Julius Fromm

Origins and early life

Julius Fromm was born in Konin, in the part of Poland then ruled by the Russian Empire, on 4 March 1883, and his parents were both Polish Jews who in 1893 took the family to Berlin, where they lived by rolling and selling cigarettes.

Work and career

His parents died young and left him responsible for his six younger brothers and sisters, and he took evening classes in chemistry. Most condoms of the time were made from animal gut or from rubber sheet joined along a seam, and Fromm worked out how to dip glass moulds into a liquid solution of raw rubber, which gave a thin, transparent condom with no seam at all. He patented the method in 1916 and that year put it on sale under its own brand name, Fromms Act, as protection against syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases as well as against unwanted pregnancy.

Mass production began in 1922 in a factory at Friedrichshagen, on the edge of Berlin, branches followed in Denmark, Britain, Poland and the Netherlands, and in German the word Fromms came to mean a condom. In 1928 his company installed its first condom vending machines, although the interior ministry let it advertise only their hygienic benefits, and in 1929 he bought land in Köpenick for a modern factory designed by Arthur Korn and Siegfried Weitzmann.

Under Nazi rule the business was taken from him: on 4 August 1938, on Hermann Göring's orders, it was sold for a fraction of its worth to Göring's godmother, Elisabeth von Epenstein, a theft traced by Götz Aly and Michael Sontheimer in their 2007 book Fromms. He emigrated with his family to London in 1939 and died there on 12 May 1945, a few days after the end of the war in Europe. His son Herbert bought back the rights to the name in 1947, condoms are still made in Germany under the Fromms brand, and on 18 October 2014 a Stolperstein in his memory was laid at the site of his last factory in Berlin-Köpenick.