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

Fromm’s plan to set up a heavy-duty rubber factory producing tires with outstanding traction. The plant would employ two hundred workers on openingday. The report, dated January 19, 1934, states: “The company can be regarded as exemplary in both its technical and its social facilities. Director Fromm is the executive of the entire business. In the course of a single generation, he has brought this factory from very modest beginnings to its current prominence. Nearly all the machines and facilities in the plant were built to his own specifications, and most are patented… Stripping this man of his citizenship poses the risk that slowly, but surely, this factory will lose its standing, and if F. sets up factories abroad, the market for German exports will be lost there.”

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Der deutsche Drogist
, 1934 (text reads: Fromms—

German quality products, manufactured by German workers)
    The response by the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Berlin was decidedly unreceptive to this argument. Motivated less by job concerns than by class envy of a successful Jewish businessman, and possibly by a prickle of anticipation about getting their hands on the booty themselves, the gentlemen disclosed their take on the issue “in strictest confidence”: “We are having particular difficulty seeing why denaturalization of Herr Fromm would represent any serious danger to the continued success of his business, let alone that it would make the company go under.”

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Der deutsche Drogist
, 1937 (text reads: Celebrating our

anniversary—25 years of service to the health of our nation)
    In the end, the chief administrative officer in Potsdam ruled in favor of Fromm. He emphasized Fromm’s “impeccably German way of thinking,” and voted “to uphold naturalization in this specific instance.” On April 21, 1934, the Prussian secretary of the interior decreed, in consultation with the Reich authorities, that “the plan to revoke Israel Fromm’s citizenship is being dropped.” Furthermore, it was found that strictly speaking, it was unlawful to force Fromm to resume using his first name Israel, and the Berlin police department initiated proceedings to rescind the “change in first name of the Jew Julius Fromm.” However, the matter was still pending when he emigrated in 1939. 33

    Apparently undaunted by all these dealings, Fromm kept at his business. Evidence of his calculated optimism was a major new marketing campaign with an array of advertisements he and his staff (whom he referred to as his “propaganda department”) designed for the pages of the
Drogisten-Zeitung
in 1933 and 1934. The sweeping curved lettering used in these ads proclaimed that this product was “Heat vulcanized / Storable for 3 years / Transparent.” The company sought to appeal to the journal’s rather conservative readers with slogans in old-fashioned German cursive script; these ran the gamut from jingles (“Fromms Rubber Products are the ones to get—because this brand’s the best one yet”) to lists of selling points (“Admired, Reliable, Popular!”). A 1934 advertisement declared with simple pride: “World-Famous Brand: Fromms Rubber Products.”
    In 1935 Fromm marketed his sheer condoms as “The Winning Quality Brand!” During the Olympic Games in 1936, he distributed a mass transit map to foreign guests with the “authorization of the Propaganda Committee for the Olympic Games.” This map bore the title Nahverkehrsplan, a clever pun on the double meaningof the German word
Verkehr
(“transportation” and “sexual intercourse”), and thus a tie-in to his leading product.
    Julius Fromm was busy around the clock, as a merchant, a boss, and an advertising agent on his own behalf. On top of that, he sought to advance the technology of his condoms. In view of the growing shortage of raw materials, Fromm—in collaboration with I.G. Farben in Leverkusen—conducted experiments to develop a suitable synthetic