From July 6 to 15, 1938, representatives from 32 countries and dozens of humanitarian organizations gathered for a conference in the upscale spa town of Evian on the French side of Lake Geneva. Their goal: to find a way out for approximately half a million Jews from the Third Reich.
This was five and a half years after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and three and a half months after the annexation of Austria. The Nazi regime had not yet begun the systematic process of mass murderย โ but the situation for Jews had been steadily deteriorating since 1935.
The racist Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their German citizenship, were internationally known โ as was the fact that Jews had been excluded from schools, universities, and public life, as well as the fact that Jews who wanted to leave the now “Greater Germany” had to leave their property behind.
As early as 1933, shortly after the Nazis seized power, the League of Nations โ the precursor to the United Nations โ appointed the American James McDonald as High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany. He resigned in 1935, despairing at the unwillingness of the world’s governments to take the problem seriously.
Emigration only after plunder
As early as 1933, shortly after the Nazis seized power, the League of Nations โ the precursor to the United Nations โ appointed the American James McDonald as High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany. He resigned in 1935, despairing at the unwillingness of the world’s governments to take the problem seriously.
Initially, under Adolf Hitler, Berlin actively encouraged Jews to leave the country โ at the time of the Evian Conference, approximately 200,000 had left Germany. However, the Nazis imposed increasingly stringent financial and administrative restrictions: Jewish people had almost all of their property, real estate, and savings confiscated before they left the country โ and they had to present a visa or travel ticket to leave.
The Nazis’ goal was clear: Jews should leave Germany completely destitute. This was not only because the regime profited from the plunder of Jewish property, but also because poor emigrants would be a greater burden for the receiving country, which was intended to further fuel resentment towards the refugees.
Roosevelt’s initiative
The Evian initiative came from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His goal was to combine refugees from Germany and Austriaย into a legal, controlled flow of emigration โ and to encourage participating countries to accept refugees according to their population size. No country would be obligated to change its immigration quotas, and no government funds would be spent on financing refugees.
But even before the delegates arrived at the luxurious hotel, Washington and London had already reached an agreement: the US had promised not to mention the British Mandate of Palestine as a possible place of refuge. And the United Kingdom, in return, promised not to address unused US immigration quotas.
Sympathy and excuses
The meeting was attended not by heads of state, but by lower-ranking diplomats. One after another, the representatives of the countries rose to express their deep sympathy โ followed by excuses as to why they could not help. The Western European democracies justified themselves by citing high unemployment and the economic crisis, claiming they had no need for professors, artists, doctorsย or tradespeople.
Canada declared that it was only prepared to accept experienced farmers with their own capital. The Australian delegate, Thomas White, said: “Since we don’t have a real race problem, we are not prepared to import one.” France stated that it was already “saturated” with refugees. The Netherlands and Switzerland only wanted to issue transit visas. Some other countries, such as Romania and Poland, even asked Western countries to accept their Jewish populations.
Only a few Latin American countries, Mexico and Colombia among them, committed to accepting several hundred Jews annually over the next few years. The Dominican Republic offered to accept up to 100,000 Jews โ but due to bureaucratic problems and the outbreak of World War IIย in September 1939, only a few hundred Jewish people reached the Caribbean nation.
‘A terrible experience’
The Evian Conference ended with the creation of the Intergovernmental Refugee Committee (IGC), a completely powerless body. Golda Meir, the future Prime Minister of Israel, attended Evian as an observer in 1938.
In her memoirs in 1975, she wrote: “Sitting there in that magnificent hall and listening to the delegates of 32 countries rise, each in turn, to explain how much they would have liked to take in substantial numbers of refugees and how unfortunate it was that they were not able to do so, was a terrible experience […].”
While the media in the German Reich rejoiced, the press in democratic countries reported with a mixture of sympathy and shame. The US magazine Time noted: “All the nations present showed sympathy for the refugees, but few offered to let them into their borders.”
On July 10, 1938, the correspondent for the New York Times wrote: “It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings docking around our consulates in Vienna and other cities, waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian. But the question they underline is not simply humanitarian. It is not a question of how many more unemployed this country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of civilization.”
A signal for Berlin
Historically, the Evian fiasco sent a clear signal to the Nazi regime: no one in the world cares about the fate of the Jews,ย and the democratic world will not lift a finger to protect them.
Jochen Thies, author of the 2017 book “Evian 1938: When the World Betrayed the Jews,” says: “The British, with their vast empire, would have had to make a very large offer, let’s say 120,000 to 150,000 out of 500,000 people to be distributed. Then the Americans, then Roosevelt, would have had a pretext to convince his public that they had to follow suit and, proportionally, say 200,000, and then they could have won over some of the South Americans.”
Just four months after the Evian Conference, the Nazi regime orchestrated the November Pogroms in Germany and Austria. A year later, the Third Reich attacked Poland, thus triggering World War II.
In the years that followed, the fate of Jews in Nazi-controlled territories largely depended on individuals willing to break the rules.
Ho Feng Shan, China’s Consul-General in Vienna, began issuing thousands of visas for Shanghai โ a port that at the time had no passport control. Some other diplomats from Latin American countries did the same. These visas saved Jews fromย Nazi horrors โ before the only path led to one of the many concentration camps.
This article was originally published in Serbian.