The Evian Conference on the Refugee Question (Part A)
Source: S. Adler-Rudel, Year Book XIII of the Leo Baeck Institute (London 1968), p. 235-273
I
In the decisive year 1938, the sixth year of Nazi domination, anti-Jewish terror in Germany was still considered by the governments of the Western democracies as an internal affair which could not be interfered with as long as the Germans were not trying to attack directly the interests of foreign states. True, the persecution of Jews and other "non-Aryans" provoked strong protests throughout Europe and America. Personalities known all over the world, whose names were linked with the history of science, art, literature, and with their country's economic, political and cultural life, had suddenly become outlaws in Germany. Public opinion -in many countries denounced Nazism, but on the governmental level no effective action was taken. The Germans soon realised that, no matter how they behaved, it would not prevent foreign statesmen from shaking hands or dining with the Nazi leaders. Every anti-Jewish demonstration instigated and organised by the Nazi party was followed by new anti-Jewish laws. 135 were enacted during the five years from 1933 to 1937 alone, laws expelling the Jews from civil service, educational institutions, the liberal professions - from one branch of economic life after another, and decrees depriving them of many of their natural rights as well as of their German citizenship. Jews unable or unwilling to bear the permanent terror flooded the neighbouring countries and caused what came to be known as the refugee problem.
In October of 1933, after protracted bickering, the League of Nations appointed James G. Macdonald 1 , High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany to negotiate and direct the international collaboration necessary to solve the economic, financial and social problems of the refugees', without, however, investing him with any real authority to act and, although an official of the League of Nations, his salary and expenses had to be provided for by private Jewish organisations. The High Commissioner, with the help of many Jewish and non-Jewish philanthropic organisations, worked hard but achieved little and, disheartened, tendered his resignation in December 1935. His successor, Sir Neill Malcolm 2 , did not meet with greater success. The intensification of the anti-Jewish persecution in Germany after 1935 justified Macdonald's desperate step and lent special significance to the concluding passage of his letter of resignation 3 :
When domestic policies threaten the demoralisation and exile of hundreds of thousands of human beings, considerations of diplomatic correctness must yield to those of common humanity. I should be recreant if I did not call attention to the actual situation, and plead that world opinion, acting through the League and its Member-States and other countries, move to avert the existing and impending tragedies.'
The situation grew worse from year to year. The number of refugees increased while counties all over the world became more and more unwilling to grant them admission. The world became, according to a saying of Chaim Weizmann, divided into two camps, one of countries expelling the Jews, and the other of countries which did not adroit them.
II
The brutal excesses against the Jewish population of Vienna after the occupation of Austria by German troops on the 12th March, 1938 once again focused the attention of the world on the fate of the Jews Approximately 150,000 Jews had left Germany during the first five years of Nazi rule. Less than 100000 of them had managed to settle overseas: 43,000 in Palestine and 55,000 in North America and some South American republics. The other 52,000 remained "refugees". Legally insecure and economically dependent on the aid of various relief committees, they tried to eke out a pitiful existence in the countries bordering on Germany. They constituted a problem that neither Jewish nor international organisations were able to cope with. The annexation of Austria increased by 190,000 the number of Jews who were forced either to emigrate or to flee. In 1938, 40,000 more Jews found themselves under Nazi rule than at the beginning of 1933.
Deports about the treatment of the Viennese Jews and the desperate attempts made by many thousands to cross the border into Czechoslovakia, Switzerland or Italy shocked public opinion in the Western world and especially in the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became so concerned about the situation that on the 23rd March 1955, only eleven days after the occupation of Austria, he advised his Secretary of State, Cordel Hulk to ask the British Government and the governments of:
France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Italy and the governments of all the other American Republics, if they would be willing to co-operate with the Government of the United States in setting up a special committee composed of representatives of a number of governments for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Austria and presumably from Germany of political refugees.' 4
Unfortunately, the second paragraph of Secretary Hull's letter to the various governments considerably reduced the importance of the President's initiative by stating that
". . . our idea is that whereas such representatives would be designated by the governments concerned, any financing of the emergency emigration referred to would be undertaken by private organisations within the respective countries. Furthermore, it should be understood that no country would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.' 5
At the same time, President Roosevelt advised his Consular Service to eliminate excessive formalism when dealing with visa requests from would-be emigrants from Germany and Austria and to give such cases more sympathetic treatment at the US consulates. The result of this instruction was an immediate and significant increase in the number of immigrants into the United States which, until then, had reached but a fraction of the legal annual German quota of 25557. Without bringing about any changes in its Immigration Law, the United States were in fact in a position to admit approximately 130,000 refugees from Germany during the years 1933-1938, while actually having admitted only 27,000 persons for this entire period-no more than about one-fifth of the German immigration quota.
Upon the advice of James G. Macdonald, President Roosevelt decided to put the entire problem of forced emigration, resettlement and legal protection of the refugees and of prose Greatened with persecution and having therefore no recourse other than emigration, on the agenda of the Conference. He also wanted to make sure that consideration would be given to the question of Palestine as a place of refuge for Jews. Great Britain realised that this would initiate an international political discussion about Palestine: she therefore entered into secret negotiations with Washington and made her willingness to participate in the Conference dependent on the conditions that (a) invitations should be sent only to countries of immigration, (b) that the Conference should deal only with refugees, but not with those threatened with persecution, and (c) that Palestine should not be discussed at the Conference 6 .
Further evidence as to the efforts to eliminate Palestine from the agenda of the Conference is contained in a letter from the Chief of the Division for Near pastern Affairs at the State Department, 57. Murray, to the American Consul-General in Jerusalem, G. Wadsworth:
Washington, July 2, 1938
Dear George:
In the comment of page two of your despatch No. 634 of June 11, 1938* you raised the question of the attitude which the American delegation at the Intergovernmental Meeting on Political Refugees would take on the matter of Jewish immigration into Palestine. For your strictly confidential and personal information
I am quoting below an extract from a confidential memorandum * *, furnished for the guidance of the American deat the meeting.
'It is highly probable that various groups will endeavour to induce the representatives of the governments participating in the meeting to take up the question of immigration into Palestine. It is felt that the Committee should reject any attempts to inject into the considerations such political issues as are involved in the Palestine, the Zionist and the anti-Zionist questions. These questions should stir up bitter passions and might even lead to a disruption of the Committee's labour.'
With best wishes, Wallace Murray.' 7 * Not printed ** Not printed
By the 2nd April, 1938 the State Department reported favourable replies from 29 countries 8 . The preparations for the Conference progressed and, on the 7th May, the Secretary of State informed the American Diplomatic Representatives that over thirty governments had agreed to co-operate and that it would be desirable that the first meeting be held on Wednesday, July 6th at Evian, France. Mr. Myron C. Taylor had been appointed as American representative with the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary and would be accompanied by one or more technical assistants.
Mr. Taylor, who in the meantime had left for Italy, asked from Rome, on the 11th May, for further information and instructions. The State Department took many weeks to clarify tilt situation and proposed to him, on the 14th June, the agenda for the meeting 9 .
III
The initiative of President Roosevelt brought new hope and encouragement. It was not the first intergovernmental conference called to consider the tragic situation of the refugees, but it represented a departure in American policy towards active participation in an international effort The President named James G. Macdonald Acting Chairman of his Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. Other members of this American National Committee appointed by the President foe the co-ordination of the work of private organisations were Paul Baerwald, Chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Dr. Stephen S. Boise, Bernard Baruch, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of the important quarterly Foreign Affairs, and representatives of the various churches. The inclusion of so many important figures of American public life was an indication of the high standing of the Committee.
Even though today, thirty years after the event, it seems that inner political considerations and not the sufferings of hundreds of thousands of human beings moved the President to act 10 , the fact remains that this initiative had an enormous impact and was hailed by the American and European press as the great humanitarian event of the year.
The representatives of the refugees, the Jewish organisations and the Jewish public in general anxiously waited for more information about the forthcoming conference, its agenda and its terms of reference. Ninety per cent of the refugees were Jewish, and those wanting to leave Germany and Austria were mainly Jews It was therefore expected that the general problem of the homelessness of Jews and their present plight in Europe would be one of the main items on the conference's agenda. But the statements of the State Department and of the British Foreign Office never referred to the Jews by name and carefully avoided - any mention of Hitler and of the Nazi Government.
Expecting to be somehow associated with the stork of the Conference 11 , the Jewish organisations began to draft their memoranda. Efforts made to avoid die appearance of too many such organisations and to set up a joint representative body failed. However, the larger relief organisations agreed to consult with each other about their intentions and to undertake certain steps together. This agreement found expression in a memorandum signed by the following organisations:
The Council for German Jewry, Lord [Herbert] Samuel, London;
The Jewish Colonisation Association, O.E. d'Avigdor Goldsmid, Paris;
The HIAS-ICA Emigration Association, James Bernstein, Paris;
Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association, Neville Laski and Leonard G. Montefiore, London;
The German Aid Committee, Otto M. Schiff, London;
Agudas Israel World Organisation, J. Rosenheim, London;
The Jewish Agency for Palestine, which endorsed this memorandum and submitted a separate memorandum on the Palestine aspects.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee also endorsed the memorandum together with the above-named organisations, but decided to advise their representative to the Conference, Dr. Jonah B. Wise, to submit a separate statement.
The Reich authorities had allowed the participation of an official delegation of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, which consisted of Dr. Otto Hirsch, Dr. Paul Epstein and Michael Traub (Palestine Office) and Dr. Werner Rosenberg (Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland). The delegates of the Juedische Kultusgemeinde Wien were Prof. Dr. Heinrich Neumann Dr. Joseph Loewenherz and Kommerzialrat B. J. Storfer. The two delegations co-operated closely and submitted to the Conference a detailed and well-documented memorandum, putting forth statistically based plans for the organisation of emigration from Germany and Austria.
Amongst the uninvited guests was a delegation from Palestine consisting of Dr. Arthur Ruppin, Chairman of the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews, Mr. Kurt Blumenfeld, Dr. Siegfried Moses and Dr. Max Kreutzberger for the Organisation of Jewish Settlers from Germany, Tel-Aviv, Mrs. Golda Meirson for the General Federation of Jewish Labour, Tel-Aviv, Mr. Zalman Rubashov (now Shazar) as correspondent of the Hebrew paper Davar, Tel-Aviv.
Many negotiations and interventions took place in the few weeks between the convening of the Conference and its actual assembly. In London, on the 15th June 1938, a deputation representing the various organisations concerned with the assistance of refugees submitted to the Home Secretary a memorandum on the treatment of refugees in the United Kingdom. This deputation, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and including Lord Sempill, the Bishop of Chichester, Mr. Otto M. Schiff, Brig.-Gen. Sir Wyndham Deedes, Lord Cecil Sir Frederick Kenyon and, among the experts, A. G. Brotman, expressed the hope that the British Government would co-operate to the utmost in the making of effective international schemes of migration and overseas settlement.
At a meeting of the Council for German Jewry in London on the 27th June, Harold Ginsburg, representing the American Joint Committee, reported on a conversation he had had with the American delegates to the Evian Conference from, which he had drawn the conclusion that it would be left to the Conference itself to decide on its procedure and program. The Americans were anxious that the Conference should be private, aiming at unofficial agreements and excluding controversial issues and especially such questions as the Jewish problem in Poland, Romania and other countries. Dr. Jonah Raise reported to the meeting that the American Advisory Committee had been appointed without prior consultation with the Jewish organisations and that it originally consisted of non-Jews with the sole exception of Bernard Baruch and Henry Morgenthau.
All those anxiously following the developments became increasingly aware that no constructive plan had been worked out and that the entire Conference was in fact little more than a feeble improvisation.
A member of the unofficial Jewish delegation from Palestine, who happened to travel with James G. Macdonald from Lausanne to Evian discussed with him the agenda of the Conference and concluded from this conversation that even Macdonald, one of the leading American delegates behind the scenes, had no clear idea about the method, duration or intended results of the Conference. The answers to the various questions were expected to turn up in the course of the negotiations themselves. A long conversation which took place on the eve of the Conference between Myron C. Taylor, George L. Warren, Dr. Bernhard Kahn and this writer while we were travelling togetfrom Paris to Evian further reduced the slight hope still remaining on the Jewish side.
Myron C. Taylor, former President of the United Steel Corporation and Roosevelt's representative, was accompanied by the President's adviser, James G. Macdonald, as well as by a number of technical assistants, including George L. Warren, Executive Secretary of Roosevelt's Committee on Political Refugees. For the following twenty years Warren represented the United States at all international conferences dealing with refugee and migration questions and became, among the bureaucrats of the State Department, one of the few understanding and dependable friends of the refugees. Great Britain was represented by Lord Winterton, Neville Chamberlain's faithful henchman, who made no secret of his opposition to any increase of Jewish immigration into Palestine. France's representative, Senator Henri Berenger, was a well-meaning humanitarian but, as host to the Conference, and like the other governmental representatives, he was anxious that it should run smoothly and avoid anything that might offend Germany.
IV
The Conference was inaugurated without much ado at Evian on the 6th July 1938. For weeks, world attention and in particular the hope of the refugees and of the Jews in Eastern and Central Europe had been focused on the idyllic little spa on the French side of Lake Geneva. In the name of the French Government, Senator Henri Berenger welcomed close to 200 delegates, journalists and observers to France, a country of refuge and free discussion. He assured the various refugee associations who had come of their own free will (i.e. uninvited) that they were nonetheless most welcome; if they had not been asked to participate, it was because this meeting was not meant as a conference of official international character, but rather as a body which the President of the United States wished to see created as a means for collaboration between America and governments from other continents. The Conference, he added, trusted that such practical and effective collaboration with the United States would give birth to something of value for refugees all over the world, who were today the stateless victims of national revolutions in various countries.
The opening took place amid journalists and observers from private organisations in an atmosphere from which cynicism was not absent. The invitations sent out by the United States Government had indicated that any financing of the emergency emigration would have to be undertaken by private bodies. But the private Jewish organisations had already spent, for the relief and migration purposes of political victims, some 50 million dollars in the first five years of Hitlerism. The assurance that no country would be expected or asked to receive a larger number of emigrants than was foreseen by its existing legislation was rather puzzling as this existing legislation was one of the very obstacles which the prospective immigrant had to face. It furthermore was not clear from the invitation issued by the United States what the scope of the work of the Committee should be and whether its deliberations should be confined to the situation created by the action of Germany in Germany proper and in Austria, or whether they should extend to the question of refugees generally.' 12
Equally difficult to understand was the following agenda of the Conference proposed by the United States Government on the 14th June 13 :
1. To consider what steps can be taken to facilitate the settlement in other counties of political refugees from Germany (including Austria). The term ΓÇ£political refugeesΓÇ¥ for the purposes of the present meeting, is intended to include persons who desire to leave Germany as well as those who have already done so. The conference would, of course, take due account of the work now being done by other agencies in this field and would seek means of supplementing the work done by them.
2. To consider what immediate steps can be taken, within the existing immigration laws and regulations of the receiving countries, to assist the most urgent cases. It is anticipated that this would involve each participating government furnishing, in so far as may be practicable, for the strictly confidential information of the Committee, a statement of its immigration laws and practices and its present policy regarding the reception of immigrants. It would be helpful for the committee to have a general statement from each participating government of the number and type of immigrants it is now prepared to receive or that it might consider receiving.
3. To consider a system of documentation, acceptable to the participating states, for chose refugees who are unable to obtain requisite documents from other sources.
4. To consider the establishment of a continuing body of governmental representatives, to be set up in some European capital, to formulate and to carry out, in co-operation with existing agencies, a long-range program looking forward to the solution or alleviation of the problem in the larger sense.
5. To prepare a Resolution making recommendations to the participating governments with regard to the subjects enumerated above and with regard to such other subjects as may be brought for consideration before the intergovernmental meeting.' 14
References:
1. James G. Macdonald, American diplomat (1887ΓÇô1964), first High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany of the League of Nations 1935ΓÇô35.
2. Sir Neill Malcolm (1869ΓÇô1953), second High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany of the League of Nations 1936ΓÇô38.
3. London, 27th December, 1935. See Norman Bentwich, The Refugees from Germany 1933ΓÇô1935 , Allen & Unwin, London 1936, p. 219.
4. Foreign Relations of the United States ΓÇô 1938, Washington 1955, vol. I, pp. 740ΓÇô741.
5. Ibid.
6. Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety , Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia 1948, p. 201.
7. Foreign Relations ΓÇô 1938 , vol. I, p. 752.
8. Department of State Press Release, April 2, 1946.
9. See below.
10.Arthur D. Morse, While Six Millions Died , Secker & Warburg, London 1968.
11.S. Adler-Rudel, Das Auswanderungsproblem im Jahre 1938, Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts , 38ΓÇô39 (1967), pp. 159ΓÇô215.
12.Sir John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem , Oxford University Press, London 1939, p. 223.
13. Foreign Relation ΓÇô 1938 , vol. I, p. 748.
14. Proceedings of the Intergovernmental Committee , Evian, July 6th to 15th, 1938. Verbatim Record of the Plenary Meetings of the Committee. Resolutions and Reports. London July 1938, p. 8.
