The Évian Conference was a meeting of representatives from 32 countries, held at the lakeside resort of Évian-les-Bains on the French side of Lake Geneva from 6 to 15 July 1938. It had been called by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss what could be done about the Jewish refugee crisis in central Europe. By the end of the conference, almost nothing had been agreed. One small country, the Dominican Republic, had offered to take a substantial number of Jewish refugees. Every other delegation had explained, with varying degrees of regret, why their country could not.
Why Roosevelt called it
The annexation of Austria in March 1938 had brought another 185,000 Jews under Nazi rule and produced an immediate refugee crisis. Adolf Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna was extorting Austrian Jews into emigration at gunpoint, while at the same time the countries that might have taken them were tightening their visa restrictions. Roosevelt was under pressure from American Jewish organisations to do something. He chose to call an international conference rather than to relax the United States immigration quotas, which had been set by Congress in 1924 and which he had no political appetite to challenge.
The conference was framed in advance to fail. Roosevelt’s invitation explicitly stated that no country would be expected to accept more refugees than its existing immigration laws allowed. Britain attended on condition that the question of Palestine was not raised, since Britain held the Palestine Mandate and was at that time restricting Jewish immigration to it under pressure from the Arab population. The Soviet Union was not invited. Germany and its territories, which were the source of the refugees, were not invited either, but the German press covered the conference and gave it close attention. The conference became, in the German telling, proof that the wider world was as antisemitic as the regime itself.
What the delegations said
One after another, the country representatives stood up and explained why their country could not absorb significantly more Jewish refugees. The British delegate said the United Kingdom was overcrowded and economically constrained, and made clear that Palestine was not on the agenda. The French delegate said France had already taken in around 200,000 refugees of various nationalities and could not take more. The Australian delegate, T. W. White, made the comment that became the conference’s most quoted line: Australia, he said, did not have a racial problem and was not desirous of importing one. The Canadian, Irish, South African, New Zealand, Argentine and Brazilian delegations said similar things in similar language. The Swiss said they were already a country of transit and could not become a country of refuge. The Belgian, Dutch and Danish delegations said they would continue to take refugees in modest numbers, as they had been doing.
The Dominican Republic was the exception. Its dictator, Rafael Trujillo, offered to take up to 100,000 Jewish refugees and to provide them with land and resources. Trujillo’s motives were not entirely humanitarian; he had recently presided over a massacre of around 20,000 Haitians on the Dominican-Haitian border and was looking for ways to improve his international standing and to whiten his country’s population. In the event, only around 800 Jewish refugees actually settled at Sosúa under the Dominican scheme. But the offer had been made.
What it meant
The Évian Conference is now remembered as a low point of the international response to the refugee crisis. Goebbels gleefully observed in the German press that no country was prepared to take in the Jews the regime was driving out. Hitler said in a speech at the time that the world had no shortage of moral lectures for Germany about what it should do for its Jews and no shortage of reasons why the world itself could not. Both observations were, in the narrowest sense, accurate.
It is worth being careful about what Évian does and does not show. The conference did not directly cause anything that came afterwards. The killing began three years later and was the work of the regime that organised it, not the result of a refusal by the wider world to take in those it was killing. But Évian made clear that the international community would not, in 1938, lift a finger to take in the Jews of central Europe in the numbers required. That was new information. Until July 1938 some German and Austrian Jews had still believed that if the worst came to the worst, foreign countries would absorb them. After Évian, that belief was harder to hold. The pace of attempted emigration intensified, but so did the desperation, because the destinations had now visibly closed.
The aftermath: the IGCR
The conference produced one institution, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which was supposed to negotiate with Germany about an orderly emigration programme. It achieved little. Negotiations were attempted on and off through 1939 and were overtaken first by the war and then by the regime’s shift from emigration to extermination. The IGCR continued in name through the war and was eventually folded into the postwar refugee organisations.
Why it matters now
Évian is sometimes pointed to by people who want to argue that the Holocaust was a collective failure of the wider world rather than a German crime, and by people on the other side who want to argue that the Allied countries were just as culpable as the perpetrators. Neither line is right. The Holocaust was a German crime, planned and carried out by the German state with collaborators in occupied Europe. But the failure of the wider world to take in the Jews who could still have been saved in 1938 and 1939 is part of the wider record of how the Holocaust came to happen. The Jews who were turned away from American consulates, who were sent back across borders, who were refused visas they had been promised, included tens of thousands of people who would later be murdered in the camps. They had asked to be let in. They had been told there was no room.
See also
Sources
- David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941, University of Massachusetts Press, 1968
- Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, Rutgers University Press, 1970
- Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979
- USHMM: The Évian Conference