Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (11 page)

Korn and Weitzmann design
for a Fromms Act office building
on Friedrichstrasse, ca. 1929

Korn regarded the Dutch De Stijl group and the Russian Constructivists (whose slogan was “Art for the people”) as kindred spirits who viewed architecture and urban planning within a social and economic context. From his point of view, the revolutions in Russia and Germany in 1917 and 1918 provided “a stream of new ideas” for architecture. “Collective labor,” he declared, “is the true key to progress.” In 1929, just when the nouveau riche capitalist Fromm was presenting him with his most important commission, Korn founded the Collective for Socialist Construction. This group, which consisted of predominantly radical left-wing students of architecture, designed a blueprint for Berlin called “The City as
Hotel and Factory,” and during the German construction trade show in Berlin organized a counterevent dubbed the Proletarian Construction Exhibition.
²⁷

On left: Siegfried Weitzmann, ca. 1950
On right: Arthur Korn, ca. 1930

Korn made his first trip to London with Walter Gropius in 1934 to attend the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM). He then worked in Zagreb for two years before settling down in England, where he devoted himself to his second passion, urban planning. He began teaching at the Oxford School of Architecture in 1941, and in 1945 joined the faculty of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Korn captivated several generations of students “with his very un-English enthusiasm for the subject of architecture.” His lectures in London drew large crowds, and sometimes ran late into the night.

Max Taut arranged for the architecture department of the Berlin Academy of Arts to have Korn named a special member. He accepted the honor “with great pleasure.” After Arthur Korn retired in 1966, he moved to Austria, where he died in 1978.

Siegfried Weitzmann emigrated to Palestine in 1936. He was retrained there as a surveyor, and attempted to learn the Hebrew language, which he found exceedingly difficult, as did many German Jews. Already past the age of fifty, “he eked out a living by selling liquor,” his second wife recalled, “going uphill and downhill in Jerusalem, despite his deteriorating heart condition.” Eventually he managed to find work at a construction company, and wrote a book called
Study of Kafka
, which was published posthumously. Weitzmann’s book contained descriptions of his own experiences as a victim of German tyranny, as an uprooted Jewish emigrant and survivor: “The judgment,” he quoted from Kafka’s
The Trial
, “does not come all at once; the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” Weitzmann added this interpretation of Kafka’s words: “There is absolutely
no pronouncement of a sentence: the defendant learns neither whether he has been found guilty nor when the judgment will be executed—until it is actually executed upon him.” In March 1960, Siegfried Weitzmann died in Tel Aviv.
²⁸

View from the fourth floor of the factory, 1931

Nearly all the buildings Korn and Siegfried Weitzmann constructed between 1922 and 1934 have been destroyed. And the friendship between these two architectural masters came to an end in 1937 because of a woman.
²⁹

In August 1990, Edgar Fromm applied for restitution of the Fromms Act working capital, the factory premises in Köpenick, and the real estate in Friedrichshagen on his own behalf and that of the widows of his brothers Max and Herbert at the Office for the Settlement of Disputed Property Claims in Berlin. He retained Petra Benoit-Raukopf, a lawyer in West Berlin, to handle the legal work. Her background, in brief, was this: She was the daughter of the Czech communist writer Otto Katz, who survived the Nazi years in French, British, and American exile and
published under the name André Simone. After the war, Katz returned to Czechoslovakia and worked as editor-in-chief of the party newspaper
Rude Pravo
. In 1952 he and ten Jewish codefendants were found guilty of “Zionism” during the Stalinist, anti-Semitic Slánský trial in Prague, and they were hanged. All the non-Jewish defendants received prison sentences. His ashes and those of the other executed men were mixed into the road grit used in the winter by the Prague sanitation department.

In the hope of expediting the return of the properties, Edgar Fromm traveled to Berlin in the summer of 1991 to meet with officials at the Treuhandanstalt (the post-reunification privatization agency for East German enterprises), which was about to sell the site in Köpenick. This agency was located in the former Air Force Ministry of Hermann Göring. The meeting left Edgar Fromm reeling. The official who spoke with him was cordial, but he explained that this was no easy matter. “Look here,” he added by way of explanation, “I am working on the case of a gentleman in Israel who is ninety-three years old and in poor health. He will probably not live to see payment of the restitution.”

Edgar Fromm, who died in 1999, lived to see his restitution payment validated. In July 1994, the Office for the Settlement of Disputed Property Claims confirmed the legitimacy of the heirs’ claim to the property in Köpenick. But since the Stinnes Corporation had already invested money in it, a simple return of the property was deemed unfeasible, and the Treuhandanstalt had to pay out the proceeds of the sale to the heirs.
³⁰
Edgar Fromm had died by the time reparations were finalized for the real estate in Friedrichshagen. In 2006—a full sixteen years after the application for restitution had been submitted—Petra Benoit-Raukopf was finally able to close the file for the restitution of the property, but the file on the restitution of the firm’s working capital remains open nineteen years later.

F
ROMMS
A
CT FOR
G
öRING’S
G
ODMOTHER

JULIUS FROMM WAS FAR TOO PREOCCUPIED
with his company to show much interest in politics. He usually voted for the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), whose business-friendly agenda meshed with his own interests. Besides, he quite liked the fact that the head of the Deutsche Volkspartei, Gustav Stresemann, was married to the daughter of a Jewish industrialist.

When Hitler became Reichskanzler in 1933, Fromm’s two directors in the company were Berthold Viert and Karl Lewis. Viert had joined the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party quite early, on October 1, 1930 (his membership number was 336158), and later served as the acting head of the local chapter in the Berlin suburb of Hirschgarten. Lewis joined the Nazi Party in 1933.

It appears that Fromm approved of, and even welcomed, the political activity of his two managers, hoping against hope that it might protect his company from outside pressures. In any case, a red swastika flag and a picture of the Führer were soon displayed
in one of the two cafeterias. In early January 1933 (during the final weeks of the Weimar Republic), Fromm suddenly started emphasizing the German nature of his merchandise, calling his products “pure German quality products.” He soon began labeling his condoms “the bestselling German select brand.” In an evident attempt to ward off boycotts of his Jewish company, he announced that “the sale of our Fromms Act select brand is, as always, absolutely permitted!” This announcement was printed on March 25, 1933, on the title page of the drugstore journal
Der Drogenhändler
in an old-fashioned German penmanship style known as Sütterlin script. In the next advertisement, Fromm left off the foreign word “Act” in the company name. For a brief period, he was so plagued by uncertainty that he refrained from advertising his condoms altogether, and focused on another of his products—Fromms Rubber Pacifiers—to show consumers that his products were in line with the Nazi campaign to step up the birth rate.
³¹

“When my father was faced with the question of whether to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover,” Edgar Fromm recalled, “his initial reaction was: ‘Hitlers come and go…’” Julius Fromm simply failed to grasp how deadly serious the National Socialists were about expelling and later annihilating the Jews. He insisted: “I cannot imagine this happening. After all, we are Germans!” Both of his directors, who had become Nazis, assured him repeatedly: “But Herr Fromm, we don’t mean
you
. You’re an exception.”