Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (14 page)

Just how much more valuable Fromms Act was in reality is evident from a capital adjustment completed in the spring of 1942 for tax purposes. Instead of 200,000 Reichsmarks of common stock capital, the internal revenue service set the value at one million. According to the balance sheet of December 31, 1940, the working assets came to 2,174,000 Reichsmarks. When the business was later bequeathed to the purchaser’s lover, Otto Metz-Randa, the tax office set the inheritance tax at 939,000 Reichsmarks. The heir took this sum of money as a “credit” from the company’s cash holdings without any liquidity problems.
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The business flourished during the war as well, and the workforce was supplemented by 150 foreign forced laborers in 1942.
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Between 1942 and 1944, three barracks were built to accommodate the new workers on the grounds of the Köpenick factory. The army needed finger cots for military hospitals and a supply of condoms in bulk. The regulations for army brothels in occupied France stipulated that each of the rooms had to display a sign that said “Sexual Intercourse Without Condom Protection Is Strictly Forbidden!” The sign had to be placed “in a highly visible location” and feature “letters that could be read easily from a distance of 20 feet.” The women were required to make condoms available, and the “price of the rubber prophylactics” had to appear on the inside of the door on the full list of set prices.
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Julius Fromm had always run his business with an iron fist, and had enforced a strict ban on smoking because of the fire hazards associated with the inflammable solvents used in the factory. To prevent employees from secretly enjoying a cigarette, matches and lighters had to be handed over when entering the factory premises. But within days of Fromm’s departure from the company he had founded, the German employees demanded that the ban on smoking be lifted, a demand that the ever-cautious Fromm had consistently refused to give in to. “Our members,” the new management wrote to the building inspection department in October 1938, “have repeatedly requested that one of the cafeteria rooms be reserved for smoking.” The “pure Aryan” management immediately agreed to satisfy the demand for this wholesome indulgence in cigarettes, and confirmed that “there would be no danger in making a cafeteria room available for smoking if the appropriate caution is exercised.” This matter was pressing, it turned out, because “a social gathering” was coming up.
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A C
RITICAL
L
OOK AT THE
P
ERSONAL
H
ISTORY OF A
P
UBLIC
F
IGURE

SHORTLY BEFORE HERMANN GÖRING ESCAPED
the hangman’s noose in October 1946 by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule, he fantasized, “In fifty or sixty years’ time there will be statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany. Little statues maybe, but one in every German home.”
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A self-image this overinflated fits the impression of Göring as a robust, good-natured, and popular man. Unlike the ascetic and fanatic Hitler, or Joseph Goebbels, who was consumed by ambition, Göring had a crude barroom humor that people found appealing.

According to the British historian Richard Overy, Göring, the corrupt hedonist, embodied “the restless and violent nature of the National Socialist movement as a whole.” He spurred on economic preparations for war and, in conjunction with this, the theft of Jewish property. In the authoritarian anarchy of the Third Reich, he moved through a total of twenty-eight top positions and titles, from Reich Hunting Master to Reich Marshal, from Reich Minister of Aviation to Prussian Prime Minister to Reichstag President to Commissioner for the Four Year Plan.

If there had been a title of Reich Lord of the Castle, it would have gone to Göring as well. No other leading National Socialist took more pleasure in amassing grand manors or reveling in historical kitsch, which explains his eagerness to get the successful and highly profitable Fromms Act into the hands of his godmother, Elisabeth Epenstein von Mauternburg, knowing that in return she would make him a gift of two medieval castles. To understand his interest in trading a condom factory for a citadel setting steeped in a sovereign past, it helps to have a look at the Göring family history.

In contrast to most prominent Nazi Party members, the second-in-command could trace a lineage of ancestors who were high-level Prussian civil servants. His forefathers included a military adviser to Frederick the Great and a district chief executive. His father, Heinrich Göring, who was born in Emmerich in 1839, earned a law degree, served as cavalry officer in the Prussian army in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71, and, after the foundation of the German Reich, became a district court judge. Heinrich Göring attracted
Bismarck’s attention with an 1884 memorandum urging the development of a colonial policy, whereupon Bismarck sent him to London to have a look at the efficient way the British ruled and exploited their colonies, and thus acquire the basic knowledge that the Germans lacked. Göring was a widower with five children. While in London, he married for a second time. His new wife was Franziska Tiefenbrunn, a Bavarian peasant girl and beer garden waitress who was a good twenty years his junior. Shortly thereafter, he was sent as governor general to the “protectorate” of German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia).

Postcard view of Neuhaus an der Pegnitz with Castle Veldenstein, ca. 1938

Once in the protectorate (through which he was driven in the same travel coach that Bismarck had used during the war against France), he and his wife got to know and enjoy the company of Hermann Epenstein, a doctor from Berlin and a former medical officer in the Prussian army who owned quite a bit of real estate and pursued his passion for hunting in Africa. He became Frau Göring’s doctor, and delivered her first son.

Castle Mauterndorf, 2006

Epenstein became a close friend and benefactor of the Görings. As the years went by, the childless bachelor became the godfather of the couple’s three sons and two daughters. There is much significance in the fact that the Görings’ second son, Hermann, who was born in 1893 in the Marienbad sanatorium near Rosenheim, was named after his godfather.

The elder Göring returned to Berlin after five years in Africa and six years as consul general and minister resident in Haiti. He and his family were now enjoying a lavish lifestyle in Berlin-Friedenau. The house belonged to their friend Epenstein. By this time, an intimate relationship had developed between Dr. Epenstein and Franziska Göring. This arrangement was quite beneficial for her family, which depended on her husband’s rather modest civil service pension. Epenstein later allowed the Görings to live rent-free in one of his two castles.

Werner Maser’s biography of Hermann Göring characterizes Epenstein as a “rich, cultivated, and artistically inclined Jew … whose penchant for luxury knew no bounds.” Actually, it was Epenstein’s father who had been Jewish, but he had converted to Christianity before marrying the daughter of a Catholic banker, and he had his son baptized as well.

In 1894 Epenstein purchased the rather dilapidated Mauterndorf Castle in Lungau, Austria, on the southern slope of the Hohe Tauern mountains, and had it restored at great expense. As a result, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria bestowed a title of nobility on the generous developer on August 8, 1910 and thenceforth he was known as Hermann Ritter Epenstein von Mauternburg. He had bought a second rundown castle in 1897 for twenty thousand gold marks: Castle Veldenstein, thirty miles northeast of Nuremberg. Sparing no expense, he commissioned a stonemason to restore it. This project took ten years to complete, and ran up a bill for the then-exorbitant sum of one million Reichsmarks.

Left to right: Hermann, Paula
,
Albert, and Olga Göring with
their godfather Hermann
Epenstein, ca. 1902

Once the renovations of Castle Veldenstein were complete in 1901, the Göring family moved in with Epenstein. According to the official Göring biography written in 1938, eight-year-old Hermann would have preferred to stay in Berlin at first, but he quickly changed his mind: “When he arrived in a horse-drawn carriage at the side of his father, and the road took them higher and higher, through the big castle gate and then through a second one, whose battlements and crenels struck him as even more beautiful; when he finally stood in the uppermost bailey, the castle tower, the deep well, and the vine-covered castle walls before him, the young Hermann’s heart soared.” “You really must come to Castle Veldenstein,” Göring’s sister Olga later told the friends of her now-famous brother. “This is where he spent his romantic youth, reading legends and dressing up as a knight, day in and day out. There you will be able to understand him.”

Göring’s father, who had become an alcoholic, spent his nights on the ground floor of the castle; his wife’s bedroom was one floor
above, adjacent to Epenstein’s ornate chamber. The ménage à trois of the two Görings and their benefactor went on for fifteen years, until early in 1913, when Epenstein announced to Franziska that he had fallen deeply in love with another woman and would be marrying her soon. The woman’s name was Elisabeth Schandrovich Edle von Kriegstreu. She was thirty-six years younger than the wealthy knight. Born in Temesvar, which was then part of Hungary (and is now in Romania), she was the daughter of a Prague aristocrat and a Bohemian officer, and had grown up in Budweis (today Bude’jovice in the Czech Republic) and Aussig (in the Sudetenland). Epenstein’s niece recalled that “Aunt Lili” was “a radiant beauty.” When she was seventeen, she had married and quickly divorced. Now, at the age of thirty-three, she met Ritter Epenstein von Mauternburg, who was fatherly and immensely wealthy. A few short weeks after the new lady of the manor moved in, the Görings were asked to vacate the castle grounds after having spent twelve pleasant years there. They moved to Munich. Heinrich Göring died a few months later, in December 1913.