Evian Conference
At the Évian Conference , which met from July 6 to 15, 1938 on the initiative of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt , the representatives of 32 states and 24 aid organizations discussed the problem of the rapidly increasing refugee numbers of Jews from Germany and Austria .
As Switzerland feared that a meeting at the seat of the League of Nations in Geneva could strain its relationship with National Socialist Germany , the delegates met in nearby Évian-les-Bains in France . The conference ended largely unsuccessful as all participating states except the Dominican Republic refused to accept more Jewish refugees. The Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler exploited the failure of the conference for its anti-Semitic propaganda. Many contemporary witnesses and historians see Evian as a moral failure of the western democracies , since a different outcome could have saved many Jews from murder in the Holocaust .
initial situation
After the takeover of the Nazis in Germany, the number of Jewish began emigrants to increase sharply since 1,933th Despite the economic crisis in the host countries, many found political asylum. Although the situation for the Jews in Germany became more and more difficult, especially as a result of the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, and the willingness to leave the country increased, the willingness to accept Jews in the destination countries decreased. In November 1937, the British issued rigid restrictions on admission to this area to calm the social situation in Palestine , although the Balfour Declaration promised Jews there in principle a “national home”.
Practical refugee aid in those years was largely in the hands of the so-called Nansen Office ( International Nansen Office for Refugee Affairs ), which had been set up by the League of Nations in 1931 . The High Commission for Refugees from Germany was set up in Lausanne in 1933 especially for German emigrants .
Since in 1938 the flow of refugees from Jewish emigrants from Germany increased again ( since March the Austrian Jews had also been exposed to the persecution of the German government, in April all Jews in Germany were forced to register their property; see regulation on the registration of property of Jews ), It soon became clear that an international agreement was needed to get the increasingly unbearable situation under control. In this situation, the United States took the initiative and proposed a conference. Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations , was initially planned as the location , but Switzerland feared that its relationship with its German neighbors would be impaired, so that France finally agreed to allow the conference to take place on its territory in Évian.
At the invitation of the President of the United States ( Myron C. Taylor as negotiator), the following countries were represented, mostly by their delegates to the League of Nations: Great Britain ( Lord Winterton ), France ( Henri Bérenger ), the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland ( Heinrich Rothmund ), Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and almost all Central and South American countries. Poland and Romania sent observers. Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were not invited. Many private aid organizations and press representatives also took part.
Course and outcome of the conference
Originally the only thought was to regulate the situation of the Jews who emigrated from Germany. Nationalist and anti-Semitic representatives of Eastern European countries in particular quickly recognized the opportunity to point out their respective “Jewish problem”. This meant that the possible target countries were faced with the prospect of not only accepting 500,000 German Jewish refugees, but possibly also several million Jews from Eastern Europe. The initial humanitarian impulse thus faded into the background and “Jews” were now largely viewed as a “problem”. Another disadvantage for the Jewish refugees was that none of the leading representatives of the World Zionist Organization was present.
It soon became clear that most countries were not receptive enough. For example, several conference participants stated that their country was in principle not a country of immigration , others pointed out that they could only allow the transit of Jewish refugees; Incidentally, further immigration would only give a further boost to anti-Semitism. The United States was unwilling to increase its quota of 27,370 immigrants from Germany and Austria annually.
There were various plans for the settlement of Jewish settlers, for example in the Birobidzhan Autonomous Region established by the Soviet Union or in the Portuguese colony of Angola . An unauthorized newspaper report from South Africa named Madagascar as a possible refuge. In fact, these projects, which aimed to push the Jewish refugees as far as possible from the field of vision of the industrialized countries , were hardly practicable. The attempt by the dictator of the Dominican Republic , Rafael Trujillo , represented at the conference by his brother, to make a name for himself by allowing his country to allow 100,000 Jews to immigrate (see Sosúa ) is one of these projects because of his questioned motives : He was accused of trying to divert attention from his reign of terror. In addition, racist motives are behind the decision, since Trujillo is about strengthening the “white” element in his country through immigration (in fact, only 600 Jews came to the Dominican Republic). 15,000 Jews escaped to China until emigration was no longer possible due to the war that had started.
Ultimately, the only concrete result was the establishment of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees , also called Comité d'Évian , which in future was to regulate the modalities of German Jewish emigration in cooperation with Germany. Its successes were limited due to the refusal of the international community to accept German Jews within the framework of concrete new contingents. In addition, the attack on Poland in the following year drastically reduced the possibilities of emigration. The conference showed that the participating states were “unwilling to take a comprehensive stand for the persecuted Jews”.
Historical classification
How many Jews could have been saved from extermination by the National Socialists in the Holocaust had the conference ended successfully is a hypothetical question that cannot be definitively answered. The construction of mass extermination camps like Auschwitz , which took place only two years later in occupied Poland , was neither foreseeable nor imaginable in 1938. Nevertheless, the governments of the participating states knew that the Jews in Germany and Austria had been almost completely disenfranchised and that even then thousands of them had been murdered or driven to their deaths.
Whether the international community failed because of its unwillingness to accept it in Évian is assessed differently by historians. The thesis of the Swiss historian Ralph Weingarten that “all the peoples of the world were also fully complicit in the final solution and its extent” has been vigorously contradicted. Accordingly, Weingarten interprets the story from the end and puts perpetrators and outsiders on the same level. Walther Hofer argued that he was ultimately playing down the National Socialist responsibility.
There is broad consensus that the outcome of the conference represented a moral disaster. What this consisted of becomes clear from the comparison of two contemporary statements. The “ Völkische Beobachter ” published a malicious comment after the conference: Germany is offering its Jews to the world, but nobody wants them. The commentator insinuated that the conference participants were acting as anti-Semitic as their own regime. Conference observer Golda Meïr, on the other hand, saw the real failure in the delegates' inability to grasp the size and urgency of the problem. She later wrote: “Sitting in this wonderful hall, listening to the representatives of 32 countries standing up one after the other and explaining how terribly they would like to take in a larger number of refugees and how terribly sorry they are that they unfortunately cannot do that , was a harrowing experience. [...] I felt like getting up and shouting at them all: Don't you know that these damn 'numbers' are human beings, people who have to spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps or on the run around the globe like lepers, if you don't take them up? "
Attendees
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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.svg){kind=small} 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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.svg){kind=small} Haiti
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.svg){kind=small} Honduras
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 Ireland
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.svg){kind=small} 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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.svg){kind=small} Paraguay
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.svg){kind=small} 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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.svg){kind=small} Venezuela
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Other delegations
| organization | Representative |
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| High Commissioner 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 colonization 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
- Center de recherches de solutions au problem 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
- 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
- Committee for the Development of Great Jewish Colonization, Zurich
- League of Nations Union , London
- New Zionist Organization , London
- LOCATION , Paris
- Royal Institute of International Affairs , London
- Swiss Aid Center for Refugees, Basel
- Service international de migration, Geneva
- Service universitaire international, Geneva
- Société d'émigration et de colonization juive Emcol , Paris
- Society for the Protection of Sciences and Studies, London
- Union des Sociétés OSE, Paris
- World Jewish Congress , Paris
See also
- Bermuda Conference , April 19, 1943
- Madagascar map
- Rublee Wohlthat Plan
Individual evidence
- ↑ Magnus Brechtken: Madagascar for the Jews . Munich 1997, p. 217.
- ↑ Shmuel Ettinger: From the 17th Century to the Present. The modern age (= history of the Jewish people , edited by Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson ). CH Beck, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-406-07223-2 , p. 367.
- ↑ Ralph Weingarten: The assistance of the western world in the final solution of the German Jewish question ... , Bern u. a. 1983, p. 204.
- ↑ Magnus Brechtken: "Madagascar for the Jews ..." , Munich 1997, p. 195.
- ↑ Walther Hofer: Levels of the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich . In: Herbert Strauss; Norbert Kampe (Ed.): Anti-Semitism. From hostility towards Jews to the Holocaust . Bonn 1995, p. 185.
- ↑ History of HICEM (English; PDF; 31 kB)
literature
- Magnus Brechtken : "Madagascar for the Jews". Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945 . Oldenbourg, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-486-56240-1 ( Studies on Contemporary History 53), (At the same time: Bonn, Univ., Diss., 1995)
- Hans Jansen: The Madagascar Plan. The intended deportation of European Jews to Madagascar . Herbig, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-7844-2605-0 .
- Michael Marrus : Evian. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 289-295.
- Jochen Thies : Évian 1938. When the world betrayed the Jews . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2017, ISBN 978-3-83751-909-9 .
- Ralph Weingarten: The assistance of the western world in the final solution of the German Jewish question. The Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees (IGC) 1938–1939 . 2nd Edition. Lang, Bern a. a. 1983, ISBN 3-261-04939-1 ( European university publications , series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences 157), (only a brief excerpt has been viewed).
Fiction processing
- Hans Habe: Die Mission , Naumann & Göbel, Cologne, approx. 1990 (first edition: Munich, Desch 1965), ISBN 3-625-20162-3 .