Bella Fromm (20 December 1890 – 9 February 1972) was a German journalist and author of Jewish heritage, who lived in exile in the United States during World War II.
She is best known as the author of Blood and Banquets (1943), an account of her time as diplomatic correspondent for Berlin newspapers during the Weimar Republic, and of her experiences during the first five years of the Third Reich.
[1] Although this book was published as an authentic contemporary diary and is frequently cited as such, recent research suggests that Fromm wrote it in the U.S. after leaving Germany.
Initially confined to traditional roles for female journalists such as fashion and social gossip, Fromm proved talented and ambitious and soon graduated to writing about politics and diplomacy.
Among those with whom she may have been acquainted were Frederick Birchall (The New York Times correspondent and editor), Aristide Briand (French Prime Minister), Vittorio Cerruti (Italian Ambassador), William E. Dodd (U.S.
By her own account, Fromm met Hitler, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels several times at diplomatic events, but was not friendly with any of them.
Fromm portrayed herself as a leading figure in Berlin's political society; she was on intimate terms with ministers, editors, and diplomats, and knew of confidential information about many of them.
Deprived of most of her income from journalism, Fromm returned to her family’s trade as a wine merchant, exploiting her contacts with foreign embassies and wealthy Berliners.
In a 2000 journal article, Turner maintained that Fromm wrote the book in New York, basing it on her extensive collection of newspaper cuttings, on secondary sources and on her own memory.
In other entries, he says, Fromm gives erroneous dates for speeches by Goebbels (including one she claimed to have witnessed) as a result of relying on newspaper cuttings rather than her own knowledge.
He writes: “A first-name relationship – for upper-class Germans of that time a near-ceremonial matter – between Kurt von Schleicher and a society columnist he had met at a diplomatic reception is, to say the least, lacking in plausibility.” He concludes: “To sum up, Blood and Banquets, a memoir about events in Germany that was composed years later in America in demonstrably inventive fashion… should be regarded by historians with skepticism.”[9] Despite these doubts about its authenticity, Fromm’s book, with its many colourful descriptions of social life in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s and its robustly anti-Nazi views, continues to be widely quoted by postwar historians of the Weimar and Third Reich periods.