Address: DLOUHÁ 729/37, PRAGUE 1

Born on the 04th May 1887 in Zawiercie/Piotrkow/Russland
DEPORTED and MURDERED 11.12.1942 IN AUSCHWITZ

Primeros is the oldest registered brand of condoms in Europe. It was founded in Prague, Central Europe in 1909 by the Jewish merchant Gustav Schwarzwald.

Primeros has officially existed since 1909, when its founder, the Jewish merchant Gustav Schwarzwald, registered a trademark for rubber goods and condoms. The headquarters of the Primeros company was located in the Prague city center in the merchant house “At The Golden Tree”. In 1927, Gustav Schwarzwald founded the “Gustav Schwarzwald – Primeros Rubber Goods Factory” in Dresden, respectively, in the nearby town of Ortrand, to facilitate trade relations threatened by the rising economic barriers between Czechoslovakia and Germany. The following year, he transferred his business ownership in Prague to his sister Eleonora Schwarzwald (Löwy or Lowry later in the US).
Gustav Schwarzwald continued to own and keep control of the patent, brand and utility model for Primeros condoms, but due to the deteriorating political situation in Nazi Germany, he was forced to defend his property rights during increasingly frequent anti-Jewish actions. Under the so-called Nuremberg Anti- Laws, the factory in Dresden (Ortrand) was finally confiscated by the Nazis in 1936. The confiscation was formally justified as the illegal export of intellectual property from Germany to the sister Czechoslovak factory Primeros. After his arrest for alleged tax evasion in 1937, Gustav Schwarzwald wanted to transfer the patent rights of the Primeros brand to the safety of his family, fearing for his life. However, the German authorities repeatedly prevented him from doing so.

His sister Eleonora, meanwhile, expanded her previously acquired business in 1932 by adding a new factory in Děčín on the Czechoslovak border with Germany (then the Sudetenland), where she produced seamless rubber goods, especially condoms of the then renowned Primeros brand. After the Munich Agreement in 1938, on the basis of which the territory of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland fell to the Nazi German Empire, the factory was also confiscated. In the autumn of 1938, an arrest warrant was issued for Eleonora by the Nazi Gestapo, before which she fled to France, just a few days after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by German troops in March 1939.

Together with her husband and sons Hanuš and Jiří, Eleonora obtained a visa from the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, in June 1940. Through Portugal, she also managed to board an ocean liner to New York, where she arrived in March 1941. According to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Eleonora’s husband, Otto Löwy, tried to help his brother-in-law Gustav Schwarzwald escape from the Nazi regime to America, but to no avail.

Gustav Schwarzwald was eventually murdered for being Jewish on 11 December 1942, in the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau , near his hometown of Zawiercie (today’s Polish Silesia).

Author of photos: Jaroslav Tatek.