Born in a small Russian town in 1883, Fromm moved with his family to Berlin as a 10-year-old, and by age 31 had founded the company known as Fromms Act, the first brand-name condom manufacturer. The company benefitted from the loosening of sexual mores in Weimar Germany along with a desire for more dependable forms of family planning. Fromm was a stickler for quality control, and his company prospered as his condoms quickly earned a reputation for reliability. At its peak in 1931, Fromms Act (which also manufactured pacifiers and hot water bottles) employed 500 people and produced more than 50 million condoms per year, distributed throughout Europe.
Julius Fromm's reluctant decision to sell the company and move to London undoubtedly saved his life and that of his wife, Selma. Not so fortunate were three family members who perished in concentration camps. By the time negotiations began in earnest in mid-1938, a Nazi decree required that all sales of Jewish businesses be approved by the Reich. And while Aly and Sontheimer observe that Fromms Act's "compulsory sale turned out reasonably well in comparison to other Aryanizations at that time," the company ultimately was sold to Hermann Göring's godmother for a small fraction of its value. In exchange for her good fortune, the purchaser bestowed a gift of two medieval castles on her prominent godson.
As painful as the loss of his thriving business may have been, even more devastating to Fromm was the systematic looting of the substantial assets he was forced to leave behind in Germany. The authors meticulously document that depredation, from the loss of the family home to the coolly efficient raiding of his safe deposit box, and they're unafraid to point to the complicity of ordinary Germans (including appalling examples of postwar denial) in the process. By the end of the war, Aly and Sontheimer estimate the Nazis stole from Fromm a sum equivalent to 30 million euros in current purchasing power, much of it used to finance the war effort and the extermination of Fromm's fellow Jews. That's the final, chilling irony of this painful account.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Through the story of Julius Fromm, once the prosperous owner of a German condom company, two German writers recount Hitler's economic war against the Jews.