Large-handed robbers thy grave masters are, And pill by law.
—SHAKESPEARE, Timon of Athens
FOR THE GENERATION of Julius Fromm’s grandchildren, born shortly after the war in the freedom and democracy of Great Britain and France and lucky enough not to have had to endure the Nazi years, Michael Sontheimer and Götz Aly’s work has been a real eye-opener. We naturally got to hear quite a lot through our fathers about the origins and achievements of our relatives, particularly their father, Julius Fromm, but this was mostly anecdotal. So we knew relatively few details about our forebears’ past. One must not forget that—as with many others who lived though the years of National Socialism—it was incredibly distressing for our parents to talk about their experiences. My mother, too, a German Jewess who came to England alone and practically penniless from Hamburg in March 1939, very seldom spoke about her parents, particularly about her mother, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. It was just too traumatic!
As a result, it has also mostly been too painful for my generation to think about what happened before we were born. Finding it easier and more practical to leave the past to our parents’ generation, we threw ourselves into the modern world, into the present day of a new, more peaceful, and freer Europe. For these reasons, we asked our parents far too little about the Nazi times and thus never learned the details of what had occurred.
It is only as one gets older, however, and one’s parents pass away that one begins to reflect more about the past. One wants to know what happened to relatives, how they fared in the period of assimilation of prewar Germany, how their lives and activities were suddenly shattered through persecution, what suffering they had to endure and what finally happened to them. With our parents gone, though, whom should we ask and where should we begin?
A stroke of good fortune then befell the Fromm family through its connection to Michael Sontheimer. He had always retained a fascination for our family’s history and had for a long time harbored a desire to write a book about it one day. Further luck and events conspired that he would eventually team up with Götz Aly. As a result of their trawling through the archives in Germany and even in Poland, the Fromm family’s original native country, a detailed story began to emerge, considerably more accurate in detail than what the postwar Fromm generation knew. It falls to me to express the whole Fromm family’s heartfelt thanks to Michael Sontheimer and Götz Aly for their undertaking. Without their efforts, none of what had long since drifted into oblivion would ever have been brought back to life, nor as my late father, Edgar Fromm, once requested of Michael Sontheimer, would the name of his inventive father, Julius, ever have been put back on the map.
Some people have asked me what the purpose of this book is: indeed, should one not rather leave the past well alone? I personally cannot subscribe to this view, since this book has a much wider purpose than simply relating another tale of persecution and Holocaust, for it serves as an example of the fate that befell not only the Fromm family but those of countless other German and Continental Jewish families. These families may perhaps not have been as rich and successful as Julius Fromm but, in the end, the huge, corrupt looting carried out by the Nazis affected all German and Continental Jewish families in one way or another. Consequently, my generation of children of Continental European Jewish parentage have very few items to remind us of the past. This does not necessarily mean a family heirloom of financial value, but mementos from the past—indeed from our family’s German past. And in some cases this past was very German: for example, on my mother’s side I can trace our family back over six centuries, generation after generation, seventeen in all, having lived their lives in Germany until the Holocaust. From her family in Hamburg as well as from my wife’s maternal family, also from Hamburg, only very few heirlooms remain because very little could—or was allowed to—be taken into emigration and what remained behind was subsequently stolen, never to be returned. Moreover—quite apart from many items never having been restored, let alone compensated for—where it proved possible after the war to lodge legal claims for documented expropriated assets, the amounts reimbursed bit by bit over the decades have, for the most part, been but a small fraction of their original worth. Indeed, some documented assets have to this day never been restituted. All this has, alas, served only to perpetuate the legalized theft that resulted from Aryanization.
In his well-known book about German Jewry entitled The Pity of It All, the Israeli author Amos Elon describes how the assimilation of German Jews began in 1743 with the immigration to Berlin of the famous German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the founder of Jewish Enlightenment, who entered the Prussian capital through the city gate reserved for cattle and Jews. That story of a noble experiment to assimilate came tragically full circle almost two hundred years later, when hundreds of thousands of German Jews were deported to meet their deaths in the extermination camps in railway trucks—equally designated for cattle and Jews. The poignant symmetry here is as shocking as it is painful. For a period of almost two centuries, most Jews living in Germany tried very hard to assimilate into the German lifestyle. They succeeded, their assimilation blossoming and flourishing during this era and contributing symbiotically to a substantial enrichment of German culture, science, and commerce. That this attempt went so sadly awry and ended in tears is the tragedy not only of our family but that of all German Jewry. Even today, sixty-four years after the end of the Third Reich, we of German-Jewish descent still feel the demise of German Jewry to be not only a great sorrow, but also an unbelievable tragedy and pity.
All of us in the Fromm family hope that, through their detailed account of our family’s story as victims of state-organized plunder, the authors’ sterling work will serve to support George Santayana’s wise warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. It is our sincere wish that this informative, enlightening book will find its niche in the vast library of volumes about the Third Reich so that from it, too, among the many others, the lessons from the past can be learned and thus a repetition of the appalling errors from history may be avoided.