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

means “action” as well as an “act” of a theatrical or sexual nature, and in German it also refers to the painted nude, and thus to the naked body. Moreover, the German word suggests the seriousness of a near-homonym,
Akte
(dossier), and sounds like an abbreviation of
Aktiengesellschaft
(corporation), thereby conveying the impression of a well-established, prosperous enterprise. In reality, of course, Fromm was running a humble operation in Berlin, but in no time at all, Fromms Act became such a household name that when Ruth Fromm was a teenager,she turned bright red with embarrassment when asked about her uncle’s company.

    One of the first advertisements in the trade journal

Der Drogenhändler
, 1917
    For the packaging, Fromm chose small striped cardboard boxes in his favorite colors, green and purple. Each box contained three condoms. At a price of seventy-two pfennigs per box, Fromm’s condoms were not inexpensive, but they offered better value and quality than any of his competitors’ products. “Attaching our own name to this article,” Edgar explained, “was my father’s bright idea.” It was a bold move for Fromm literally to put his name on the line for a product whose failure could be devastating. He inserted his full name, Julius Fromm, into the sweeping upstroke of the A in “Act,” which curled back onto the word “Fromms.”
    Until that time, customers had only the foggiest notion of where their condoms had originated, and the quality of these condoms was abysmal. To get around having to provide warranties for these sought-after commodities, Fromm’s competitors used an ever-changing array of fancy names—such as Ramses, Mikado, Uncle Sam, Dingsda, Souvenir, Viola, and Venus—to market their condoms in Germany. This practice continued intothe 1920s. The British company London Rubber did not introduce the brand name Durex—today the global leader—until 1929.

    Max, Julius, Herbert, and Selma Fromm
,
ca. 1916
    Initially Fromm also had to contend with serious quality issues. There were “large numbers of rejects,” one worker recalled after the war, “and Herr Fromm quite often took whole sackfuls of them, called us in, and asked, ‘Would you want to buy these from me?’” The production process was soon refined, and a combination of relatively high retail prices, a marked increase in demand, and a switch to piecework wages soon resulted in sizable profits.
    Glass cylinders served as molds for the condoms. They were mounted on carrier frames, then dipped into a vat containing arubber solution liquefied with gasoline, benzene, and carbon tetrachloride. Experiments made it clear to Fromm that “Ceylon rubber is best suited to the manufacture of Fromms products.” After two dippings, a thin rubber skin adhered to the cylinders. This skin was then brushed to roll the open side into a bulging rim. Next, the condoms were vulcanized in special ovens using sulfur vapors. The key factors in making the little rubber skins sturdy yet elastic, and durable enough to be warehoused, were strictly calibrated ingredients, temperature, and timing. All this required, as Fromm said, “a very well-trained staff.”
    The condoms were dusted with a lubricant to give them a “velvety surface,” then rolled off the glass cylinders, tested, inverted, and packaged. Using the technical principles still employed today, Fromm also manufactured surgical finger cots, rubber gloves, pacifiers, and nipples for baby bottles.
    From the outset, he insisted on quality. In 1917 Fromm launched the advertising slogan “We guarantee our products—exchanges accepted at any time.” 17 After a few years, he introduced a three-step inspection process. First, “each item, one by one [was] inflated with compressed air.” The condoms that passed this round then underwent a “second, even more rigorous test” and then a third in the rolling room, where “the tips of the items that proved satisfactory in the earlier tests