Évian Conference
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The Évian Conference was convened from 6–15 July, 1938, at Évian-les-Bains, France, to discuss the Jewish refugee problem and the plight of the increasing numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution by Nazi Germany. It was convened at the initiative of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt who perhaps hoped to obtain commitments from some of the invited nations to accept more refugees, although he took pains to avoid stating that objective expressly. It was true that Roosevelt desired to deflect attention and criticism from American policy that severely limited the quota of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States.[1]
The conference was attended by representatives from 29 countries, and 24 voluntary organizations also attended as observers, presenting plans either orally or in writing.[2] Golda Meir, the attendee from British Mandate Palestine, was the only representative of a landed Jewish constituency, but she was not permitted to speak or to participate in the proceedings except as an observer. Some 200 international journalists gathered at Évian to observe and report on the meeting.
The dispossessed and displaced Jews of Austria and Germany were hopeful that this international conference would lead to acceptance of more refugees and safe haven. "The United States had always been viewed in Europe as champion of freedom and under her powerful influence and following her example, certainly many countries would provide the chance to get out of the German trap. The rescue, a new life seemed in reach."[3]
Hitler responded to the news of the conference by saying essentially that if the other nations would agree to take the Jews, he would help them leave:
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I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships.[4]
The conference proved a failure because both the United States and Britain refused to accept any (substantially) more refugees, and most of the countries at the conference followed suit. The conference was seen by some as "an exercise in Anglo-American collaborative hypocrisy."[4]
Contents
Background
The Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews, who were already persecuted by the Hitler regime, of their German citizenship. They were classified as "subjects" and became stateless in their own country. By 1938, some 450,000 of about 900,000 German Jews were expelled or fled Germany, mostly to France and British Mandate Palestine, where the massive wave of migrants led to an Arab uprising. When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, and applied German racial laws, the 200,000 Jews of Austria became stateless.
Hitler's expansion was accompanied by a rise in vicious and violent anti-Semitic fascist movements across Europe and the Middle East. Significantly antisemitic governments came to power in Poland (from 1935 the government boycotted its own Jewish population), Hungary and Romania, where Jews had always been second class citizens. Thus the numbers of Jews trying to leave Europe was in the millions, while Jews were perceived as an undesirable and socially damaging population with popular academic theories arguing that Jews damaged the "racial hygiene" or "eugenics" of nations where they were resident and engaged in conspirative behaviour.
Before the Conference the United States and Britain made a critical agreement: the British promised not to bring up the fact that the United States was not filling its immigration quotas, and any mention of Palestine as a possible destination for Jewish refugees was excluded from the agenda.[5] Britain administered Palestine as a "Jewish National Home" under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate.
Proceedings
Conference delegates expressed empathy for Jews under Nazism but made no immediate joint resolution or commitment, portraying the conference as a mere beginning, to the frustration of some commentators. Noting "that the involuntary emigration of people in large numbers has become so great that it renders racial and religious problems more acute, increases international unrest, and may hinder seriously the processes of appeasement in international relations", the Évian Conference established the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICR) with the purpose to "approach the governments of the countries of refuge with a view to developing opportunities for permanent settlement." The ICR received little authority or support from its member nations and fell into inaction.
The United States sent no government official to the conference. Instead Roosevelt's friend the American businessman Myron C. Taylor represented the U.S. with James G. McDonald as his advisor. The U.S. agreed that the German and Austrian immigration quota of 30,000 a year would be made available to Jewish refugees. In the three years 1938 to 1940 the US actually exceeded this quota by 10,000. During the same period Britain accepted almost the same number of German Jews. Australia agreed to take 15,000 over three years, with South Africa taking only those with close relatives already resident; Canada refused to make any commitment and only accepted a few refugees over this period.[6] The Australian delegate T. W. White noted: "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one".[7] The French delegate stated that France had reached "the extreme point of saturation as regards admission of refugees", a sentiment repeated by most other representatives.
Britain did agree to admit 10,000 Jewish immigrant children in the Kindertransport (more than any other country), but refused to allow free Jewish migration to anywhere in the British Empire, including Palestine where strict quotas restricted Jewish immigration.
The only country which was willing to accept a large number of Jews was the Dominican Republic, which offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees on generous terms.[8] In 1940 an agreement was signed and Rafael Trujillo donated 26,000 acres (110 km2) of his properties for settlements. The first settlers arrived in May 1940: only about 800 settlers came to Sosúa; most later moved on to the United States.[8] The Sosua Virtual museum is a living memorial to the settlers.
Consquences
The result of the failure of the conference was that the Jews had no escape and were ultimately subject to what was known as Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Two months after Evian, in September 1938, Britain and France granted Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, which made a further 120,000 Jews stateless. In November 1938, on Kristallnacht, a massive pogrom across the Third Reich was accompanied by the destruction of over 1,000 synagogues, massacres and the arbitrary arrest of tens of thousands of Jews. In March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, which now took in a further 180,000 Jews, while in May 1939 the British issued its notorious White Paper, which barred Jews from entering Palestine or buying land there. Following his occupation of Poland in late 1939 and invasion of Russia in 1941, the Germans embarked on a program of systematically killing all Jews in Europe, sometimes with local assistance.
Literary references
In her autobiography My Life (1975), Golda Meir described her outrage being in "the ludicrous capacity of the [Jewish] observer from Palestine, not even seated with the delegates, although the refugees under discussion were my own people...." After the conference Meir told the press: "There is only one thing I hope to see before I die and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore."[9] Chaim Weizmann was quoted in The Manchester Guardian as saying: "The world seemed to be divided into two parts – those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter."[10][11]
In July 1979, Walter Mondale described the hope represented by the Evian conference:
"At stake at Evian were both human lives – and the decency and self-respect of the civilized world. If each nation at Evian had agreed on that day to take in 17,000 Jews at once, every Jew in the Reich could have been saved. As one American observer wrote, 'It is heartbreaking to think of the ...desperate human beings ... waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian. But the question they underline is not simply humanitarian ... it is a test of civilization.'"[12]
Participants
National delegations
| Country | Delegation |
|---|---|
 Argentina |
|
 Australia |
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 Belgium |
|
 Bolivia |
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 Brazil |
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 Canada |
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 Chile |
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 Colombia |
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 Costa Rica |
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 Cuba |
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 Denmark |
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 Dominican Republic |
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 Ecuador |
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 France |
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 Guatemala |
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 Haiti |
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 Honduras |
|
 Ireland |
|
 Mexico |
|
 Netherlands |
|
 New Zealand |
|
 Nicaragua |
|
 Norway |
|
 Panama |
|
 Paraguay |
|
 Peru |
|
 Sweden |
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 Switzerland |
|
 United Kingdom |
|
 United States |
|
 Uruguay |
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 Venezuela |
|
Other delegations
| Organization | Representatives |
|---|---|
| High Commission for Refugees from Germany |
|
| General Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Committee |
|
Private organizations
- Agudas Israel World Organization, London
- Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris
- American, British, Belgian, French, Dutch, and Swiss Catholic Committees for Aid to Refugees
- American Joint Distribution Committee, Paris
- Association de colonisation juive, Paris
- Association of German Scholars in Distress Abroad, London
- Bureau international pour le respect du droit d'asyle et l'aide aux réfugiés politiques, Paris
- Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews, London
- Central Committee for Refugees from Germany, Prague
- Centre de recherches de solutions au problème juif, Paris
- Comité d'aide et d'assistance aux victimes de l'anti-semitisme en Allemagne, Brussels
- Comite for Bijzondere Joodsche Belangen, Amsterdam
- Comité international pour le placement des intellectuels réfugiés, Geneva
- Comité pour la défense des droits des Israélites en Europe centrale et orientale, Paris
- Committee of Aid for German Jews, London
- Council for German Jewry, London
- Emigration Advisory Committee, London
- Fédération des émigrés d'Autriche, Paris
- Fédération internationale des émigrés d'Allemagne, Paris
- Freeland Association, London
- German Committee of the Quaker Society of Friends, London
- HICEM, Paris[20]
- International Christian Committee for Non-Aryans, London
- Internationale ouvrière et socialiste, Paris and Brussels
- Jewish Agency for Palestine, London
- The Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association, London
- Komitee für die Entwicklung der grossen jüdischen Kolonisation, Zürich
- League of Nations Union, London
- New Zionist Organization, London
- ORT, Paris
- Royal Institute of International Affairs, London
- Schweizer Hilfszentrum für Flüchtlinge, Basel
- Service international de migration, Geneva
- Service universitaire international, Geneva
- Société d'émigration et de colonisation juive Emcol, Paris
- Society for the Protection of Sciences and Studies, London
- Union des Sociétés OSE, Paris
- World Jewish Congress, Paris
Press
The international press was represented by about two hundred journalists, chiefly the League of Nations correspondents of the leading daily and weekly newspapers and news agencies.[21]
See also
- Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938)
- The Holocaust
- The Haavara Agreement
- Bermuda Conference
- British Mandate of Palestine
- White Paper of 1939
- SS St. Louis
- SS Navemar
- International response to the Holocaust
References
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- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "The Holocaust: Timeline: July 6–15, 1938: Évian Conference." Yad Vashem. Retrieved November 19, 2015.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Fischel, Jack R., The Holocaust (1998), pp. 28–29
- ↑ Sykes, Christopher (1965) Cross Roads to Israel: Palestine from Balfour to Bevin. New English Library Edition (pb) 1967. Pages 198, 199.
- ↑ http://www.holocaust.org.au/mm/i_australia.htm
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Provizier, Norman, and Claire Wright. "Golda Meir: An Outline of a Unique Life. A Chronological Survey of Golda Meir's Life and Legacy." Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, Metropolitan State University of Denver. Retrieved November 19, 2015.
- ↑ Manchester Guardian, May 23, 1936, cited in A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge, Britain and the Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933–1939, (London, Elek Books Ltd, 1973), p. 112
- ↑ The Évian Conference – Hitler's Green Light for Genocide by Annette Shaw
- ↑ New York Times : Evian and Geneva By Walter F. Mondale
- ↑ Bio & Photo
- ↑ Bio & Photo
- ↑ Bio & Photo
- ↑ Obit
- ↑ Bio & Photo
- ↑ Bio & Photo
- ↑ Photo
- ↑ History of HICEM
- ↑ A list of the papers and agencies and their reporters was published by Hans Habe, present at the Conference as a foreign correspondent of the Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily), as an appendix to his novel Die Mission (The Mission, 1965, first published in Great Britain by George G. Harrap & Co. Limited in 1966, re-published by Panther Books Ltd, book number 2231, in 1967).
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- Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany
- International response during the Holocaust
- Diplomatic conferences in France
- International conferences in France
- 20th-century diplomatic conferences
- 1938 conferences
- 1938 in international relations
- 1938 in France
- The Holocaust and the United States
