Georg Iggers in Osnabrück, 2006
“What was it like to emigrate? Well, my parents didn’t think about leaving Germany at the beginning. After all, Germany was their home. (They had) grown up in Germany. Their language was German. And they still thought that this was temporary, that this was somehow not typical for Germany. And then came March 1936. In March 1936, German troops moved into the Rhineland. The Rhineland was supposed to be demilitarized under the Versailles provisions. And the French looked at that and did nothing. So apparently the generals were against the invasion of the Rhineland because they were afraid that the French would intervene and that the Germans would be outgunned, but Hitler did (do it). And Hitler was successful. The world watched as the Treaty of Versailles was broken. That’s when my parents realized that the Nazis were not going to have a transitional government, they were going to stay in power. And (they) then tried to emigrate. And they couldn’t. So no country wanted to take refugees from Germany and there was nowhere to go. And it was a big miracle that we got a visa to America in 1938. That was actually a coincidence, so quite desperately my father went to America for two weeks in March 1938. He didn’t know anyone in America, and then he called all the people in the New York telephone directory, in the Manhattan telephone directory, who had our family name, and then he discovered someone who was a very distant relative, a very wealthy lawyer on Wall Street, and he invited my father to his house and very generously offered us guarantees, so-called “affidavits”. My father went back to Germany, and six months later, on October 5, 1938, we got the visa, and left Germany on October 7. There was still some harassment at the border, but we went to England via Holland. In Bentheim we were taken off the train and interrogated and harassed, so my eight-year-old sister had a doll, and they tore the doll’s head off to see if there was any money hidden in it, and that was our last memory of Germany. But we survived, we were in no danger of our lives, and then of course we were completely surprised when 5 weeks later there was the so-called “Kristallnacht”. Between November 9 and 10, Jewish synagogues were destroyed, Jewish stores were looted, and almost all men between the ages of 16 and 60 were sent to concentration camps. Then the Holocaust began…”