From July 6 to 15, 1938, delegates from 32 countries and dozens of humanitarian organizations gathered for a conference in the expensive spa town of Evian on the French shore of Lake Geneva. The idea was to address the issue of how to deal with the half a million Jews being persecuted in the Third Reich.
This was five and a half years after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and three and a half months after the occupation of Austria. The Nazi regime had not yet begun its systematic process of mass murder – but by 1935 the situation of the Jewish people had been steadily deteriorating.
The racist Nuremberg Laws, which were enacted in 1935 and stripped Jews of German citizenship, were internationally famous – as was the fact that Jews were excluded from schools, universities, and public life, and those who wanted to leave what was now “Greater Germany” had to give up a large portion of their property.
In early 1933, shortly after the Nazis seized power, the League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations, appointed American citizen James MacDonald to chair the High Commission for Refugees from Germany. Frustrated by the reluctance of world governments to take the problem seriously, he resigned in 1935.
flee only after looting
Initially, Adolf Hitler and his government actively encouraged Jews to leave the country – by the time of the Evian Conference, approximately 200,000 people had already left Germany. However, the Nazis imposed increasingly stringent financial and administrative restrictions: almost all property, real estate and savings of Jewish people were confiscated before they could leave the country – and they had to present a visa or travel ticket to leave.
The Nazis’ goal was clear: they wanted the Jews to leave Germany completely destitute. This was not only because the regime profited from the looting of Jewish property, but also because poor immigrants would be considered a major burden in the countries they moved to, which was intended to further increase resentment toward refugees.
Roosevelt’s initiative
The Avian Initiative came from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The idea was to encourage states participating in the conference to welcome refugees from Germany and Austria in accordance with the size of their populations. There was no intention to force states to change their immigration quotas or to spend more money on refugees.
Even before the delegates arrived at the luxurious hotel where the conference was to take place, the US and the United Kingdom had already reached an agreement: Washington promised not to mention the British Mandate of Palestine as a possible place of refuge for Jewish refugees, and London in return promised not to address the fact that the US was not filling its immigration quotas.
Sympathy for Jewish refugees and an excuse for not taking them in
The meeting was not attended by heads of state, but rather by lower level diplomats. One by one, they stood up to express their deepest sympathies – followed by excuses as to why they couldn’t help. European democracies justified themselves by citing high unemployment and economic crisis and claiming that they had no need for professors, artists, doctors, or businessmen.
Canada announced that it was ready to accept only experienced farmers who had their own capital. The Australian representative, Thomas White, said: “Since we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing any racial problem by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign immigration.” France said it had already reached “the tipping point of saturation” with regard to refugees. The Netherlands and Switzerland wanted to issue only transit visas. Other countries such as Romania and Poland also asked Western countries to accept their Jewish populations.
Some Latin American countries, including Mexico and Colombia, have committed to accepting several hundred thousand Jewish refugees per year in the coming years. The Dominican Republic offered to accept 100,000 Jews – but due to bureaucratic problems and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, only a few hundred Jewish people actually reached the Caribbean nation.
Golda Meir: ‘A terrible experience’
The Evian Conference ended with the creation of a completely powerless body, the Intergovernmental Refugee Committee (IGC). Golda Meir, future Prime Minister of Israel, visited Evian as an observer in 1938.
In his memoirs in 1975, he wrote: “To sit in that magnificent hall and listen to representatives of 32 countries telling one by one how much they would have loved to take in large numbers of refugees and how unfortunate it was that they were not able to do so was a terrible experience […]”
While the media in Nazi Germany celebrated, the press in democratic countries reported on the conference with a mixture of sympathy and shame. American magazine Time “All the countries present expressed sympathy for the refugees but few offered to allow them within 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 surrounding our consulates in Vienna and other cities, waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian. But the question they underline is not merely a humanitarian one. The question is not how many more unemployed this country can safely add to its millions of unemployed. It is a test of civilization.”
a nod to berlin
The Avian fiasco sent a clear signal to the Nazi regime: No one in the world cares about the fate of the Jews, and the democratic world will not lift a finger to protect them.
Jochen Thies, author of the 2017 German publication “Evian 1938”, whose subtitle translates as “When the world betrayed the Jews”, said that “the British, with their vast empire, would have to offer a very large, let’s say 120,000 to 150,000… people, spread around. Then the Americans, then Roosevelt, would have There would be an excuse to convince the public that they would have to comply and, proportionately, say 200,000, and then they could win over some South Americans.”
Just four months after the Evian Conference, the Nazi regime conducted what became known as the November Pogroms in Germany and Austria. The following year, Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II.
In the years that followed, some Jewish people in Nazi-controlled areas were able to escape Nazi terror due to individuals willing to break the rules.
For example, Ho Feng Shan, China’s Consul General in Vienna, issued thousands of visas for the Chinese port of Shanghai – where there were no passport controls. Some other diplomats from Latin American countries also did the same.
But millions of Jews were deported to concentration camps or mass murdered.
This article was originally published in Serbian.