In recent years, the number of Jews in New York applying for German citizenship has nearly doubled, according to a Deutsche Welle report.
That includes Ruth Gruenthal, who fled Nazi persecution in her teens and rebuilt her life in the United States.
The 103-year-old told the German publication that U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election “evoked feelings that I thought I would never in my lifetime have to deal with again.”
The German consulate in New York City recorded 666 restorations of naturalizations of Jews, whose citizenship the Nazis stripped, in 2025, of 1,771 such applications, the publication reported.
Germany allows victims of the Holocaust and their descendants to reclaim their citizenship.
Gruenthal was born in 1922 in Hamburg. She was imprisoned in France and then escaped to the United States, where she became a psychotherapist and raised a family that spans four generations.
She told the publication that she considers herself “foreign-born, but American.”
“Unless you’re Jewish, it’s hard to appreciate that you’re walking around with a feeling that your right to walk the earth could be questioned,” she said, which “is certainly being revived right now.”
Her family and the larger Jewish community in Hamburg were assimilated into German culture before the war. “My father was an officer in World War I,” she said.
She thanks his bravery on the battlefield for her family being allowed to live in an area normally prohibited for Jews.
Her father was shocked to learn that many of his presumed friends turned out to be Nazis after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, she told the publication.
The Jewish community in Hamburg was “almost in equal footing” to non-Jews, Gruenthal said.
In 1939, Gruenthal’s father sent her and her sister Miriam to a boarding school in France. When the Nazis invaded France the following year, she was arrested.
She was transported to the French internment camp, Gurs, in southwestern France, some 50 miles from the border with Spain.
“The circumstances were pretty terrible,” she said. “Gurs especially was built on clay ground, so every time it rained it turned into a complete morass,” and “there was no food coming in.”
Inmates who could afford discharge papers were given the opportunity to leave. Her father picked her up with her sister, and the two siblings fled into Spain. The girls continued their journey to Lisbon, Portugal, and from there boarded a vessel sailing to the United States with the help of their father’s friends.
Boarding the luxurious ship was like “getting into a different reality,” Gruenthal told the German publication.
