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

virtually no start-up capital. Paper that cost twenty pfennigs and tobacco ninety-five pfennigs would yield about a thousand cigarettes.
    This cottage industry enabled Jews to observe the Sabbath. But “the greatest benefit,” according to Eschelbacher, “was the prospect of autonomy it offered.” “With a wife and children pitching in, cigarettes were often rolled until two in the morning. A deft worker with several older children sometimes reached an output of as many as 3,000 cigarettes.” 13 Bernhard Fromm began by selling cigarettes for other companies, then manufactured and sold the product himself. Naturally the whole family had to help out.
    Bernhard Fromm died on June 18, 1898, at the age of only forty-two, quite possibly as a direct result of working under poor conditions, inhaling tobacco particles, and living in wretched housing.

    At the time of Bernhard’s death, the Fromms had been living in Berlin for five years, and the widow and her children found themselves in desperate straits. The family lacked a breadwinner, but fortunately Gormannstrasse had a cooking school belonging to the Jewish community that supplied inexpensive food to the needy. Moreover, Regina Fromm was in the third trimester of her latest pregnancy. At the end of her rope, she felt she had no choice but to place her youngest sons, Siegmund and Alexander, in the Baruch-Auerbach Orphans Educational Institute at Schönhauser Allee 162. In July 1898, just one month after the death of her husband, shegave birth to her sixth son, and named him Bernhard in memory of her deceased husband.

    Fromm family, ca. 1904; standing from left: Max, Else, Siegmund, Helene
,
Julius; seated from left: Alexander, Regina (mother), Bernhard
    Since his older brother, Salomon, had emigrated to London, and remained there for several years, fifteen-year-old Julius had to take care of his mother and siblings. The family continued making cigarettes at home—for the years 1899 to 1907, “R[egina] Fromm, W[i]d[ow]” was listed in the address book as
Cigarettenmanu
. Later on, Julius became an employee of Josetti Cigarettes, where he quickly worked his way up in the business. A photograph taken circa 1904 shows Regina Fromm with seven of her children in festive outfits and earnest expressions.
    When Julius started his own family in 1907, at the age of twenty-four, he and his wife and their newborn son (whom they had named Max, like many assimilationist Jews of the time) moved to the nearby Bötzow area in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, which had fairly decent Wilhelmine-style tenements.His mother and younger siblings soon moved into a neighboring apartment. They were now living at Allensteiner Strasse 40. The street has since been renamed Liselotte Hermann Strasse in honor of a communist student executed in 1938. Their neighbors included a postal worker, a jeweler, and a furrier. The Fromms were coming up in the world.

    On left: Salomon Fromm, Julius’s older brother, ca. 1907

On right: Helene Fromm, Julius’s younger sister, ca. 1910

    Julius’s father had lived to the age of forty-two. His mother passed away when she was fifty-two, on July 13, 1911. Their unadorned double tombstone, at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, carries this inscription: “Here lie our dearly beloved parents. In their unselfish love for their children, they passed away far too soon.” Klara Eschelbacher observed that “Eastern European Jews who were willing and able to work, even when they had virtually nothing upon entering the country, were able to save up money relatively quickly by living incredibly frugally.” Scrimping andsaving opened up new opportunities for “Eastern European Jews … to carve out better futures for themselves and especially for their children. In pursuit of this goal, they are willing to go hungry and live a miserable life.”
    Salomon and Julius were now solely responsible for their brothers and sisters. They proved equal to the