Read Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis for Free Online

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.”

3.
T HE W ORLD’S F IRST B RAND -N AME C 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 manufacturedhis 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)