Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (18 page)

After fifty-seven days at sea, the
Dunera
reached Sydney. Then Edgar Fromm and the majority of his fellow sufferers, about 2,600 in all, had to endure a nineteen-hour train ride before pulling into the town of Hay in New South Wales. Just outside the town, two internment camps—enclosed behind electric barbed-wire fences—had been set up so hastily that they seemed to have materialized out of thin air. Edgar was one of about a thousand Jewish deportees (some of whom had already spent time in German concentration camps) assigned to the spot in the desert designated as Camp 7.

During the day the temperature soared as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was bitterly cold at night. Still, the food was good, and the Australians allowed the inmates to run the camp themselves. A former director of the Bavarian Mortgage and Exchange Bank helped them introduce their own currency. Doctors saw patients, an orchestra performed music, and young people completed their high school examinations. The prisoners put together a theater troupe and soccer teams. There was also kosher food for the Orthodox.
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Even before the British government publicly declared the indiscriminate internment and deportation a political blunder, the Home Office sent an envoy to the prisoners in Camp 7. This envoy was Major J. D. Layton, a Jew who in civilian life had worked as a London stockbroker. He offered the internees an alternative to remaining in Australia: anyone who volunteered to join the Pioneer Corps of the British Army could return to Europe.

Julius Fromm wrote to his son recommending that he stay in Australia and await the end of the war; at least he would be safe there. Edgar wanted to get back to England, however, come what
may, so that he could marry his fiancée, Jolanthe Wolff. Jolanthe had been permitted entry into England in March 1939 because she had a household job lined up with the Fromms. Before long, Edgar and Jolanthe fell in love, but his father Julius was adamantly opposed to the match. For one thing, the woman Edgar had chosen was eight years older than he; for another, the factory owner considered a penniless servant not in keeping with their social standing—a strange sort of condescension, considering that Jolanthe’s father had been a judge in Hamburg and her mother was a member of the Weill family, a distant relative of the composer Kurt Weill. Her forefathers had lived in Germany for a good eight centuries; the family’s earliest known ancestors had emigrated from Spain in the thirteenth century, settling in Weil der Stadt near Stuttgart, from which they took their surname.

While Edgar was stranded in the Australian desert, he sent daily letters to Jolanthe. On December 23, 1941, after one and a half years overseas, Edgar Fromm came back to London and soon enlisted in the army. One year later, on New Year’s Eve 1942, he and Jolanthe were married. His parents pointedly avoided the wedding.

Jolanthe Wolff’s passport
photograph, 1939

S
EIZURE BY THE
G
ERMAN
S
TATE

IN 1938 GERMAN BUREAUCRATS
began setting a complex and somewhat improvised—yet effective—machinery into motion. In a series of several dozen operations, they seized the assets the Jews had been forced to leave behind when they emigrated, placed them “in trust” for the German state, and eventually expropriated them. The loot was divided every which way. Although a substantial portion flowed into the Reich reserves for the benefit of the public at large, individuals eager to grab their share did not miss out. All across the board—from bigwigs and bourgeois to minions and manual laborers—there were profits to be had.

From London, Fromm gave instructions in 1939 to Günther Loebinger, an attorney and tax consultant in Berlin, to look after his remaining assets in Germany. Once the war began, Loebinger reported Fromm’s various asset values to the Reich commissioner for the administration of enemy assets. Twelve dossiers were compiled to document every detail of Fromm’s possessions. Copies of such important papers were always submitted to the Reich
Finance Ministry and directed to the attention of a senior civil servant named Ludwig Bänfer, thus laying the bureaucratic foundation for the expropriation to follow.
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Although Fromm had lost his German citizenship and was considered stateless in Great Britain, back home in Germany he was listed as an enemy alien, that is, as a Briton, once the British declared war on September 3, 1939. Compared to the legal status of a German Jew, this proved to be quite advantageous at first. The property he had left behind in the Reich was now subject to enemy asset administration, according to the standard principles of wartime international law. In the first year of the war, Loebinger continued to represent Fromm’s interests using his power of attorney, but two resolutions by the Court of Appeal in Berlin, in November 1940 and in January 1941, resulted in the appointment of Werner Ranz, a lawyer and notary, as trustee; subsequently the attorney Karl Kühne assumed this function.

Günther Loebinger was born in 1899 in Schlesiengrube, outside of Beuthen (now Bytom in Poland), in Upper Silesia. Before he studied law in Breslau, he served as a volunteer in the German Army. He seems to have been an exceptionally judicious man, a real stickler for the rules. After 1939 he was forced to take Israel as his middle name, and because the job title “attorney” was now reserved for Aryans, his letterhead had to read: “Legal Consultant / Permitted to Advise and Represent Only Jews/ J.[ewish] ID: Berlin A 429165.” His office was located in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, at Brandenburgische Strasse 38.

The Aryan business partners’ behavior toward a man thus stigmatized was mixed. Some—including attorneys Ranz and Kühne—referred to him respectfully and without any discriminatory add-ons in their official correspondence as “Dr. Loebinger,” acknowledging his legal degree. Others—mainly Julius Fromm’s
debtors—opted for the disdainful “Legal Consultant Israel Loebinger.”

Owing to his service in World War I, Loebinger was not brought to the extermination camps when he was deported on July 1, 1943, but to Theresienstadt, on a transport for the elderly—the ninety-fourth
Alterstransport
from Berlin. Part of his furniture went to Albert Merten, a tax official from Teltow who had been bombed out shortly before that.
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On October 28, 1944, Loebinger—together with 2,038 other prisoners—was transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Of them, 1,689 were sent straight to the gas chambers from the arrival ramp, among them the forty-six-year-old attorney Günther Loebinger.

On November 13, 1942, a group of undersecretaries of state decreed that expelled German Jews, who, like Julius Fromm, had actually or purportedly acquired citizenships in other countries were no longer to be treated as enemy aliens, but instead would be renaturalized as German citizens. The aim of this seemingly paradoxical measure was to subject emigrants to Reich laws, thus enabling the government to expropriate Jewish property still in Germany.
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For this reason, the Gestapo in Berlin now requested that the head of the security police and intelligence service conduct an “assessment according to [paragraph] 8 of the Eleventh Ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Law” in the matter of Fromm’s property. The sole purpose of this ordinance, which was issued on November 25, 1941, was to take over the property of Jews holding German citizenship the instant they were deported. Paragraph 8 read: “(1) The head of the security police and intelligence service will determine whether the prerequisites for asset forfeiture have been met. (2) The administration and valuation of the assets is incumbent upon the Chief Finance Authority in Berlin.” The latter had
already set up the Asset Valuation Office in Berlin-Alt-Moabit for this express purpose. The Chief Finance Authority soon merged with the Chief Finance Authority of Brandenburg to gain the complement of civil servants required to carry out this massive theft from the German Jews.

Earlier, the Gestapo had called upon the Chief Finance Authority to secure Fromm’s remaining assets from the Reich commissioner for the administration of enemy assets, but to hold off on their sale until a formal notice had been issued. The closing sentence of the Gestapo official Heinrich’s letter (“I have closed my files”) suggests that he knew exactly how the notice would read. The official notice of asset forfeiture followed on October 13, 1942. It was issued by Section IV B 4 of the Reich Security Main Office, headed by Adolf Eichmann, and signed by a man named Kube. Fromm’s assets had been transferred from trustee administration into Reich property exactly one month before the undersecretaries of state got around to weighing in on this matter at their conference on November 13.

The Chief Finance Authority was delighted to announce that the involvement of trustees Ranz and Kühne was now a thing of the past. Kühne begged to differ. On January 13, 1943, he stated matter-of-factly: “The administration of enemy assets will not be terminated until a conclusion is pronounced by a ruling of the Court of Appeal.” He refused to hand over the assets or settle his accounts until this ruling was made. Two days later, the pertinent application was filed by the Reich commissioner for the administration of enemy assets.

On March 9, 1943, Kühne was relieved of his duties by the Court of Appeal. This step by the judges of the Fifteenth Civil Court—Günther, Andrée, and Schroeter—put the finishing legal touches on Julius Fromm’s expropriation. They declared that the entire fortune in Germany that had belonged to the London
businessman Julius Israel Fromm was now “forfeited to the Reich.” This fortune comprised a wide variety of assets.