The Évian Conference

On 6 July 1938, in the Hôtel Royal at Évian-les-Bains, a spa town on the French shore of Lake Geneva, an intergovernmental meeting on refugees from Germany and Austria began its deliberations. It had been called by the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it was attended by representatives of 32 countries, several dozen relief organisations and some two hundred journalists. For ten days the delegates, one after another, professed their sympathy for the victims of persecution and, one after another, explained why their country could not take in more immigrants. The only state that offered to accept a large number of refugees was the Dominican Republic. The Évian Conference ended on 15 July with the creation of a standing committee in London and nothing more, and in the history of the Holocaust it became a symbol of the world’s indifference to the fate of the Jews a few years before they were murdered.

It is sometimes said that the conference lasted from 6 to 16 July and that “the United States and Britain refused to take in more Jewish refugees”. In fact the final session was held on 15 July, and the closing resolution had been agreed the day before. As for the second claim, neither Washington nor London closed the door entirely, but neither agreed to do anything beyond what it was already doing, and the British excluded Palestine, the most important destination of Jewish emigration, from the discussions in advance.

Forced out of the Reich

From 1933 the Third Reich’s policy towards the Jews had a single aim: to drive them out of public life, rob them and force them to leave. The boycott of Jewish shops, the removal of Jews from the civil service and the professions, and then the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 made them second-class people in their own country. Of the roughly 525,000 Jews living in Germany in 1933, about 150,000 had left by 1938. Some reached Palestine thanks to the Haavara Agreement, others went to neighbouring European countries, the United States and South America. Emigration, however, was expensive and increasingly difficult: the state took most of the emigrants’ property through the “Reich flight tax” and an unfavourable exchange rate, while the destination countries, still struggling with the effects of the Great Depression and with unemployment, were reluctant to admit penniless people.

In the spring of 1938 the situation changed dramatically. After the Anschluss in March, a further 185,000–190,000 Jews came under Nazi rule, the great majority of them in Vienna. Immediately after the Germans arrived they were struck by a wave of violence, humiliation and plunder, and the first transports left Vienna for the Dachau camp. Within a few weeks the Austrian Jews lost everything of which German Jews had been stripped over five years. In April Jews throughout the Reich had to register their property with the authorities, which foreshadowed its seizure, and in June the police, in an operation against “asocials”, arrested some 1,500 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Thousands besieged the consulates in search of visas. As early as 1 April Switzerland introduced a visa requirement for holders of Austrian passports, and other neighbouring states tightened their border controls.

International institutions could not cope. The League of Nations did have a High Commissioner for Refugees coming from Germany and the Nansen Office, which issued Nansen passports to stateless persons, but both had modest resources and could not compel any state to take in refugees. The first High Commissioner, the American James G. McDonald, had resigned in 1935 with a public letter calling on the League to put pressure on Germany. It achieved nothing.

Roosevelt’s initiative

On 23 March 1938, ten days after the Anschluss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the ambassadors in London, Paris, Rome and several other capitals to ask the governments there whether they would take part in a special committee to facilitate the emigration of “political refugees” from Austria and Germany. Similar inquiries were sent to all the American republics. Over the next two days the matter was made public. Even this first telegram contained two reservations that decided the fate of the entire undertaking. Emigration was to be financed by private organisations, not by governments, and “no country would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation”.

Historians still debate what exactly Roosevelt expected. The United States itself had no intention of changing the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which set annual quotas for individual nationalities. Congress was in an isolationist mood, unemployment was still high, and polls showed that a large majority of Americans did not want refugees admitted, Jewish ones included. Some scholars believe that the President hoped other states, especially the vast countries of Latin America and the British Dominions, would open their doors wider. Others stress that his main aim was to show the public that he was doing something, without risking a quarrel with Congress. The only concrete step on the American side was to merge the German and Austrian immigration quotas into one of 27,370 people a year and to make sure it was actually filled.

The government in Rome declined to take part at once. Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano explained to the American ambassador that Italy could not help “enemies of fascism and Nazism”. Germany was not invited, and the Soviet Union did not take part either. Nor were the states of Central and Eastern Europe invited, though they had large Jewish communities of their own, because Washington feared that their governments would treat the conference as an encouragement to get rid of their own Jews. The fears were not groundless. As early as April the Romanian foreign minister, in conversation with the American envoy, expressed the hope that the initiative would be extended to Romania and indicated that his country would like to “get rid of” as many Jews each year as were born. The Polish government, which since 1937 had been looking into the possibility of settling Jews on Madagascar, also made it known that it expected international help with their “emigration”. According to some studies, Poland and Romania sent unofficial observers to Évian.

The meeting was originally to have been held in Switzerland. The Swiss, however, did not want to host in Geneva a conference that might irritate Berlin, so France became the host. Roosevelt sent to Évian neither the Secretary of State nor even a career diplomat. The delegation was headed by his friend the industrialist Myron C. Taylor, former chairman of U.S. Steel, appointed ambassador extraordinary for the occasion. James G. McDonald acted as his adviser. Britain was represented by Lord Winterton (Edward Turnour), a member of the cabinet, and France by Senator Henry Bérenger. Before the conference the Americans, British and French agreed in Paris that it was to be a meeting of government representatives rather than a public forum, and that Palestine would not be discussed. The American instructions stated plainly that the committee should reject any attempt to bring into its deliberations Zionist and anti-Zionist disputes that would “arouse bitter passions”.

Ten days at Évian

The participants were the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and nineteen Latin American republics. South Africa sent an observer. The first two days were taken up with procedure, including a dispute over the chairmanship, which in the end went to Taylor, with Bérenger as honorary president. Then came the delegates’ public statements.

They sounded much alike. Taylor recalled that the United States could admit more than 27,000 immigrants a year from Germany and Austria, and offered nothing more. Lord Winterton declared that Britain was densely populated, had high unemployment and was “not a country of immigration”, though it was ready to consider settling small groups in some African colonies. Bérenger said that France had already taken in a vast number of political refugees and had reached “the extreme point of saturation”. The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries stressed that they had admitted many refugees for their size and could at most continue to serve as countries of transit. Canada made no declaration at all, and even before the conference its government had expressed doubts as to whether a standing body should be set up in the first place. The Australian delegate, the Minister for Trade and Customs Thomas White, uttered the sentence that went down in history: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” Australia later agreed to take 15,000 refugees over three years.

The Latin American states declared that they needed farmers, not merchants, doctors and lawyers, and let it be understood that they did not want the urban Jews of Vienna and Berlin. Taylor reported to Washington that many of them feared even the mildest criticism of Germany, because the Reich was an important trading partner and could apply pressure through its barter agreements. Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile and the Central American states threatened to vote against the resolution unless a formula was found releasing them from any obligations. The exception was the Dominican Republic. Its delegate, the brother of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, offered to take as many as 100,000 settlers on favourable terms. The motives for this generosity were dubious: Trujillo, who a year earlier had ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitian immigrants, wanted to improve his image in the United States and to “whiten” his country’s population with European settlers. Of the promised hundred thousand, only a few hundred people – between about 600 and 800, according to various sources – reached the settlement of Sosúa on the island’s north coast in 1940–1945.

Representatives of Jewish and relief organisations, among them the Joint, the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Agency and Quaker committees, were allowed to present their case only before a sub-committee and only for a few minutes. Nor did they speak with one voice. Some American organisations feared that too loud a demand for open borders would provoke a wave of antisemitism in the United States, while the Zionists saw the solution above all in Palestine, which was not to be discussed. The Jewish community of Palestine was represented as an observer by Golda Meir, then Golda Meyerson. She had no vote and did not sit among the delegates. In her memoirs she recalled that, listening to the representatives of one country after another explain how much they would like to take in more refugees and how sorry they were that they could not, she wanted to stand up and shout that these “numbers” were human beings, condemned to camps or to wandering the world. At a press conference after the proceedings closed she said that there was only one thing she hoped to see before she died: that her people should no longer need expressions of sympathy.

The resolution and the London committee

On 14 July, after long haggling with the Latin American delegations, the heads of delegation agreed on and adopted the final resolution. The conference was closed the next day. The document contained not one word of criticism of Germany and did not once use the word “Jews”. It spoke of the “involuntary emigration” of people who had to leave Germany, including Austria, “on account of their political opinions, religious beliefs or racial origin”. It stated that the influx of such people at a time of unemployment posed an economic and social problem for the receiving countries, as well as one of “public order”, and even that mass emigration was “aggravating racial and religious problems” and might disturb “the process of appeasement in international relations”. It expressed the belief that Germany would allow emigrants to take their property with them. It recommended that the receiving countries assume no financial obligations and that the immigrants be ready to accept “changed conditions of life”.

The only concrete decision was the creation of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, based in London. Its director was to negotiate with Germany the terms of an “orderly emigration” and to seek countries willing to accept settlers. The committee first met on 3 August 1938. Lord Winterton was elected chairman, Bérenger and Taylor vice-chairmen, and the American lawyer George Rublee became director. His talks with the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, and later with Göring’s official Helmut Wohlthat, produced at the beginning of 1939 a plan for the emigration of several hundred thousand Jews over several years, financed partly from frozen Jewish assets. The outbreak of war killed it before it could be put into effect.

The German reaction

Nazi propaganda greeted the outcome of the conference with satisfaction. As early as March, speaking in Königsberg, Hitler had mocked that he hoped the world which felt such sympathy for “these criminals” would be generous enough to turn its sympathy into practical help, and that Germany was ready to put them at its disposal, “even on luxury ships”. After Évian the German press remarked sarcastically that the world condemned Germany for its treatment of the Jews, but when it came to taking them in, nobody wanted them. The Reich authorities concluded that foreign countries would not stand up for the Jews, and kept increasing the pressure. In August 1938 the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established in Vienna under Adolf Eichmann; within a little over a year it had robbed more than a hundred thousand Austrian Jews and forced them to leave.

What Évian changed

The record of Évian was not entirely empty, and judging it calls for caution. In the 1939 fiscal year the United States for the first time filled the combined German-Austrian quota in full. Britain, despite Winterton’s declaration, took in several tens of thousands of refugees from the Reich before the outbreak of war, including some ten thousand children through the Kindertransport. Over ten thousand Jews fled to Shanghai, one of the few places in the world that could be entered without a visa. Yet no state other than the Dominican Republic agreed at Évian to anything beyond what it was already doing, and the gathering showed both the Nazis and the persecuted themselves that the world’s borders were closing to Jews.

Historians disagree about how many people might have been saved had the conference ended differently. In 1938 nobody foresaw the gas chambers, and the Reich itself moved from expulsion to murder only a few years later. The claim that the states present at Évian were “complicit” in the Holocaust has rightly been challenged, since it equates the perpetrators with passive bystanders. There is broad agreement, however, that Évian was a moral failure of the democracies: the governments knew that the Jews of Germany and Austria had been deprived of their rights, robbed and subjected to violence, and yet they treated them above all as an economic and political problem.

A few months later it became clear how quickly the trap was closing. Switzerland pressed for the marking of German Jews’ passports, Poland stripped its Jews living in the Reich of their citizenship, and Germany expelled them across the Polish border. In the autumn came the nationwide pogrom in Germany, and in May 1939 Britain published a White Paper that drastically restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. At the same time the liner St. Louis, with more than nine hundred refugees on board, was turned away from the ports of Cuba and the United States and had to return to Europe. After the outbreak of the Second World War, when Germany conquered Poland and then a large part of the continent, the chances of escape all but vanished, and the policy of expulsion turned into the Holocaust. When, in 1943, at the height of the killing, the British and Americans met to discuss refugees at the Bermuda Conference, it once again ended in declarations.