Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis by Michael Sontheimer, Götz Aly, Shelley Frisch

form of rubber. 34 He improved the lubrication of “rubber products for rectal and vaginal use,” and filed a patent application to the Swiss Bureau for Intellectual Property in Bern on February 24, 1936. His new approach remedied several vexing problems that commonly occurred with older methods, which typically employed fine-grained materials such as Indian tragacanth or locust bean gum as lubricating substances. Although this treatment “smoothed the surface of the rubber products and improved the desired lubrication,” the rubbers would swell up prematurely in humid air, causing an “annoying stickiness” and making it “very difficult to impossible” to unroll them. Fromm therefore mixed the bulking agents “with finely powdered additives unaffected by humidity, such as talcum, mica, and other substances of that sort” and dusted the rubber products with these mixtures. This patent may well have been his most important one. It was registered in thirty countries. 35

    In the summer of 1936, the anti-Semitic newspaper
Der Stürmer
launched a smear campaign. Under the headline “Yet Again the Jew Company Fromms,” the paper used the form of ostensible or actual letters to the editor to inform its readers: “Dear
Stürmer!
I have before me edition no. 8 of the trade journal
Der deutsche Friseur
(The German Barber), dated April 16, 1936. This paper, I find a large advertisement for the Jewish company Fromms.” Another letter writer described the conduct ofthe
Gubener Zeitung
as “an outrage” and “the height of tastelessness” for having placed an advertisement by “the Jewish company Fromms Rubber Goods … right in the middle of the text of a speech” by Rudolf Hess. Furthermore, the streetcars in Hamburg were “still full of Fromms posters.” “Couldn’t you,” the alleged reader asked “dear
Stürmer
,” “at least drop a broad hint to the management of the Hamburg streetcars?” 36
    Julius Fromm was bound to have realized by this point “that he had to leave Germany,” his son Edgar recalled, “but he was so successful that he did not want to give up.” By the end of 1937, he knew it was time to go. He instructed his bank, the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft, and his attorney, Sally Jaffa, to sell Fromms Act. 37 The managers at the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft agreed in principle to lend Fromm their support. Their initial plan was to grant him a credit in the amount of one million Reichsmarks so that he could emigrate as quickly as possible, and to take interimpossession of the company on behalf of the bank. The company could then be Aryanized in good time. But in May 1938, the legal situation changed drastically. From then on, sales of companies that belonged to Jews were subject to the approval of the Reich Economics Ministry.

    The boss in his office in

Köpenick, ca. 1935
    Immediately thereafter, both the district economic adviser in Berlin, Professor Heinrich Hunke, and Hitler’s economic adviser, Wilhelm Keppler, began to show an interest in Fromms Act. However, Hunke (who went on to head the economics division of the finance ministry of Lower Saxony after the war, and remained in that position until 1967) was pushed aside to accommodate a far more influential prospective buyer, and he instead took possession of the Ebro Company (officially called the First Berlin Steam-Horsehair Spinning Factory, Inc.) in Berlin-Weissensee. 38
    On May 18, 1938, a Dr. Heuser, the assistant district economic adviser, came to the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft to discuss theFromm situation. According to notes on the conversation, he “pointed out that managing a factory with these notorious products would not be very pleasant for a bank, even if a trustee were appointed. Criticism of the bank might be leveled by a public authority or by some other agency.” He added the ominous remark, “Lending a million to the Jew Fromm could be somewhat risky.” After all, there was no guarantee that the collateral would