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

challenge that lay ahead. Eschelbacher characterized the typical Eastern European Jewish cigarette maker, such as Julius Fromm, as “a quintessential ‘entrepreneurial proletariat’ [who hoped] with some justification to become a manufacturer some day.” 14 As the manual assembly of cigarettes gradually gave way to machine production, Julius Fromm sought an alternative career. “Rolling cigarettes forever wasn’t good enough for him anyway,” his son Edgar recalled, “so he started taking evening courses in chemistry in 1912—especially in rubber chemistry—and hit upon the idea of making condoms.”

    Max, Julius’s eldest son, with wooden hoop and playmates, in the Bötzow

section of Berlin–Prenzlauer Berg, ca. 1915
    Two years later, he founded a one-man company: Israel Fromm, Manufacturing and Sales Company for Perfumes and Rubber Goods. He rented a store at Lippehner Strasse 23, which today bears the name of Käthe Niederkirchner, a communist who was shot at the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944. From this point on, Fromm considered himself a merchant. In 1914 his business was outfitted with a telephone (“Telephone Exchange: Königstadt 431”). He set up an account at Dresdner Bank, and before long he also had a telegram address (“Frommsact Berlin”). The classified directory carried a listing for his “seamless rubber products,” which in 1915 he expanded to read: “rubber products and perfume factory.” In 1916 a highlighted entry announced: “I. Fromm, Special Manufacturing of Rubber Products. Fromms Act.”
    Giacomo Casanova had taken to using condoms back in the eighteenth century; in his memoirs he referred to them as “English riding coats.” The early condoms, generally made of sheep intestine and fish bladder, were far from satisfactory. They were used primarily by wealthy people who wanted protection against syphilis, then incurable. These condoms offered only limited protection against infection and interfered with lovemaking so exasperatingly that the Marquise de Sévigné disparaged them as “armor against pleasure, and a cobweb against danger.” A set of instructions issued by the Social Democratic Party public health spokesman Alfred Grotjahn in the 1920s makes it clear that contraceptives made of animal innards left a lot to be desired in their reliability and ease of use: “The condom, pulled over the penis, has to be moistened with water, after which it fits snugly. For added peace of mind, a second condom is pulled over it, and its outer side is lubricated with some fat. After sexual intercourse the condom can be washed out and reused, provided there are no holes.” 15
    The technical prerequisite for modern condoms was the rubber vulcanization process that Charles Goodyear had invented in1839. When the sap of the rubber tree (
Hevea brasiliensis
) is formed into rubber, then treated with sulfur and heated to a high temperature, it forms a mass that is both elastic and durable. Soon the rubber produced in this manner was being made into raincoats and shoes. The major product was, of course, tires. In the United States, condoms were made this way as well, and “rubber” became a synonym for condom. But these early condoms were like bicycle inner tubes with bulging seams, which understandably limited their popularity and sales. A special dipping method that would produce seamless and sheer condoms inexpensively was eventually developed, and sales took off. Engineers at Goodyear appear to have begun manufacturing the first condoms with this method in 1901, but it took quite a while for the product to attain industrial maturity.
    Julius Fromm was the one to accomplish this in Germany. A child of a penniless immigrant family, he put the right product on the market at the right time and in the right place. In 1995 his son Edgar summed up his path to success: “Shortly before World War I, my father tried to make reputable brand-name merchandise out of a product that had