Critical Praise

"A footnote to the history of the Nazi Reich, illuminating and even fascinating."

—Walter Laqueur, author of The Last Days of Europe

"The condom --- that lowly, indispensable, and still hotly contested object --- is not only one of the great inventions of all time but also provides a crucial clue to the ultimately devastating triangular relationship between Jews, Christians, and Nazis in 1930s Germany. This riveting, brilliant little book offers profound new insights into the tangled mess of gentile greed, corruption, anti-Semitism, and ambivalence about sexual freedoms that explains so much about the Third Reich’s rise and murderous trajectory."

—Dagmar Herzog, author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics

"Serious, ironic, sarcastic, with a deep moral outrage that shines through every page, and does not need to be made explicit through sermonizing. The book traces the history of an East European Jewish family that became German in language, culture, and outlook, and that built a manufacturing empire producing condoms, a salacious detail that makes it possible for Aly and Sontheimer to be provocative, forthright, and convincing. Fromm was serious, responsible, full of social ideals, and at the same time an excellent entrepreneur who looked after his workers well. The slow liquidation of his possessions and establishments by the Nazis is described in well-researched detail. But the second part of the book is no less impressive: it follows, in painful detail, the way postwar German governments in both German states cheated, lied, and prevaricated toward Fromm's heirs, in order to not pay out the restitution that the family quite clearly was entitled to. The book deals with Jews, and with German society before, during, and after the Nazi period. A gem of a book."

—Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem