Jerry Springer’s family fled Nazi terror that killed 27 family members

Jerry Springer is known for hosting the outrageous Jerry Springer Show, famous for brawling guests with wild personal lives.

But his background is far more tragic than the crazy antics his eponymous show provided.

The TV host spent his early years in London amid the Blitz after his Jewish parents fled persecution in Germany.

Springer was born at Highgate station when his parents Richard and Margot were taking shelter from falling bombs.

The couple, a bank clerk and a shoe shop owner had moved to East Finchley in North London in 1939.

READ MORE: Who is Jerry Springer’s ex wife? She stood by host throughout sex worker scandal

Four years later in 1943, while crowding on the Highgate underground station platform, Margot gave birth to her son Gerald Norman Springer.

Springer was born on February 13th, 1944. He described his birth as a “little bit out of the ordinary” in 2012.

The TV host discussed his early days in England, where he lived with his parents until he was four.

He lived on Belvedere Court in East Finchley, North London. Springer told the BBC he remembered “looking out my window every day because I was obsessed with buses’.

“Back then… the two buses that came right in front of our houses – the double-decker buses – were the 58 and the 102.”

At the age of four Springer moved to Queen’s New York with his family, his parents, and an older sister.

Belvedere Court, at the time Springer lived there, was mostly let to Jewish families feeling from the Navis and from German occupation in various countries.

Springer’s family had been devastated by the Nazi movement of the 1940s. Twenty-seven of Springer’s relatives died in the Holocaust. His maternal grandmother died in the gas vans at Chełmno extermination camp.

His paternal grandfather died in a hospital in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.