Robyn: 0:00

But he had the backing of the big industrialists in Germany. They were very much in favor of power and conquest of other countries. Germany, you know. Today Germany. Tomorrow the world. That was the philosophy. That was their their big phrase. We all thought it was a joke. Ah, it won't amount to nothing. Just another political party.

Thad: 0:31

So months ago, I remember you running into my office. Super excited. And you said, Thad, I'm reading a story about this guy who is a Jew who stood guard for Adolf Hitler. Today, this is that story. So who is this guy?

Robyn: 0:54

Well, first of all, I take offense at your reading the story about, because it was not about him. There's no story written anywhere about him. I was reading his transcript from an actual oral history. So you're not going to find this in like a published book or something.

Thad: 1:13

So that's right. That's right. He is this is a this is a guy whose oral history is on record at the Holocaust Museum.

Robyn: 1:22

Yeah, the um United States, one in Washington. Um the collections are um at the Shapell Center, but it's, you know, the one in Washington, do we?

Thad: 1:31

And and you can look you can, in fact, so we're going to talk about it, but if you want to, you could go and listen to this guy's story online. Right. Right. It got uh he talks at length about the thing.

Robyn: 1:42

You can see the interview. Oh wow. And I know, and and hear him. Um, but you can look it up. It's Edward Adler, um, E-D W A-R-D A-D-L-E-R. Um, and I mean there's actually thousands of oral histories there that um are really good there.

Thad: 2:02

Awesome. All right, so so tell me about Edward.

Robyn: 2:06

Okay, well, he was an interesting guy. He was born in 1910. But before we talk about his role in everything, we need to talk about where Germany was in life. And he actually he actually says it too, that in order for us to understand anything that he tells us, that uh well this is what he said, quote, we have to put this in proper context. Things were very bad in Germany. Unemployment was perhaps, I'm not sure of this now, but I would say perhaps 20% people weren't working, and there was no jobs to be had, and as time went on, they became more and more sympathetic to the Nazi movement. First, I would imagine, for economic reasons, and secondly, it became very popular to be anti-Semitic because it was the easiest thing in the world. If you want to hate somebody, the Jews are always around, they can be hated. End quote. So we're setting it in Germany in the twenties, which was after World War One. And and I want to read a quote from a a book called Appeasement, which you know is nothing about Nazi Germany, but just to put it in wor the world perspective of what the world was like after the first world war. And in the book, it was by uh Tim Bovary, and I'm basically reading this just to get all the statistics uh right, okay? So the desire to avoid a second world war was perhaps the most understandable and universal wish in history. More than 16.5 million people died during the First World War. The British lost 723,000, the French 1.7 million, the Russians 1.8 million, the British Empire 230,000, the Germans over 2 million. 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, while the ossuary at Daumot contains the bones of some 130,000 French and German soldiers, a mere sixth of those killed during the 302-day Battle of Verdun. Among the survivors, there was scarcely a soul that was not affected. Almost everyone had a father, husband, son, brother, cousin, fiance, or friend killed or maimed. When it was over, not even the victors could feel victorious. End quote. So that's where the world was at this point. At the end of the war, they had the Treaty of Versailles, which gave Germany horrible reparations. I'm sure at length in another podcast, I'll be talking about the Treaty of Versailles and the war guilt clause, which required Germany to pay, you know, massive reparations for the war, which of course they they didn't really have money to, which created another problem we'll talk about in a minute. But uh they uh but it was France that really struggled with it. And I mean, it's a fun story that uh after the Franco-Prussian War, the German war, like in 1871, the uh the Germans made the French sign their uh the treaty that they lost, the war, in the actual Versailles uh Hall of Mirrors. And I have the diary of a guy who was actually one of the German soldiers there in, you know, this is 1871. His name is Otto Bertram, but you know, it's this di it's a diary that he wrote, and so it's just fascinating because, you know, they went into France, which Versailles is essentially Paris, it's about 20 miles out, and so went into the capital of France and forced them to sign this treaty, and it was humiliating and horrible for the French. So they just were ready to get back at Germany about this, and the treaty uh, you know, of Versailles was kind of like their opportunity to.

Thad: 6:26

So it's kind of like, hey guys, we remember what you did a few years back, and uh now we're back, except the tables are turned.

Robyn: 6:32

Yes, how the turn tables turn.

Thad: 6:35

All right. So uh so so Germany was uh was under some pressure after the Treaty of Versailles. Uh World War I was over. Um and so the world is like, well, we didn't want to go back into that, and that's that's where we enter this story.

Robyn: 6:51

Well, as he talks about, there was massive unemployment in the early 1920s. The Weimar Republic, which was the fledgling republic that they created after the first world war, that really, you know, never really got good grounding, uh, but it had massive hyperinflation because they like printed more money so they could pay off the reparations and and that created lots of problems. And then of course in 1929, with the stock market crash around that time, the whole world suffered, you know, around the time of the US stock market crash.

Thad: 7:30

That was the Great Depression.

Robyn: 7:32

Yeah, that for America.

Thad: 7:34

Yeah, that would be um and so so that was the Great Depression for America, and Germany was already depressed.

Robyn: 7:40

Well, Ger Germany, well, here's the thing: America had offered to help the Germans pay for some of the reparations they were with with the the tech guys. So, like in the initial quote that I read, he talks about the industrialists being um behind Hitler. These are like the tech guys that we would think of today, those the billionaires we have supporting this um this regime. And so they had investments and stuff, and you know, through complicated, convoluted economic reasons, um that started to fall. The um the German economy did, but the industrialists decided to back the National Socialist Party against the communists, who were the other the other main group.

Thad: 8:24

So you had the National Socialists, and then you had the communists, and then everybody else kind of just caught in the middle.

Robyn: 8:32

Yes, yes, pretty much. And of course, we look at Germany at the time and the politics that were going on, but uh it's like countryside Germany was very different than city Germany. The cities, mainly Berlin and Hamburg, the mainly the northern ones, like Munich was a hotbed of national socialism, it's southern Bavarian part. But Berlin, Hamburg, to an extent Dresden, like it northern cities mainly. I mean, this is Germany, so north and south is like nothing in relation to Texas. Um but yeah, but still, they had the massive working class neighborhoods. I think Berlin, like 35% of the vote or something in one of the elections was um communist. They so they had working class neighborhoods and Edward Adler lived in Hamburg. Okay, and in Hamburg there was what they called the German October that happened in 1923, which really was was nothing really, but it they had hoped to have like a communist revolution in like the 18, 19, eight, 1918, 1919 time period, caught there was a communist uprising, you know. So communists had been trying to get power. They had hoped that this would be a thing across the country, and one took place in Hamburg. And so he's gonna say he's gonna talk about it, so I'm gonna just talk about it through his eyes.

Thad: 10:02

Okay.

Robyn: 10:02

Um, okay. Quote I remember that they, the Nazi Party, were then a party um number 26. We had many, many political parties in Germany at that time, and they were party number 26. They had the advantage over other political parties, such as communists and democrats, because they had a lot of money backing them, and when they marched into a certain neighborhood, they had beautiful shiny boots and beautiful uniforms, and they marched in military formation, whereas Democrats and communists at the time, they were organized, but they were like a bunch of people running down the street, as compared to the well-organized march of the Nazis. At that time we lived in an area of Hamburg, Germany, which was a working class neighborhood. I would say very largely communist, but not necessarily party members, but certainly sympathizers. There was one particular day I remember quite vividly when the Nazis decided they wanted to march down the main street in our neighborhood, by the thousands, incidentally. And we we didn't exactly like this idea. It was our neighborhood, our turf. There was a lot of shooting. Machine guns had been mounted on roofs, would shoot into the air, groups and so forth, and it became a very bloody affair. This was only one time. I guess I'm not quite sure about the date, but it was 1930, a very early 1930. I was involved in many of the anti-Nazi street fights, and well, I was never a member of the party really, but certainly a sympathizer, end quote. So that's an example of the type things that were going on between uh communists and Nazis that like I said, so the Nazis would come up and basically be like, hey guys, here's a gun. Like it you can have clothes and boots and a gun and occasionally shoot someone and and here's something to do. And you know, Adler was he said 20 or 21 when this was happening, and you know, he's just like, Yeah, we my friends and I basically we had nothing else to do. I mean, why not? You get good clothes and something to do, and so so he joined the the the Nancy's? Well, let me let me tell you, in his own words.

Thad: 12:17

All right.

Robyn: 12:18

Okay. So he says, quote, a group of young men, friends of mine, we used to hang around together. We were quite active in dancing and all this kind of thing. We decided we're gonna join the army. It was it was not an army. It was called the the Arbeites, Arbutan. It this was Hitler's force that I talked about in uh in another episode where Hitler brought in and then National Socialists came in on top of the police force. It was like a it it was a different thing. So he said, I don't recall exactly the name of it. It was a labor camp in which we had regular military training, except for weapons. That was against the Treaty of Versailles at the time, which had been still obeyed then. We had no weapons, but we w marched in military formation and we used spades, shovels as rifles while marching and all this kind of thing. We had regular military training. And at that time that I went there, it was nobody asked me if I was Jewish, and I didn't mention it. So we all got accepted into this camp. Somehow or other, I I don't recall how, they found out I was Jewish. And I was stationed in East Prussia, which was um near Elbin, and which was German, but it had been independent earlier. It's an area that's been kicked back and forth between Poland and Germany for many years. We marched from Marienburg to Elding, which I'd say was about thirty kilometers and stood guard for Hitler. And I claimed to have the very distinct um I don't know what I should call it. I was probably the only Jew in the world that ever stood guard for Hitler. I saw him as close as I see you in front of me right now. He was making a speech at the city of Elding, and he walked by us, reviewing the troops. He was a little man. Everyone knows the mustache and his hairdo, and he looked perfectly calm, and we stood out there waiting for him to finish, which took about three hours. When he came out and he marched by us again towards his car, the man looked and I remember this very vividly. He looked like a maniac. He talked himself into a total frenzy. I don't believe that he even knew what he was speaking about anymore, because he was he looked he looked a person who has not control over his emotions anymore. I was found out somehow or other, as I said before, that I was Jewish, and I was discharged from the camp. I must have been in there, I don't I don't remember exactly, I'd say close to a year. This was 1932. So before Hitler came to power in Germany. Nothing much happened between 1932 and 1935, except the regular political marches through neighborhoods, and and they weren't wanted and so forth. But in the meantime, the Nazi Party grew and grew in popularity. A lot of the German fellows, young fellows, that weren't really anti-Semitic or anti-anything, but they had nothing to do. They had no jobs, and here came around, gave them a beautiful pair of boots, gave them a nice shirt and pair of breeches, have a gun in your hip, you know, you can go out and shoot anybody. It's okay, you'll get away with it. Now that became very popular. End quote. He said that, you know, things were pretty calm until 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws came out. And I think I think it's really interesting that he says this because he says 32 to 35. Hitler came to power in 33 in January and, you know, passed the enabling law. There was a Reichstag fire, which of course they blamed on the communists, and a slew of laws and persecution started. Adler actually says at one point, he thinks the start of everything was the boycott in April 1st, 1933, where uh the Nazis were basically boycotting Jewish doors for a day. It didn't really work very well, but it was like he's he says he thinks it was the first time it was their attack on the Jewish economy at all. But I also find it interesting, many people that I talked to, read transcripts of say that uh German people say that they placed the beginning of the war and like when things got really bad in 1942, which of course was after the US was in the war, after um Germany had invaded Poland, and because that's when the ghettos started and the death camps opened en masse. So it's just it's interesting because he says that he points he puts it at 1933 in April.

Thad: 17:07

So we can see that the Nazis have a prejudice against the Jews right from the very start. But it's not it's not barefaced and horrible right at the beginning. It's it's small things. So they start off by by having it, like you said, this boycott. And then slowly ratchet things up over time.

Robyn: 17:31

Here's what you have to remember about German people in general is uh after World War One, going back to like, you know, 19, 18, 19, 19, there was a legend in Germany called the stab in the back legend. So basically, the generals that were fighting in the Eastern Front in World War One, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, they came back from the war and was just like, yeah, Germany was winning. We were stabbed in the back by the people that signed the treaty, which some of them were Jewish. So that was like the starting of blaming the Jews. Adler says everyone knew that Hitler was anti-Semitic because of Mein Kampf and the things he said, but no one ever thought he'd actually, you know, do something about that.

Thad: 18:18

Um, so everyone just thought, oh yeah, Hitler doesn't like the Jews, but I mean, you know, that's that's just the way it is. No big no big deal.

Robyn: 18:26

Right. You know, someone comes in power and doesn't like a specific group of people, you don't think, oh, they're gonna do anything about that. So it took everyone by surprise.

Thad: 18:36

Gotcha.

Robyn: 18:36

Even even knowing that he was anti-Semitic.

Thad: 18:39

Right.

Robyn: 18:40

So Adler says in 1935, so at this point he would have been about 25, the Nuremberg laws were passed. And he says, quote, September 15th, a new law came into being that a German family could not have a Gentile maid, and there were many Jewish families quite wealthy, too, and they had a maid and a live-in maid. They could not have a live-in maid at the age of under 55 for apparently obvious reasons. They also at this time took a law into effect that did not allow a Jewish person, male or female, to go with a gentile person, male or female. At that time I was going with a nice young lady I had gone out with for some time, and we were camping. I remember very well. I had a kayak, and we went out camping near Hamburg, and there was a fellow next to us, near us, in another little camp with a tent. We slept in tents. He wanted to make a date with this young lady that I was going with, and she didn't want any part of it. He reported me to the Gestapo, and I was arrested for going with a Gentile girl. I got six months in prison, solitary confinement in 1935. When I was released, I became known as a habitual criminal in the eyes of the Nazi Party. I was a habitual criminal. I never did anything criminal in my life. But as far as they're concerned, being doing something against the law was enough to make me a habitual criminal. So, you know, he so that happened.

Thad: 20:13

Do you have to be careful who you're dating? 1935.

Robyn: 20:16

1935. All right. Yeah, that'd have him checked out. Um but it it gets worse.

Thad: 20:22

It does.

Robyn: 20:22

It does. From six from six months of solitary confinement, uh, it's hard to beat that. Right. Um, but so three years later, three years, on June 14th, 1938, he was married at the time, had a baby, and his wife was pregnant again. And he says, quote, we had gone to a birthday party on June 14th. So some of so some friends of ours who had come home, must have been about midnight, somewhere around midnight, four o'clock in the morning. We had a banging on the door. And I thought those were our friends coming back to continue the celebration. I said, Come on, go on home. It's enough already. You know, four o'clock AM, I got work tomorrow. The knocking persisted. I opened the door and two plainclothes men with guns came into the room. You're under arrest. Under arrest? What for? I didn't do anything. No questions asked. They didn't push us around at that point. I was I got I got dressed and they took us to a police station in the neighborhood where we were. I got into a room perhaps as large as this one here. There must have been two or three hundred people in there, and we didn't know what was going on. What what are you here for? I don't know. I didn't do anything. We didn't know anything. Nothing. We had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. All we knew is we were under arrest. Around seven o'clock or six o'clock in the morning, they loaded us all into trucks and it took took us to a remote train station in a place called Fulsburg. It's a it's a name. It's a suburb of Hamburg. The trucks were supported by police. Well, the storm troop the stormtrooper cars, not really police cars. The private police had nothing to do with this. They had a car in front of the truck and a car in back of the truck, and one on each side with bloodhounds. To be facetious, they wanted us to make sure nobody got lost. You know what I mean? They took us to the train station and we were loaded. We were loaded into regular trains, not boxcars, as what would happen later. We were not in boxcars. We went in a regular train. And then, several hours of train ride, we didn't know where we were. We had no idea what was happening. And you can imagine some older people, I mean I was just a young fellow, but there were some older people started crying. What did what did we do? When we got to Berlin, they loaded us back on trucks again. No, no, no, that's not correct. We went to a town called Oranienburg, which is a suburb of Berlin. How far outside of Berlin, I do not know. The train stopped. They shoved us all out of the train, and we began to march towards the camp. We didn't know what was going to ha to be, we had no idea. Along the train ride, some, we had to run. There was no walking. One particular incident I recall, like it was yesterday. An old man with the name of Solomon. I'll never forget. He must have been well into his seventies. He simply couldn't run. He couldn't run. He had to walk. He couldn't run and he collapsed and he laid in the road. And one of the stormtroopers, a tall, young fellow, very slender, very tall, stepped on his throat. This is true. Unbelievable, but true. Till the man was dead. We had to pick up the body and throw him to the side of the road. And we continued on into the camp, where we assembled in a courtyard. And a strange incident happened at that time. We faced a barrack, a door on the right, a door on the left. People went in the left door, came out the right door, entirely different people. Their hair had been shaven off. They had on a prisoner's uniform, the very white striped uniform. My number was 6199. And a strange thing happened, as I mentioned before. My parents were separated. I hadn't seen my father. He was my stepfather, I must say, in perhaps eight or nine years, right after I was barmit barmit. My parents separated for a specific reason, and I hadn't seen him in all these years. And I met him, I saw him in that camp. It was it was hard to describe. My father was a very, very big man. He weighed 350 pounds. I introduced myself and he didn't recognize me, of course. We became a family again. While we were in the camp, I tried to take care of him as much as I could. There wasn't much that I could do at the time, but I just have to mention all this because it relates to a very traumatic experiences in my life. We worked ten hours a day, if I remember correctly. We slept on straw, on straw backs. It was it was just a stack filled with straw. I guess that's common, you know, under certain circumstances. Many people sleep that way. We worked ten hours a day on a field that was approximately a square kilometer, somewhere around that area. One area of this field was quite high. The other was quite low. The area that had to be leveled, and what was done was they had tracks running from one end to the other. On those tracks were mining cars. Now, in this country, a mining car is square. There's over is a mining car is a triangular shape, steel mining cars, and each train had about ten of those on it. On each one of those mining cars, stormtroopers stood, and we had to run from one end to the other, shoveling the mining car, filling it with dirt. If anyone would have told me at that time I can run 40 kilometers a day, I'd say, you're crazy. But I did, day after day after day, for 10 hours. The food was barely edible, and I remember one particular incident. It so happens, I hate broccoli, and they had broccoli soup for three days in a row. And for three days in a row, I didn't eat anything, just dry bread. The other prisoners gave me some of their bread. They ate the soup, I got bread. I just couldn't eat it because if I would have, I'd gotten sick. Psychological, certainly, but at that point, I'm entitled. I'm gonna stop here because I just I know I was talking about mining cars, you may have gotten lost some. The significance of this is that they were using his group of people to build the first death camp, which was Iranianburg outside of Berlin. So all this that he's talking about with the mining cars and running and how it's you know high on one side and low on the other, they did not know it at the time. But this was Jews being used as slave labor to build their own first concentration camp.

Thad: 27:28

Holy cow.

Robyn: 27:30

Yeah. And I mean, so yeah, eventually we'll we'll get to a podcast where we talk about a man who went in the middle of the night, escaped Ronienburg to go to a doctor who then fixed him up in the middle of the night. It's just interesting that you know you you hear that with the different stories, different people you interview.

Thad: 27:49

Right.

Robyn: 27:49

So that's what they were using him for. So I'm gonna continue. I just needed to explain that.

Thad: 27:56

Yeah.

Robyn: 27:56

Quote At one time they assembled us in a courtyard. They had machine gun towers all the way around, and they were shooting machine gun bullets over our head, maybe a foot over our head. And they said they made a a commander made a speech. They said that if Germany this this was the time Germany was taking over the Czechoslovakia, it was like 1938. They said that if Germany gets involved in the war, the machine guns will be lowered and we're and we're going to kill you all. We were hoping this wasn't gonna happen. Perhaps um perhaps many people recall a Christian pastor by the name of Niemoller. Niemoler had been arrested from the pulpit in a little church somewhere in Midwestern Germany because he simply did not believe the Nazi doctrine, and he was preaching openly against it, and he was arrested and put in camp. And it became like an international incident at the time. I met him in Sachenhausen. What they did to this man, one human being doing this to another, is beyond description. This man is perhaps he was in our camp perhaps six months, aged twenty-five years old. Perhaps I shouldn't say this, but they literally made him eat his own waste. But he lived through it because he had strong faith. I just mentioned this to convey what one human being can do to another. When you read this in a book, it's one thing. When you see it and it actually happens, it's quite another. I assure you. He was in concentration camps, including Sachenhausen and later Dachau, where in a future podcast I'll talk about how he used to meet with the commandant and well, the future commandant that he was, you know, a soldier, it's fine, but what they would meet and talk. They actually had high level Nazis come and try. To get Niemuler to change his mind. And he, if you go, I think, I mean, his quote's one of the most famous ones you see around, you know, they came for the communists, and then there was no one left when they came for me. That that's Pastor Niemuler. He spent the re the rest of his life talking about how he felt he felt bad that the the Germans hadn't done more when they saw what was happening, and and he himself had guilt for it. That he was in concentration camps from 1937 to 45. What made him what made him turn against the Nazis was when they started oppressing the Christians.

Thad: 30:37

Right. I mean, uh didn't he originally in the early 30s, and he supported he supported the Nazis, right?

Robyn: 30:44

So he thought he, like many Germans, thought that and good that Germany needed a strong leader.

Thad: 30:50

Right.

Robyn: 30:51

Because chaos had ensued in the twenties. I mean, you know, like we talked about politics were everywhere, the inflation, inflation was going crazy. It was also in Germany, kind of like in the United States, we had the Roaring Twenties flapper era, where people were just like, woo-hoo! Okay, well, that was kind of going on in Germany um too. If you've ever um seen cabaret, that uh it's it's that kind of setting.

Thad: 31:16

It was wild. And the the Nazis were a they they were they were the conservatives. You had you had the the Nazis that were the the right wing conservatives, you had the the communists that were the the left-wing liberals, and uh and uh you know looking at the political system in the area, Russia was was falling to the communists, and so you know it was kind of like well we can either we can either go back to go back to our traditions or you have to keep in mind they saw the whole Russian revolution happen, not not very many years before that.

Robyn: 31:48

I mean, it was in 1917, so you know, that was fresh in everyone's mind, and many people were just like, Oh my gosh, we do not want the communists come in here. Right. Um, you know, anything but that. Um and so they had that kind of mentality too. But also Germany, they were accustomed to a strong leader. There was ever since the concert of Europe in Vienna with Metternich in 1848, I won't bore you with that. But what came out was then Germany had a strong leader. Well, Kaiser Wilhelm II was a super special case, but you know, they they were under one leader, so they were accustomed to having, you know, they w they had a constitutional monarchy and they were accustomed to having a leader at the top, and so they thought Hitler would be a strong one.

Thad: 32:36

And he was.

Robyn: 32:37

Right. So I'm gonna talk some more about his time in the camp.

Thad: 32:41

All right.

Robyn: 32:42

Uh quote, while in the camp I had pneumonia. The commander used to come into the barracks and expect the sleeping sleeping quarters. Well, there were no living quarters. We only had beds in a barrack. Other than that, we stayed outside. There was nowhere that we could relax or assemble. No way. He used to hold his nose. Ugh, these juice stink. I can't stand it. This of course was all in German. One time we were assembled, and I always tried to make it my business to stay in the back row. We always had three or four rows of soldiers. I tried to stay in the back row, not to be conspicuous in any way. One time it it just didn't happen. I was standing on the front row, and as the guards walked by, they stopped in front of me. And I dreaded that because I knew this might happen. And he said to me, Why are you laughing? I was in no mood to laugh, I assure you. But as far as he was concerned, I laughed. He said, You're gonna hang. In two weeks from today, you're gonna hang. Hanging means, and this is continuing his quote, so this is him explaining it. Hanging means they tie your hands, your hands are tied behind your back, and they hang you to tie on a pole, a perfectly plain pole for 24 hours. After that, you can never use your arms again. This was supposed to be done sixteenth of September 1938. Now, I was released on the fifteenth of September. My father was released first, and I was released about two weeks afterwards. The release came about because at that time the Nazi government was satisfied if a Jewish person could leave the country, they let you go. They had no death camps at the time. So my wife had been very active trying to get me out. The first six weeks she didn't know where I was, if I was alive or anything, and of course she was pregnant and had a baby at this time. There was no communication, but she kept on working to get us out of Germany. She had family in this country in Providence, Rhode Island. The papers were all set and ready and everything, and she went and she got me released on the fifteenth of September, one day before I was supposed to hang. How I got from the camp back home, I don't really know. I don't even know what I had on or anything. All I know is that when I came home, she didn't recognize me from ten feet away. She was pushing a baby carriage down the street, but I was home. There were in many incidents that I really have to go back to recall, whether many people were shot during the day when we worked and worked among others I many times because you can't run much and they would they wouldn't let you walk. They whipped you. So I recall one time they got us out of bed at four o'clock in the morning with water hoses. The guys had a ball. They had a wonderful time. They got us all out with fire hoses and water, just for no reason at all. And then they wanted some fun, so they got us all out and standing in the yard, and after an hour or so we all had to get back and continue to sleep if we could on that wet straw. I will say that during the time when the Austrian guards were on duty, they had German guards and Austrian guards. When the Austrian guards were on duty, it was horrible. They were the most brutal of anyone you can imagine, but they did with us and we had no choice. Many people will say, Why didn't you fight back? I equate it with the situation in Ethiopia when Mussolini went into Ethiopia with tanks and they were shooting slingshots against the tanks. We were in the same position somewhat. How can you fight back? You had nothing. You had to take it. Fortunately, I was there for only three months. I know people who left whether from well they had no family left anywhere, or they could not get out. And some were all killed, of course. End quote. So that was his time um in a concentration camp, which was before the death camps, and and he was released. So I talked some in another episode about Kristallnacht, which was just a couple months after he was released in 1938. Which is when the Germans came in and well, a group of them that had been partying came and broke into a bunch of Jewish doors. It was the night of the broken glass.

Thad: 37:18

Oh, right. Yeah, we talked about that um a couple of episodes back on the the kinder transport.

Robyn: 37:24

Yes. And we read an account of uh a German guy who had lived through it.

Thad: 37:28

Right.

Robyn: 37:29

But so this is this is Adler though. We're we're back to Adler. Back to Adler. He says, quote, when I came out of the concentration camp, I had to report to the Gestapo ten o'clock every morning, except Sundays. You had to go downtown, report every morning at ten o'clock, a sort of sign in ceremony. They wanted to be sure I was still all right, that I wasn't sick, you know. They wanted to take good care of me. Kristonloft happened November ninth. November tenth in the morning we stayed at my mother's, and my wife said, I'll go downtown with you. We went downtown, we got on a streetcar. There was all kinds of commotion. What was going on we didn't know. We hadn't no radio or put it on or anything. There was no television in those days. Didn't put a radio, didn't know, and everybody was whispering and pointing. We didn't have any idea. We got downtown, and there were a million people. The city of Hamburg had three million people. It was a very large city. And in the finest stores, the finest Jewish stores, the windows were smashed, and the mannequins were laying in the street, people were burning books, dancing around it. We had no idea what was going on. I turned up my collar, I'll never forget, and put my head down and said, God, somebody should recognize me. I'll be torn to pieces. We went to the Gestapo building and there were lots of people loitering outside on the first floor. I said to my to my wife, I'll tell you what, run upstairs and see what's going on. We had no idea. She ran upstairs. I don't think she ever ran as fast, a flight of stairs so fast in her entire life. She came down, she says, and I was hiding, incidentally, in a building, in the basement of a building across the street. She came over and she said, They're all going to be arrested again. This was November 10th, 1938. She said, You have to get out of here. How can I get out of here? We're not ready. I don't have we went back. Um, no, we went to the Holland, America line, where we already had made res remade reservations to come to this country, America, because my wife took care of all of that while I was still in the camp. But we didn't have the money to pay for tickets anymore because it was all confiscated. My father-in-law, who was well established in business, they had nothing left. Everything had been taken away. And at that time, they'd already been in this country and we had nowhere to go. My wife called a very famous banker with the name of Wahlberg, W-A-L-B-E-R-G. He was a very famous banker in Germany. He called Holland America Line. He guaranteed payments for the tickets on November 10, 1938. I took my wife back home to my mother's and at three o'clock in the afternoon I got on the train. I left for Holland. My wife had a sister and brother that lived in Holland at that time. She was married to a Dutch fellow, and they moved to Holland probably three or four years before. I don't know exactly when. My wife my wife could verify the date. The train where I was on, this is kind of interesting, the train that I was on stopped in the city and at the last German station. It stopped for five minutes. They changed train personnel. The Dutch person now would come on and then we would go further into Holland. And as we were riding along, customs came. They came into my car, and every everyone there had their own room, which I think seated about six people. But it's not the way it is in America. It's one long train. The customs came in and they asked me for my passport. I showed him the passport, and I must say that on the German passport, the fort first page has a big, great big J on it, a red J, so that anyone who opens up your passport knows instantly that you are Jewish. He looked at it, there was no problem. Where are you going? I said, I'm going to Amsterdam. No problem. Okay. He gave me back my passport and I was very relieved. I had, you know, really didn't expect it to be that easy. Well, a few minutes later, I went walking through the train towards the dining car. I wanted to get a cup of coffee or something, and there came a black uniformed SS. Where are you going? I'm just going to get a cup of coffee or some tea or something. Go back to your car. So you have no choice. You have to go back. And mine was a young American couple. I know it was an American couple by the passports. They came and they asked this young couple for the passports. He says, Americans? The fellow says, Yes. We're on our honeymoon. Okay, and give them back their passports. He came to me. Passport, please. I showed him. He says, Oh, you're a Jew. You're running away. Where do you come from? I said, I come from Hamburg. He said, You're running away. You didn't report to the Gestapo this morning. Get off. I said, I'm not gonna get off. If they kill me, they kill me, but I'm not gonna get off. The train stopped and one minute was like an eternity. A minute went by. Two minutes went by. No, those watches. I had a watch, you know, in my vest pocket, those days long ago that ticked. A minute went by. Two minutes went by. Three minutes. It's endless. When you wait for one minute to go by, it's an awful long time. This the train started rolling to a stop. I was not out. They came back and I thought, I'm all set. But they opened the window and they threw me out the window, out onto the platform of the train. They held me. I was searched. I mean totally searched. Nude searched. They said, something's wrong here. You didn't report to the Gestapo this morning. You're running away from something. We're calling Hamburg. Whether they did or not, I don't know. At midnight they let me out and I was allowed to go to another train that went to Amsterdam. I stayed in Amsterdam and waited for my wife. She was not allowed to come. The American consul wouldn't give her the visa at that time because she had just had a baby and she had veins in her legs that were very prominent, and he wanted to wait till that cleared up. And then he gave her her passport. I waited in Holland for six weeks until we came to America. End quote. So Adler came to America and really he didn't leave at all to go back to Germany in 1938. So he wasn't there for the con concentration camps to get us. He was already here. But he did go back. Years later, some organization was having the Jews come back, the Jewish people who had been persecuted during the war. And so he hadn't returned. His mother had been shot and killed by the Nazis in Treblinka. And his sister, who was married with two children, was killed by the Allied bomb planes. They found her body the next morning with her husband and her young son. That was a quote from him. He uh we will talk in another podcast about the bombings, the Allied bombings over Dresden and Berlin and Hamburg. But that's what happened to his family that stayed in Germany. But he went back many years later and he said that, quote, the lady in charge was a very, very nice lady. You could really see that she felt what we went through. And that, I mean, the city of Ham Hamburg had at one time, I don't know, I think 60,000 Jews or something like that. It was a big city, three million people. We had 60,000 Jews. There was nothing left. And all the big stores that used to be owned by Jewish people are now have now been taken over by the Nazi Party in those days, and eventually probably went through generations of their father and grandfather and now they own it or whatever. And this lady felt sorry for us. I asked her, what's the purpose of inviting us? Do you expect anyone that to change his mind and come back and live here after living in America for fifty years? She said no, no, that's not really the purpose. It is perhaps to ease our conscience a bit. That was her statement. We stayed there for, I think, ten days. It was really nice, very nice. The city of Hamburg is a beautiful city. It was seventy-five percent destroyed by the Allies, and after the war, through the Marshall Plan, naturally American money, we built it up again into a beautiful city. It really is a beautiful city. End quote. So that was Adler's experience going back to Germany years later. As I said, I was reading this in an interview from the Holocaust Museum. So he gave his whole story, told everything, and the interviewer had a follow-up question. Well, she had several, but I would just I'd like to read to you um the follow-up question that she asked in his response. She asked him, yeah, so how did the Jewish people not realize this was happening? He said, Well, I was among them. When Hitler was party number 26, and we all said, ah, he's never going to amount to anything. It's a great big joke. Doesn't mean anything. What we did not realize, I don't think many of the German people didn't realize, that that's not the right phrase really. We're all German. I was German at that time. What many people didn't realize, let's just generalize it, is that they had the backing of the most powerful people in Germany. He had the backing, what how he sold them, I have no idea. I think maybe the background was money or power, perhaps more than anything else, power, and they financed his whole campaign. But there was friction as well. The so called aristocratic Germans, they were not in favor of Hitler. And to prove a point, they made attempts to kill him after he was the big man, and they all got killed in the process. But he had the backing of the big industrialists. They were very much in favor of him, and power and conquest of other countries. As far as the Jews were concerned, they said, Well, maybe it's not so wrong after all, because there was no killing at the point. When I left, we all knew from the book Meinkampf that he was extremely anti Semitic, but we never thought, nobody thought in his wildest dreams, that you can really imagine that anything could come to such extremes. Nobody can imagine. I don't believe that anyone in the world can visualize six million people assembled in one place. And he killed six million people. Six million It's an incredible figure. Along with five million non-Jews, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, or anyone who didn't believe his philosophy. Life meant nothing. It's the most expendable thing in the world. Life is the cheapest thing you can get. Nobody paid much attention to it at that time. Nobody. You can't in your wildest dreams imagine that anything could go to such extremes. And actually, the extreme started in 1940 at the Von Sea conference in Berlin, outside of Berlin, where Reinhardt Heydrich was appointed to be in charge of the quote unquote final solution. Of course, Reinhard Heydrich was killed in Ledisky, Czechoslovakia. He was assassinated, and as a result of the assassination in Ledisky, Czechoslovakia, the whole town was obliterated. Today every living thing, totally, every living thing, every man, woman, and child was killed in that town in revenge for Reinhard Heydrich's death. When Heydrich was killed out, Eichmann took over the final solution. At that time, of course, I was already in this country. End quote. So the only the only other thing that Adler, well, Adler has a lot of other things to say that we'll get to in other podcasts, I'm sure. But one of the things that he talks about that many of the other transcripts, um, many of the other things I've read, watched, talk about is being Jewish, being Jewish as a religion versus being Jewish as a nationality. And I would say a majority of Jewish people in Germany saw themselves as Germans first. So it was like, yes, they went to a Jewish school, yes, they went to a synagogue, but but they saw themselves as Germans. And that's part of the reason why it was so hard for them to accept that, you know, they were getting all of this backlash. Everyone hated the Jews because they they felt German. And and he talks about that a lot, but it's it's just something to keep I mean, that I think is interesting and to keep in mind when you're looking at what was going on in Germany at the time.

Thad: 51:18

They didn't see themselves as a completely different people. They saw themselves as just being one of the one of the folk.

Robyn: 51:24

I exactly. And you read a lot of the stories, um, the Hitler Youth, which I'm sure we'll get to. There were a lot of Jewish kids that wanted to join the Hitler Youth because their friends were in it. That kind of kind of like Adler, you know, he joined the because yeah, he didn't care it was a Jew.

Thad: 51:45

It's the end thing, right?

Robyn: 51:46

And you know, there's one point where Adler's like, yeah, I went home to my mom and told her that I joined the army, and she was like, What are you thinking? And he was just like, Yeah, well, my friends did it. Of course. And of course, he was a teenager, like 20 at that time. Um, but but yeah, most of them saw themselves just very much ingrained with regular culture. They a lot of them went to regular schools, um, you know, what would essentially be public schools before Hitler came to power. So it it really was shocking for a lot of them that they would be taken out and discriminated against so much. Um Adler even talks about his uh he did uh like a genealogy thing through the Red Cross at some point, and you know, he was like, Yeah, my family went back in Germany at least 200 years. It's like we're Germans, we're not Jews, we're Germans, which just made it so much more messy, very messy and complicated.

Thad: 52:47

That's it's an amazing story.

Robyn: 52:50

I think I think it's very interesting, and I think when we look at any time in history, I mean, for me, it's like obviously this time because I literally spent years of my life studying modern German history. But, you know, you could talk about you could spend hours just talking about one of the acts, the enabling act, or the Reichstag fire, or anything, you know, that happened in Germany. You could spend hours on that one thing. But the way to really feel and understand what was going on is to, you know, take a person like Adler and look at his life, see what actually went on with him, instead of you know, just going through, I could go with you through with you all through all the laws and all the everything that happened structurally in Germany, you know. It's kind of like when you learn all the Civil War battles and names or something. You know, you learn all of the upper level stuff. I can go over all of that with you, but you don't, people I think, don't really understand until you're able to walk in another person's shoes and and see where they're coming from. So, you know, that's I think that's the best way to approach really history in general is by looking at the person.