Georg Iggers tells students at Graf-Stauffenberg-Gymnasium in Osnabrück, 2005.
“So I was in New Jersey for just three weeks, three months in New Jersey in a school, and they were trying to teach me about American democracy. Then I came to Richmond and was terribly shocked. So we almost didn’t experience the aftermath, but we did experience apartheid in Nazi Germany, and there I saw a very similar apartheid that didn’t affect me, but it affected the black population. So everything was segregated. Schools, parks, I can remember in Germany, so blacks weren’t allowed in the parks, they weren’t allowed in the movie theaters, they weren’t allowed in the restaurants, and so on. There were black hospitals that were in very bad condition, the mortality rate of blacks was higher, in the newspaper blacks were identified as “colored,” kind of like in Germany you were identified as a Jew or a … identified. Blacks were not addressed as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” but by their first names. And on the public toilets it said “white gentlemen,” “white ladies,” “black men,” “black women.” I was very shocked by that. Then I came to school, and in every classroom there was a photograph of Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee was the top general of the Southern states in the Civil War. And I told people, I resented that, it reminded me of Germany, there was a picture of Hitler in every classroom. So that was the South. "