Georg Iggers in front of students at Graf-Stauffenberg-Gymnasiums Osnabrück, 2005
“I would like to distinguish two periods. So a turning point was the so-called Kristallnacht, the November pogrom. Until Kristallnacht, until the November pogrom, the Nazi policy was to make life so difficult for the Jews, the German Jews, because Jews in Germany were Germans, were culturally Germans, and so on, was to make life so difficult for the Jews that they would leave Germany. But the problem was that they had nowhere to go. After Kristallnacht it became more and more difficult, and after 1941 emigration was forbidden. So Jews were no longer allowed to emigrate, and they were no longer allowed to emigrate because the Nazis wanted to kill them. And then the mass murders started. The deportations to the concentration camps, so that’s something we didn’t participate in. But there was nowhere to go. It was a great miracle that we were able to go to America, and about 25,000 German and Austrian Jews went to Shanghai.”