provided certain conditions were met. This authority evidently gave precedence to potential economic benefits over safeguarding the rights of neighbors. The Industry Supervisory Board of Treptow-Köpenick ruled: “The gases and steam created by the vulcanization of rubber products have to be extracted and rendered harmless in a suitable
manner at the point of origin. Under no circumstances can these processes create a nuisance for the workers or the neighbors.” Enforcement of this regulation was only partly successful in defusing conflicts, however. Right from the start, Fromm was besieged with complaints from the neighbors. Solutions of natural rubber in a petroleum solvent posed an ongoing fire hazard. In May 1926, a local fire department reported: “When the fire broke out, three factory workers sustained slight injuries—burns and lacerations. They were treated by the Friedrichshagen volunteer first-aid crew and released.”
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Fromm commissioned the architects Arthur Korn and Siegfried Weitzmann, who subscribed to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity) style of architecture, to design the new factory floor and office wing (parts of which are still standing today). Now the neighbors complained not only about the noise and fumes but also about the aesthetics of the new building, which clashed with their gabled homes. A letter to the editor in a local newspaper, the
Niederbarnimer Zeitung
, argued that “the flat roof [of the new building is] an architectural impossibility.” Moreover, the angry neighbor who sent this letter warned “the highest authorities” that he and other established members of the community would “not put up with any further defacement of this area by buildings of this kind.”

Fromm had a series of slides made for promotional purposes in 1935. The
thirty-seven extant photographs document work routines in his factory—
such as the condom testing displayed here

“Complaints about the stench and racket emanating from the rubber factory,” reported the local paper in September 1928, “have not ceased since the day the factory began its operations.” The article went on to claim that adjacent properties were “subjected day and night to such powerful droning and thudding from the rolling mills and mixers as well as from the boiler plants and their steam exhaust pipes that heavy pieces of furniture in the neighbors’ rooms sometimes start shaking.” As a result, the residents were “robbed of sleep and unable to focus on their work.”

“Our factory,” Fromm retorted in the local newspaper, “employs the latest technology to prevent unpleasant odors and disturbing sounds to the greatest extent possible, and we have spared no expense in making our company a model company.”
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Fromm himself may have been quite unpopular with his neighbors, but the opposite was true of his leading product. In 1926 Fromms Act manufactured 24 million condoms. Two years later, the business had agencies in Bremen, Breslau, Cologne, Danzig (today Gdansk in Poland), Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Kiel, Königsberg (today Kaliningrad in Russia), Leipzig, Munich, Rostock, and Würzburg. Exports were handled by branches in Antwerp, Constantinople, Czernowitz (today
Chernivtsi in Ukraine), The Hague, Kattowitz (today Katowice in Poland), London, Riga, Reykjavík, Auckland, Budapest, and Zurich. By 1931 Fromms Act had undergone a major expansion. With added production plants in Köpenick and Danzig, the company produced more than 50 million condoms that year.

Even the world economic crisis did not cause a slump in sales at Fromms Act. “Business is brisk even now,” the German Credit Bureau ascertained in February 1933, about the company and about Fromm himself. “Sales are in the millions. The company’s products are well established… Our sources describe Fromm as an extremely competent and ambitious businessman who has worked his way up over the years to a position of wealth. We are aware of nothing negative of any sort.”
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Julius Fromm ate lunch with his staff in the cafeteria, and considered hard work the key to success. Every afternoon he rested on his office couch—for exactly twenty minutes. His motto was “Ever onward!”

“W
E
H
AVE
B
ECOME
G
ERMANS”
—A
N
I
LLUSION

JULIUS FROMM’S SEVEN SIBLINGS
were no match for their fabulously successful brother, but they too built up small businesses and earned respectable livelihoods. Only Max (whose name was originally Mosziek) continued to lean on the family for financial support. He eked out a living as a self-employed women’s tailor, and died in 1930 at the age of forty-five.

When Salomon returned to Berlin from London in 1912, he married, and opened an optician’s shop at Siegmundshof in the Tiergarten area of the city. Alexander, who had borrowed money from his brother Julius to set up an optical company on Alexanderstrasse, moved his shop to Memhardstrasse in 1925. Helene took up the same line of work as her two brothers, and opened her store right in the center of the city, at the Spittelmarkt.

Siegmund Fromm and his brother-in-law Willy Brandenburg (his sister Else’s husband) tried their hand at a business similar to the one Julius was running. Their company, which was registered in June 1921 as Fromm & Brandenburg, produced soaps,
perfumes, and creams. Bernhard Fromm, the youngest brother, later joined them. Bernhard, Siegmund, and Willy each owned one-third of Fromms Cosmetics Associates. They later gave the company an English name, Fromm Brothers, to appeal to an international market.

The company’s signature cream, Fromms Skin Food, which was used to treat rough, dry, and sunburned skin, became a big moneymaker. Many barbershops and drugstores in Berlin had signs with the advertising jingle “Fromms Act for the bride, Fromms Skin Food for the hide.”

The cosmetics business and the optician’s shops yielded handsome profits. The Fromms were not quite in the lap of luxury, but they lived very comfortably, and had the means to take a summer vacation, which was somewhat out of the ordinary in
the 1920s. They and their families lived in the upscale western section of Berlin. On Sundays the family typically gathered in the large garden of Julius’s villa or went for a stroll in the Tiergarten park.

Salomon Fromm’s optician’s
shop in Berlin-Tiergarten
,
ca. 1930

The immigrants of Julius’s generation were not especially well educated—how could they be?—but their children were expected to learn, learn, and learn some more. They studied the piano or some other instrument, and graduated from high school if at all possible. Salomon began to teach English to his daughter Ruth when she was only three years old. He was exasperated to no end by her older brother Berthold’s limited aptitude.

The Fromm siblings, who were the first generation of the family to grow up in Germany, cast aside the “religious fixation” of their parents. Ruth reports that when the school administration expelled her from the Königstädtisches Gymnasium in 1936 because she was Jewish, the local Jewish high school refused to accept her because her upbringing had not been sufficiently religious. Left with no choice but to attend the Jewish school on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a school she considered “dreadful,” she balked: “What was I doing learning Hebrew all of a sudden? And all that religion! I didn’t know a word of Yiddish, and there I was with a bunch of ghetto children.” Even so, the new surroundings rubbed off on her, and no sooner did she use Yiddish expressions at home than all hell broke loose: “Not because they were afraid of the Nazis, but because such uneducated blather was not to enter their home. After all, we were now German!” In all the brouhaha about this “Jewish nonsense,” Ruth quit school altogether and began an apprenticeship at Rosenbaum Textile Company, but her stay there was similarly short-lived, since she emigrated to England in 1939. There she became a domestic servant and later an assistant medical technician. Briefly, she returned home and served as a translator for
the American armed forces stationed in postwar Germany. More than three decades after she had been robbed of her chance for an education in Germany, Ruth Fromm was awarded a master of social sciences degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1968, and later underwent additional training in child psychology and psychiatry. These days she attends synagogue from time to time: “I meet people there who share similar memories, which makes me feel close to my family.”