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

competent and ambitious businessman who has worked his way up over the years to a position of wealth. We are aware of nothing negative of any sort.” 23
    Julius Fromm ate lunch with his staff in the cafeteria, and considered hard work the key to success. Every afternoon he rested on his office couch—for exactly twenty minutes. His motto was “Ever onward!”

4.
“W E H AVE B ECOME G ERMANS” —A N I LLUSION

    JULIUS FROMM’S SEVEN SIBLINGS were no match for their fabulously successful brother, but they too built up small businesses and earned respectable livelihoods. Only Max (whose name was originally Mosziek) continued to lean on the family for financial support. He eked out a living as a self-employed women’s tailor, and died in 1930 at the age of forty-five.
    When Salomon returned to Berlin from London in 1912, he married, and opened an optician’s shop at Siegmundshof in the Tiergarten area of the city. Alexander, who had borrowed money from his brother Julius to set up an optical company on Alexanderstrasse, moved his shop to Memhardstrasse in 1925. Helene took up the same line of work as her two brothers, and opened her store right in the center of the city, at the Spittelmarkt.
    Siegmund Fromm and his brother-in-law Willy Brandenburg (his sister Else’s husband) tried their hand at a business similar to the one Julius was running. Their company, which was registered in June 1921 as Fromm & Brandenburg, produced soaps,perfumes, and creams. Bernhard Fromm, the youngest brother, later joined them. Bernhard, Siegmund, and Willy each owned one-third of Fromms Cosmetics Associates. They later gave the company an English name, Fromm Brothers, to appeal to an international market.
    The company’s signature cream, Fromms Skin Food, which was used to treat rough, dry, and sunburned skin, became a big moneymaker. Many barbershops and drugstores in Berlin had signs with the advertising jingle “Fromms Act for the bride, Fromms Skin Food for the hide.”
    The cosmetics business and the optician’s shops yielded handsome profits. The Fromms were not quite in the lap of luxury, but they lived very comfortably, and had the means to take a summer vacation, which was somewhat out of the ordinary inthe 1920s. They and their families lived in the upscale western section of Berlin. On Sundays the family typically gathered in the large garden of Julius’s villa or went for a stroll in the Tiergarten park.

    Salomon Fromm’s optician’s

shop in Berlin-Tiergarten
,
ca. 1930
    The immigrants of Julius’s generation were not especially well educated—how could they be?—but their children were expected to learn, learn, and learn some more. They studied the piano or some other instrument, and graduated from high school if at all possible. Salomon began to teach English to his daughter Ruth when she was only three years old. He was exasperated to no end by her older brother Berthold’s limited aptitude.
    The Fromm siblings, who were the first generation of the family to grow up in Germany, cast aside the “religious fixation” of their parents. Ruth reports that when the school administration expelled her from the Königstädtisches Gymnasium in 1936 because she was Jewish, the local Jewish high school refused to accept her because her upbringing had not been sufficiently religious. Left with no choice but to attend the Jewish school on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a school she considered “dreadful,” she balked: “What was I doing learning Hebrew all of a sudden? And all that religion! I didn’t know a word of Yiddish, and there I was with a bunch of ghetto children.” Even so, the new surroundings rubbed off on her, and no sooner did she use Yiddish expressions at home than all hell broke loose: “Not because they were afraid of the Nazis, but because such uneducated blather was not to enter their home. After all, we were now German!” In all the brouhaha about this “Jewish nonsense,” Ruth quit school