In his relationships with other people, including us children, he seemed very inhibited. He felt himself to be a Jew, but did not want to stand out as such in any way. He had a certain idea of bourgeois respectability and wanted to prove himself as a capable and successful merchant. During the first years of his self-employment, 1925 to 1929, he did reasonably well, but never again after that. Apparently he lost a lot of money on the stock market. In 1962, his Hamburg restitution lawyer showed me his tax returns from 1929 to 1933, which showed that he had not been able to support himself and the family and had been dependent on support, very likely from his brother-in-law Ernst Minden. After 1933, due to the economic upswing under Hitler, he was paradoxically somewhat better off again until shortly before his emigration in 1938.
His hope of becoming self-employed again in America proved illusory. Two thousand dollars, which he had managed to get out of Germany illegally, were quickly used up, and Ernst’s efforts to find him a commercial position came to nothing. The beginning in America, which he described in letters to his childhood friend Adolf Mayer-Sommer in Zurich, which the latter made available to us after my father’s death, was very difficult and also humiliating. For five years he had a very poorly paid subordinate job as an accountant in Richmond, which again forced him to accept support. In many ways it was fortunate that he lost this job in 1944 and was hired by a German Jewish firm in New York as a traveling salesman. This position gave him more freedom and income, but was extremely punishing, as he had to travel all over the American Southeast by bus with heavy suitcases and was often absent from home for months at a time. Although we invited him to move to Buffalo after all, after my mother’s death in 1968, he insisted on continuing to work. It was not until he was 79 that he accepted our invitation. He never visited Germany again during his lifetime, and he also declined our suggestion to visit us in Göttingen.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 54f (translation)