The Great Depression; Interview with Ruth Gruber. Part 1

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

Mark it please.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

Gruber two, camera roll twelve, sound roll seven.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so, you ready? Tell me about the rally that you went to that first [inaudible]

RUTH GRUBER:

In 1931 I was sent to Germany on an exchange fellowship from the University of Wisconsin. And, Hitler was coming to power, and I heard that he was going to give a lecture in the big hall, it was called the Messehalle, across the Rhine in Cologne. I was living with a Jewish family and when I announced that I was going to hear Hitler they were ready to kill me or explode with fear, and said, \"You can't go. You're a naive American, you mustn't put yourself in such danger.\" And I said, \"Oh, nothing will happen to me. I'll wear an American flag in my lapel,\" and off I went, knowing that I was giving them heartaches, but I had to see what Hitler looked like, I had to experience a Nazi rally. And it was horrifying, terrifying. I sat there with my knees shaking so loudly I was sure that one of the S.S. men would hear and throw me out. There they were in this huge hall, completely decked with Nazi flags with swastikas, and the marching of the men, you could hear the boots marching, and they kept singing and shouting, and they were sending shock waves of hatred across this hall. And then Hitler came and it was as if the Messiah had come. There was such excitement and joy, and people raising their hands to greet him. And his speech grew more and more hysterical, his voice kept getting higher and higher, and he ranted against socialists, against Communists, against the Treaty of Versailles, against Americans, and always against Jews. It was, it was a really, a growing experience because in many ways it shaped me. I knew that from then on I would have to do whatever I could to fight this man, that this was the greatest danger, not only to my people, but to the world.

INTERVIEWER:

What,[coughs] what do you think it was—can we hold on for a second?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

Three, camera roll twelve, sound roll seven.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, what do you suppose, now again, placing this in the time, it was the depression, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about that and what it was about Hitler, what was his growing appeal to people, what was it that kept bringing people to him?

RUTH GRUBER:

He reached out, first to the dispossessed in the small towns, and found that that was the way to go to them, to promise them jobs, and work, and employment, and beautiful future. Then he reached out to the farmers, then he went into the big cities, and not only reached all the dispossessed and the unemployed—

INTERVIEWER:

I'm sorry, [unintelligible]

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

Twelve, sound roll seven.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2

OK, you want to stop? We're OK?

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so let's try again. Why don't you tell me again what Hitler's appeal was to the German people in the '30s and the depression?

RUTH GRUBER:

It was a period of great depression in Germany in the early years after World War I, The Great War they called it, not World War I, but after that period the inflation was so high that people had to put German pounds, German marks into a baby carriage in order to buy a loaf of bread. You could buy a Stradivarius violin or a grand piano for a few hundred dollars. People were selling everything just to stay alive. By '31 the inflation was already under control but there was still a depression and a lot of unemployment. So Hitler reached all of these unemployed, the Lumpenproletariat who didn't want to work anyway, and he began in the small towns and the villages. And he was very smart. Hitler did everything legally. First he went to the small towns, then he went to the big cities, then he entered every single political race until he was able to reach his goal. And as he reached out, he went from the Lumpenproletariat, from the unemployed, to the bankers and industrialists, and he promised them that he could create the kind of Germany they wanted, a Germany in which they would really be the masters. So that he was able to reach the whole spectrum of German life, and even people who thought of him as a clown, Charlie Chaplin with a little mustache, still listened to his siren songs, and particularly when he blamed everything that happened in Germany on the Jews. They were, anti-Semitism was so endemic in Germany.

INTERVIEWER:

So what was, what was the promise? What did he promise the people?

RUTH GRUBER:

He promised first of all that they would all have jobs, that they would all have fine homes, that farmers would be able to sell their produce, that people in the factories would get good jobs and then they could live well. He had a promise for every single group inside of Germany. And the promise was always couched in terms of, we'll get rid of the Jews. They're our misfortune. "Die Juden sind unser Unglück," he said, and he said, "If we get rid of the Jews, we get rid of the Communists and the bankers. He had them fixed, they were both the multi-millionaires who controlled everything and they were also the Communists who were going to overthrow Germany. You took whatever you liked.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, what was you reaction, your personal reaction, I know you weren't there at the time, but after you came back to the United States and you found out that Hitler had become Chancellor, what was your reaction?

RUTH GRUBER:

It was a period of mourning for me. The Weimar Republic, it—

INTERVIEWER:

OK excuse me. When you start there can you tell me when you heard it, you have to say back the question, when you heard that Hitler became Chancellor.

RUTH GRUBER:

I see.

INTERVIEWER:

And again, what happened to you personally, physically, on the day that you found out? What was that experience like?

RUTH GRUBER:

When I returned from Germany Hitler had already won a good many victories, politically, but he was not yet Chancellor. When he became Chancellor in January of 1933, I was sitting in my little studio listening to the radio and I heard that he was now going to run Germany, and I sat there mourning the death of the Weimar Republic. It was as if a country that I had grown to love while I was a student there, even though I knew its dark underside, but it was this country with the great writers, Beethoven, and the musicians, you know, Beethoven, and Bach, and the writers like Goethe and Schiller, and the poet Rilke, had died. Everything that was noble and beautiful in Germany suddenly died, and Hitler destroyed it.

INTERVIEWER:

And you just sat there mourn—

RUTH GRUBER:

I sat there weeping. It was the way you weep when a beloved parent dies, or a beloved friend dies. It was the death of Germany, and I knew it, I knew it in every cell in my body.

INTERVIEWER:

When you went back to Germany, what was it like to enter, to cross the border and go into Germany at that time, and how was it different from the first time?

RUTH GRUBER:

When I went back to Germany in 1935 on another fellowship, I was making, I had been sent both by The New York Herald Tribune as a correspondent and on a new fellowship at the recommendation of the Guggenheim. The border was immediately an instrument of terror. The German soldiers in their uniforms and their shiny boots entered the compartment in which I was sitting, they demanded my passport, of course they always do, but then they demanded that I open my suitcase. They held everything up to the light. I felt as if they thought I was a spy. What were they looking for? I wasn't smuggling anything, I was going back to see what had happened to the Germany I had once loved. And it, it must have been the same for every foreigner, as well as every German returning there. It was a moment in which they wanted to instill terror into your bones.

INTERVIEWER:

And what had happened to the Germany that you once loved? What was your sense of it when you returned?

RUTH GRUBER:

And the Germany I had once loved had turned into a Germany in which, wherever you looked there was swastikas flying, remind [sic] you of how the Germans were going to, thought of themselves as conquerors. You saw these flags waving, you saw, troops were constantly marching down the streets. I was in a bookstore in Cologne, a book store in which I had so frequently gone to buy books when I was a student at the university there, and everybody was browsing around. Most of the books had swastikas on them. Hitler's <hi rend="italic">Mein Kampf</hi> was everywhere as if it were the bible. And suddenly everything went still. They turned on the radio and Hitler's voice came into that bookstore, the same hysteria that I had heard when I went to hear him in the Messehalle in Cologne. And the people stood there again mesmerized, and his hysteria was mounting and mounting—

RUTH GRUBER:—and all I could think of was, how can a people as brilliant as the Germans, people who had created so much, love this tyrant who was going to drag them down.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Thirteen, sound roll seven.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so describe to me again that, that day when you went into the bookstore after you returned.

RUTH GRUBER:

I was in Cologne and I went to the bookstore that I had used all the time I was a student in Germany, it was a bookstore I loved, and now most of the books were with swastikas, and Hitler's Mein Kampf was the centerpiece as if it was the bible. And I was browsing around and suddenly everything went still. The radio was put on, Hitler was making a speech, and the people stood there mesmerized. And I wondered, how could a people as bright as the Germans listen to his hysteria. And the things he was saying, and the voice kept getting more and more hysterical as if he was talking out of his belly. And then the, he finished and the radio stopped, and the people went back to browsing as if nothing had happened. And I walked out on the street and suddenly I found myself being crushed by a mob of people. They were watching soldiers walk down the center, down in the gutter, no, no cars were allowed, and a man next to me said, "Oh my God, it's my neighbor, and she's Jewish." And I started talking to him and he said, "First they rounded up the Communists, then the Socialists, and now the Jews." I said, "Where are they taking her?" She was carrying, she was sort of helping an old man, and it was as if her life depended on protecting him. I didn't know who he was. I didn't know who she was, but she was moving along with him. And I said, "Where will they take them?" And he said, "To some kind of camp." We still didn't know about the big camps that he was sending them to.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, excuse me. I'm not clear again, when you walked down—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Do you want to stop?

INTERVIEWER:

No, keep going.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

OK.

INTERVIEWER:

When you walked out of the store, out of the bookstore, what exactly was going on in the street? Were there people out, I didn't quite get a sense of who was pushing whom around.

RUTH GRUBER:

Well the—

INTERVIEWER:

OK, start again with when you walked out of the store.

RUTH GRUBER:

Yes, when I walked out of the store I saw a lot of people lining up on the sidewalk, and I went to see what was happening. And then I found myself being pushed closer and closer to the front, and in the gutter soldiers were marching and they were bringing a woman with her, apparently her father or grandfather, but an old man and several others. And they were shoving them along, herding them as if they were herding cattle. And a man said, and in a very low voice, "Oh my God, it's my neighbor." And so I turned to him and I said, "Who is she? What is it?" And he said, "First they rounded up the Communists on our block, then the socialists, and now they're rounding up the Jews." And I said, "Where will they take these people?" And he said, "To some kind of camp." We didn't know yet about the death camps, and of course they hadn't become yet the death camps, but they were already building camps in Germany, and they were taking them to camps in Germany.

INTERVIEWER:

Thank you. When you were in Germany at that time in '35, do you recall, do you, what sorts of signs out, visible signs in the street were there of anti-Semitism, of segregation of Jews, or any, was there any, you talked about seeing swastikas and flags, was there any anti-Semitic graffiti or signs or what, what, how did that manifest itself?

RUTH GRUBER:

There were signs in some of the shops that said "No Jews Allowed." There were Jewish shops that were boarded up already, that they were making people move out of. You had the feeling all around you when you walked down those streets that if you were a Jew you were in danger, they were going to get you somehow, and they, they forced them out.

INTERVIEWER:

Great, thank you. Now, I think, was this also in the same day you had an encounter with a woman in the Jewish community—OK we have to cut.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

Sound roll seven. Mark.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so why don't you just go ahead and describe that.

RUTH GRUBER:

When I left Cologne and I went on to Berlin I was still searching to find out what was happening to Jews and what was happening to women, and I went to see a woman who was sort of the head of the welfare department. She had an office right next to the famous synagogue, called the Oranienburger Straße, and she was very suspicious of me at first. She said, "Who are you and why have you come?" I said, "I'm a student, and I'm a journalist, and I want to talk to you about what's happening to the Jews." She said, "You're an American, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes," and she said, "What's wrong with you? Are you stupid? Why would you come to Berlin now when we're in such danger? Why have you come?" And I said, "Because I want to know what's happening." I said, "Why don't Jews leave? If they can get out, why don't they leave now?" And she looked at me as if I really were very stupid. She said, "Of [sic] they'd all like to leave, but do you know what your country, America, demands before they can get a visa? You have to fill out a document that's a foot or two long. And anybody in America who wants to sponsor you here has to fill out this document with their whole life history, their bank account, their taxes, everything. They have to prove that you won't be a burden to society there. And many of the relatives don't have the kind of money that are [sic] needed, or they don't have the room. It's almost impossible to get a visa now. It may take years for any of us to get out and get a visa, so what are you doing here now?" And again I told her that, why I was here and I was writing articles, and she said, "You want to know what's happening to us?" she said, "We would like to leave, but many Jews, like many people, can't move." She said in German, "Wir sind unbeweglich." We're immobile. She said, "Picture your father, could he just pick up his roots and run to another country? Some have a little property and they're hoping that something will change. They've lived through other crises and maybe something will change and they don't have to leave, so they're holding on to the property, or the little store, or something that is tying them to this land because don't forget, Jews have been here for hundreds and hundreds of years. Their roots go back to Charlemagne, maybe earlier, so how can some of them pick up roots?" But she said, "You're a young woman, don't stay here! You think being an American with your passport will save you, will protect you?" Because when I was leaving my mother, of course, was terrified that I was going, she said, "They can shoot you." And I said, "Mom they won't shoot me, I have an American passport," and she said, "So they can't shoot an American passport?" And now this woman was practically saying the same thing to me, she said, "Your American passport may not save you. They can lie, they can say that you were dealing in the black market, that you were trying to change dollars into cheap marks. They can pick up anything, they can put you in jail, and nobody will ever here from you again." She said, "Get out of here! Leave here, but when you go home," and she came around her desk and she put her arm around me, she said, "I have a daughter your age. I wish my daughter could leave. She can't leave, but you're an American, you can leave. Go, and when you go home, scream. Scream so that you can tell the whole world what Hitler is doing to Jews here. Go home my girl, go home and scream."

INTERVIEWER:

Will you cut for a second please?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER

Sound roll seven.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #3

Mark it please.

RUTH GRUBER:

Both this woman and others whom I met would say to me, "You think things are bad here, we know what's happening in your country too. You're having a terrible depression. We hear about the anti-Semites in your country. We know how your whole country on Sunday afternoon gets paralyzed because they're listening to Father Coughlin, and how he's spewing the air with his anti-Semitic poison. We hear how they're hanging black men on trees in the South. For what? They make up stories that they're raping white women, we know what's happening in your country." And it was many of the Germans who later became Nazis.

INTERVIEWER:

I'd like to stop right there. We have to change rolls.