The Bermuda Conference

On 19 April 1943 an Anglo-American conference on refugees opened in Hamilton, the capital of the British colony of Bermuda. It had been called under pressure from public opinion after the December declaration by the United Nations, which had officially confirmed that Germany was murdering the Jews of Europe. Yet the conference included neither representatives of the victims nor ministers able to take decisions, and both governments had excluded from the talks in advance almost everything that might have saved anyone. The deliberations lasted until the end of April: depending on the source, the last sessions are dated to 28 or 29 April and the close of the conference to 30 April. Their only lasting result was the revival of a committee set up five years earlier at Évian.

The conference began on the same day that the Germans entered the Warsaw Ghetto to deport its last inhabitants and Jewish fighters took up arms. That same evening in Belgium three young men stopped a train carrying Jews from Mechelen to Auschwitz. This coincidence of dates made Bermuda, in later memory, a symbol of Allied inaction in the face of the Holocaust.

The pressure of public opinion

The declaration read out in the House of Commons by Anthony Eden on 17 December 1942 promised to punish those responsible but said nothing about rescuing those still alive. In Britain it was above all clergy and some members of parliament who demanded this. On 23 March 1943 the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, called on the government in the House of Lords to act immediately, saying that the British stood at the bar of history. The MP Eleanor Rathbone and the publisher Victor Gollancz campaigned for the admission of refugees, and in March the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror was founded.

In the United States, on 1 March 1943, the American Jewish Congress and other organisations brought tens of thousands of people to Madison Square Garden in New York for a rally under the slogan “Stop Hitler Now”. A week later Ben Hecht’s pageant We Will Never Die, prepared by the group of Hillel Kook, who worked under the name Peter Bergson, was staged in the same hall. Jewish organisations demanded negotiations with Germany and its satellites through neutral states, the opening of borders, the dispatch of food to the ghettos and camps, and the opening of Palestine.

It was precisely such demands, however, that the two governments feared. On 20 January 1943 the Foreign Office proposed to Washington a joint examination of the refugee problem, deliberately framing it broadly as a matter concerning all victims of the war rather than primarily the Jews. The State Department under Cordell Hull, where visa matters were handled by an Assistant Secretary of State hostile to immigration, Breckinridge Long, agreed to talks but was in no hurry to hold them. After other venues, including Ottawa, had been considered, Bermuda was chosen: remote, subject to wartime travel restrictions and with limited access for the press. Historians, particularly David Wyman, consider that the choice of venue was no accident.

The attitude of both governments is well captured by a conversation at the White House on 27 March 1943, during Eden’s visit to Washington. According to a note by Harry Hopkins, when Hull raised the question of the 60,000–70,000 Jews under threat in Bulgaria, Eden replied that the whole problem of the Jews in Europe was very difficult and that one should move cautiously on any proposal to take all the Jews out of a country such as Bulgaria. In his view the Jews of the world would then demand similar offers for Poland and Germany, and “Hitler might well take us up on any such offer”, while there were not enough ships in the world to transport them.

The delegations and the scope of the talks

Both delegations were made up of second-rank politicians. The British were led by Richard Law, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, accompanied by the Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Osbert Peake, and the Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, George Hall. The American delegation was headed by the president of Princeton University, Harold W. Dodds; its members included Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois and Congressman Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, himself a Jew whom Jewish organisations regarded as loyal to the administration. The delegation’s secretary was a State Department official, Robert Borden Reams, who opposed rescue plans. The talks were held behind closed doors at the Horizons hotel. Jewish organisations were not admitted; they could only submit memoranda.

The scope of the talks was narrowed even before they began. The State Department stipulated that the problem must not be treated as an exclusively Jewish one, that the United States would not change its statutory immigration quotas, would not provide ships to carry refugees across the Atlantic and would not commit itself to financing relief. The British excluded from the discussion Palestine, where Jewish immigration was restricted by the British White Paper of May 1939, rejected any negotiations with Germany for the release of Jews, and refused to allow food to be sent to occupied Europe through the blockade. Both sides repeated that the best way to help the victims was the speediest possible victory, and that nothing must delay the war effort or take up tonnage needed by the armed forces.

Many of these restrictions concerned matters in which there was room for manoeuvre. During the war only a small part of the American immigration quotas for the countries of occupied Europe was used, because the State Department kept multiplying visa requirements. Ships still sailed from Lisbon to America, and neutral vessels could take refugees from Spain and Portugal. In February 1943 the press reported Romanian soundings about releasing tens of thousands of Jews from Transnistria, and Bulgaria, which in March had handed over to the Germans the Jews of occupied Thrace and Macedonia, halted the deportation of the Jews of Bulgaria proper. The delegates nevertheless judged the proposals of the Jewish organisations to be impracticable in wartime.

It is often said that the fate of Europe’s Jews was discussed in Bermuda by the “leaders” of Britain and the United States. In reality neither Winston Churchill nor Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor their foreign ministers took part in the conference, and in official documents the delegates tried to avoid the word “Jews”, speaking instead of “political refugees” and “victims of persecution”.

Results

The conference’s findings were set out in a confidential report adopted at the end of April. The final communiqué stated only that the delegates had agreed on a number of concrete recommendations whose content could not be disclosed because of the war. The recommendations were modest. They provided for the evacuation of some of the refugees who had reached Spain (about 5,000 were mentioned) to a camp in North Africa, to make room in Spain for others. They proposed a joint declaration on the return of refugees to their countries after the war, the use of neutral shipping and a search for places of refuge in neutral countries. The most important decision was to revive and broaden the mandate of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, set up in 1938 at the Évian Conference, which had been virtually inactive since the outbreak of war.

Even these recommendations were implemented slowly. The committee met again in London in August 1943. The camp for refugees from Spain at Fedala (today Mohammedia) near Casablanca was opened only in May 1944; according to Wyman, about 630 people were sent there. The Yad Vashem encyclopaedia concludes that the conference’s only positive decision came too late to save even a single Jew.

Reactions

The news that the conference had ended without any public decisions provoked outrage. The London weekly The Observer wrote of well-dressed gentlemen who had gathered in the island’s luxury hotels to assure one another that little could be done. Congressman Emanuel Celler called the conference a failure, and leaders of Zionist organisations called it a “mockery”. On 4 May 1943 the Bergson group placed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times headed “To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap Bermuda Was a ‘Cruel Mockery’”. Senator Lucas and other members of Congress regarded the advertisement as an insult to the Senate, which had taken part in the conference; Senator Harry Truman resigned from the Bergson committee in protest.

On 12 May 1943, while the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was being crushed, Szmul Zygielbojm, the Bund’s representative on the National Council of the Polish government-in-exile, took his own life in London. In his farewell letter to President Władysław Raczkiewicz and Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski he laid responsibility for the extermination of the Jews not only on the Germans but also on the Allied governments, which had done nothing to stop it. His death is often linked with the failure at Bermuda, although the letter does not mention the conference by name.

The conference’s place in the history of the war

The Bermuda Conference resembled the Évian Conference of 1938: sympathy, but no readiness to take in refugees or bear the costs. The difference was that in 1943 the governments already knew of the systematic murder of millions of people. For Zygielbojm, for Jan Karski and for the leaders of the Jewish underground in Warsaw who had begged for rescue, Bermuda was proof that the world did not intend to act.

In the United States the pressure did not let up. In the autumn of 1943 Congress took up a proposal to establish a special rescue agency, and Breckinridge Long, testifying before a House committee, inflated the number of refugees admitted by the United States. Treasury officials prepared a report for Secretary Henry Morgenthau on the “acquiescence of this government in the murder of the Jews”, accusing the State Department of deliberately obstructing relief. Morgenthau put the matter to Roosevelt, who on 22 January 1944 established the War Refugee Board. According to historians’ estimates, the agency helped to save at least tens of thousands of people, and by some assessments a far larger number, among other places in Hungary in 1944. For most of Europe’s Jews, however, it came too late. In April 1943, while the delegates were deliberating in Bermuda, most of the victims of the Holocaust were already dead.