Évian Conference
The Évian Conference was convened at the initiative of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938 to discuss the issue of increasing numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. For eight days, from July 6 to July 13, representatives from thirty-one countries met at Évian-les-Bains, France. Twenty-four voluntary organizations also attended, as observers, many of whom presented plans orally and in writing.[1] The fact that the conference did not pass a resolution condemning the German treatment of Jews was widely used in Nazi propaganda.[2] It can be argued that the failure to agree on who should receive Jewish migrants from Germany further emboldened Hitler in his assault on European Jewry.[3]
Background
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws made German Jews, who were already persecuted by the Hitler regime, stateless refugees in their own country. By 1938, some 150,000 of about 600,000 German Jews had fled Germany, mostly to Palestine, but British immigration quotas prevented many from migrating. In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and made the 200,000 Jews of Austria stateless refugees. In September, Britain and France granted Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, and in March 1939, Hitler occupied the remainder of the country, making a further 200,000 Jews stateless.
In 1939, the British White Paper capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at 75,000 over the next five years, after which the country was to become an independent state with an Arab majority. Jewish refugees could no longer find countries willing to admit them. Before the Conference, the United States and Great Britain made an agreement: the British promised not to bring up the fact that the U.S. was not filling its immigration quotas, and any mention of Palestine as a possible destination for Jewish refugees was excluded from the agenda.[4]
Proceedings
In the course of the conference, the delegates expressed sympathy for the refugees, but did not commit their countries to let more refugees in.
No high-level official was sent by the United States. Instead, Roosevelt's friend, American businessman Myron C. Taylor, represented the U.S. at the conference and stated that the American contribution was to make the German and Austrian immigration quota fully available. The Australian delegate noted: "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one."[5] 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. The only country willing to accept many Jews was the Dominican Republic, offering to accept up to 100,000 refugees on generous terms.[6] In 1940 an agreement was signed and Rafael Trujillo donated 26,000 acres of his properties for settlements. The first settlers arrived in May 1940; eventually some 800 settlers came to Sosúa and most moved later on to the United States.[6]
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."[7] 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."[8]
Aftermath
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.
On July 21, 1979, Walter Mondale compared the plight of refugees in Indochina to that of Jews in reference to 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.”[9]
Intergovernmental Consultation on Asylum recommenced in 1985 with the establishment of the IGC :
"The Consultations were initiated in 1985 as a modest meeting point for seven Governments, but has in recent years developed into a multilateral consultation mechanism, while still maintaining its informal character. An independent Secretariat was established in June 1991. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and IOM (International Organisation for Migration) participate on an equal basis in these consultations. " [10]
Participants
National delegations
| Country | Delegation |
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 Argentina
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 Australia
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 Belgium
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 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
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 Ireland
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 Mexico
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 Netherlands
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 New Zealand
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 Nicaragua
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 Norway
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 Panama
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 Paraguay
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 Peru
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 Sweden
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 Switzerland
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 United Kingdom
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 United States
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 Uruguay
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 Venezuela
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Other delegations
| Organization | Representatives |
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| High Commission for Refugees from Germany |
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| General Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Committee |
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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 [19]
- 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
The 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. This is an incomplete list of the papers and agencies, and their reporters.[20]
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See also
- Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938)
- The Holocaust
- Bermuda Conference
- British Mandate of Palestine
- White Paper of 1939
- SS St. Louis
- International response to the Holocaust
Notes
- ^ July 6-15: Évian Conference
- ^ quoting from "Voelkischer Beobachter," North German edition, July 13, 1938 from Yad Vashem
- ^ http://christianactionforisrael.org/antiholo/evian/evian.html
- ^ Fischel, Jack R., The Holocaust (1998) pp 28-29
- ^ "Australian Memories Of The Holocaust". Retrieved May 17, 2008.
- ^ a b Crassweller RD. Trujillo. The Life and Times of a Carribean Dictator. The MacMillan Co, New York (1966). p. 199–200.
- ^ Golda Meir: An Outline of a Unique Life. A Chronological Survey of Golda Meir’s Life and Legacy by Norman Provizer and Claire Wright
- ^ 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, also in The Evian Conference — Hitler's Green Light for Genocide by Annette Shaw
- ^ New York Times : Evian and Geneva By Walter F. Mondale
- ^ Inter-Governmental Consultations
- ^ Bio & Photo
- ^ Bio & Photo
- ^ Bio & Photo
- ^ Obit
- ^ Bio & Photo
- ^ Bio & Photo
- ^ Photo
- ^ Photo
- ^ History of HICEM
- ^ This list 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).
- ^ Bio
- ^ Bio
External links
- Decisions Taken at the Évian Conference
- The Évian Conference at Yad Vashem
- The Évian Conference - Hitler's Green Light for Genocide