Fromms: How Julis Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis (22 page)

Yet another way to pilfer the property of Jews was to auction off the furniture and clothing that came from the households of the Western European and Czech Jews that had been plundered every which way by the German state. From the occupied western territories alone—France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—more than 1,300 freight cars transported the household goods of the deported Jews to Berlin. The number of inland ships unloading this kind of freight cannot be determined with any accuracy.
⁷⁴
Moreover, the clothing of the people who were deported or murdered wound up in secondhand stores or was distributed to the needy by the National Socialist Public Welfare office. If these transactions are factored in, the number of Berliners who profited from the auctions of Jewish property clearly exceeded 200,000. Since most of the profiteers from the deportations at that time were not single households, but rather families of four and five, the number of Berliners whose comfort level increased at the expense of the persecuted and the murdered Jews quickly jumps to a million.

There was something to suit everyone’s taste. Even Germans who arrived late or came with an empty wallet and left empty-handed still stood to profit in the end, because the proceeds flowed into the Reich coffers and reduced the tax burden across the board.

The documentation clearly indicates that the Fromms’ furniture sold to Colonel Bork and auctioned off to various other buyers had enriched the German state by a total of 4,520.80 Reichsmarks. Despite this evidence, on October 9, 1962, the compensation bureau in Berlin refused once and for all—at least in this case—to make restitution of a single penny for what the civil servants had the audacity to mislabel the “abandonment of furniture.”

In contrast to the petitioners, these officials had full access to the original files from the years of Aryanization, which they took advantage of to the detriment of those entitled to restitution. In
1955, a senior tax collector demanded that the renovations in the Fromms’ villa that the tenant, Colonel Hagemann, had insisted on and that had been paid from Fromm’s liquid assets “be deducted from the reimbursed sum for the property in the restitution process.” Hagemann’s air-raid shelter alone must have cost a fortune!

Storage facility for “property from Jews” in Oberhausen, ca. 1943

The files also indicate that restitution officials in Berlin were aware of specified assets about which the petitioners had no knowledge. No compensation was made for these assets. For example, Salomon Fromm had taken out a small life insurance policy for his daughter Ruth in 1926, which was to be paid out on February 1, 1944. Payment on maturity had indeed been made—but to the Reich treasury. When in 1958 Ruth Fromm applied for compensation for the losses she and her family had sustained, she did not know about the life insurance policy in her name, and was thus unable to claim restitution, although the administrators knew full well of its existence. They pored through the 1944 correspondence between the life insurance
company and the Berlin tax authorities, then added it to their office files—and kept their findings to themselves.

At the time of Julius Fromm’s formal denaturalization, his personal assets totaled about 1.6 million Reichsmarks, all of which he had to leave behind in the Reich, as we learn from the balance sheet his lawyer, Loebinger, drew up in February 1939.
⁷⁵
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of his company, in the amount of 300,000 Reichsmarks, should be added to this sum, as should the package of gold and jewelry in the safe deposit box at the Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft that Loebinger had not reported as “enemy assets;” this package was easily worth an additional 200,000 Reichsmarks.

The Berlin-Zehlendorf tax office collected 25 percent off the top of the total amount as a “Reich Flight Tax.” The cynically named “Jewish atonement payment” of a billion Reichsmarks, which Göring imposed in consultation with the Reich Finance Minister after the November 9 pogrom (Kristallnacht), required every German Jew whose assets exceeded five thousand Reichsmarks to hand over 20 percent of these holdings as a contribution to the German state. Julius Fromm was forced to pay this money, and in addition a “Count Helldorf Donation,” named after the Berlin chief of police. This “donation” was extorted from every well-to-do Jewish emigrant from Berlin to augment the municipal treasury. No receipt was issued. Yet another compulsory payment, this one to the Jewish Community in Berlin, was earmarked as poverty aid for Jews of lesser means, who were denied the benefits to which they were entitled as qualifying members of the German social security system, so this money went straight to the German treasury and social security funding as well.

If we add up all these amounts, we find that the government had helped itself to about 50 percent of Fromm’s assets by 1939.
The second half was appropriated by the end of 1944. An itemized list of the state’s profit from its Aryanization of Fromm’s holdings is as follows:

The preceding balance sheet appears to count the sum of the Reich railroad bonds twice (item 5). The restitution process that Ruth Fromm initiated for her father Salomon’s expropriated assets indicates the kinds of ploys associated with these bonds. As the Commerzbank advised on May 27, 1955—for a fee of “4 marks for expenses”—it had sold Salomon Fromm’s Reich railroad bonds (worth 20,500 Reichsmarks) “in several small units” on the stock exchange. “The final sale of the remaining stocks in the amount of 500 Reichsmarks occurred on November 11, 1940.” The proceeds from this sale were immediately converted into war loans and later confiscated.
⁷⁶
Aside from this item, the nationalization of Julius Fromm’s personal assets can be clearly documented.

The above-mentioned sum, which comes close to representing the total figure, should be increased by at least the inheritance tax that Otto Metz-Randa had to pay for Fromms Act in 1941 as the heir of Elisabeth Epenstein, the Aryanizer of the business. The tax office assessed the company’s value at 1.9 million Reichsmarks and set the inheritance tax of Metz-Randa, who was not related to the deceased, at 935,000 Reichsmarks.
⁷⁷
Metz-Randa paid this tax out of the Fromms Act assets.

Factoring in this amount, we discover that a total of about three million Reichsmarks flowed into the Reich treasury and thus to the German
Volksgemeinschaft
(people’s community) as a result
of the expropriation of Fromm’s assets. In today’s purchasing power, that would equal about 30 million euros. Elisabeth Epenstein and her heir secured a large portion of the loot for themselves. Others swooped in to profit from the Aryanization on a small or a large scale, notably two high-ranking Wehrmacht officers, who were given manifestly preferential treatment. There was also a covert deal involved in this lucrative transaction for Frau von Epenstein, whereby Göring would get two castles “as gifts” in return for his largesse, and his sisters and a woman identified as “Frau Göring” would receive an allowance for life from the profits of Fromms Act—and did in fact receive this allowance until 1945. Thus the family of a leading Nazi also made money hand over fist.

Julius Fromm had fallen prey to the robbers. These were not a bunch of bandits in the bushes, however, but a state and its citizens. Millions of Germans—Nazis and others—seized the opportunity to profit. According to the principles of social participation, helping the Nazis meant helping themselves. The National Socialist movement may have sprung from an ideological foundation, but it was now fully fused with material interests, thus uniting the Görings, Hagemanns, and Metz-Randas, the men who ran the elevators and the men who ran the country, the tenants in the modest back units and stately front buildings, lower-ranking and top-level officers. Instead of going to a carnival or a sale, everyone happily trotted off to the Jew Auction.

F
ROM
V
ILLA
F
ROMM TO
A
USCHWITZ