Evian Is Everywhere

You may have read about German Captain Carola Rakete of Sea-Watch 3, a rescue ship, who defied the Italian government ban and eventually docked at the port of Lampedusa. On-board dozens of African migrants rescued from distress. She committed the desperate measure following a two-week odyssey in the Mediterranean with many people on board being sick.

It was like the year 1939 reloaded when the steamer St. Louis with 927 Jewish refugees tried in vain to moor in the New World for weeks. Neither the US nor Cuba opened their ports. Eventually, the ship had to return to Europe, where at least 254 of the former passengers died in Nazi extermination camps.

This so-called Journey of the Damned had been preceded by the Evian Conference of 1938. The conference followed an appeal by President Roosevelt to help persecuted Germans and Austrian Jews leave the Großdeutsches Reich. Initially, the meeting was scheduled in Geneva at the headquarters of the League of Nations. However, Switzerland insisted on relocating it to the French side of Lake Geneva in order not to annoy the increasingly threatening Nazi Germany.

On July 6, 1938, representatives of 32 states met at the noble hotel "Royal" in the French lakeside resort of Évian-Les-Bains. They discussed the fate of about 550,000 people, 350,000 German and 200,000 Austrian Jews. The prominent three negotiators were: American Conference President and a friend of Roosevelt, Myron Charles Taylor, the French ambassador and a man with literary ambitions, Henry Victor Bérenger, and British emissary and conservative parliamentarian Edward Turnour Earl of Winterton. These gentlemen mimed empathy followed by long laments.

For the Nazis, Bolshevism was Jewish as well as international finance.

Taylor reminded the participants that the US was still feeling the consequences of the great depression; therefore, the quota of 27,370 emigrants from Germany and Austria per year would remain fixed.

Lord Winterton said," Great Britain is not a country of immigration. Asylum can only be granted within narrow limits," sparing out the mandated territory of Palestine, the destination and port of longing of many Jewish emigrants in the 1930s. But given the conflicts in the Middle East, the British did not want to spoil it with the Arabs.

Bérenger mentioned the already hosted foreigners and whined," France, despite its long liberal tradition, has reached, if not exceeded, an absolute saturation point concerning the admission of refugees."

These statements revealed all the flimsiness of the argumentation, which determined the conference climate: Yes, the fate of the German and Austrian Jews was pathetic, they had to be helped in the face of inhuman persecution, but a great BUT always followed suit.

Delegates from other countries sang the same tune. Sir Thomas Walter White, the Australian Chief Delegate, said, "It will undoubtedly be understood that we, who have no real racial problem, do not wish to introduce such a problem in our country."

Heinrich Rothmund, Swiss Chief Delegate and Chief of the Federal Aliens Police, stated, "Switzerland has just as little use for these Jews as Germany. In collaboration with the Vienna [Nazi!] police, we will take measures to protect Switzerland from being inundated with Jews."

Golda Meir, later Prime Minister of Israel, was a more than critical observer from Palestine. She said, "It was a terrible experience to sit in the magnificent hall and watch delegates from thirty-two countries rise one after the other and declare that they would have liked to receive a considerable number of refugees but regrettably were unable to do so."

"Only those who have gone through similar experiences can understand the feelings that filled me in Evian - a mixture of sorrow, anger, frustration, and horror. I would have liked to have jumped up and screamed, 'Don't you know that these numbers are human beings? If you don't take them, they may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps or wander around the world like lepers.' "

As expected, the conference results were more than meager; vague declarations of intent, otherwise only the establishment of a refugee council in London. The Intergovernmental Committee of Refugees was to negotiate with Germany the modalities of an orderly exodus of the Jews, including permission to take their goods with them.

Nazi party rally at Berlin's Sportpalast

But the Nazi government immediately categorically rejected this; it would have restricted the greedy grip on Jewish property. The Nazi press cheered the results of the Evian conference. The Völkischer Beobachter commented," Nobody wants them." The paper continued that the participants had taken precautions at the meeting "to protect themselves from an influx of Jewish immigrants because the disadvantages of Jewishization had been clearly recognized."

This indeed was echoed in 1939 by a high-ranking Canadian immigration officer commenting on the reception of Jews in Canada, "None is too many."

All photos and some written material were taken from an article by Hans-Peter Föhrding: Als die Welt sich abwandte (When the world turned its back), published in Der Spiegel in July 2018.

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