On July 6, 1938, a nine-day forum initiated—though not attended—by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took place in the French town of Évian-les-Bains. Known as the Evian Conference, its purpose was to address the growing plight of the Jews created by the rise and expansion of Nazi Germany.
When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he immediately enacted state-sponsored persecution of Jews, while passing numerous pieces of legislature removing Jews from German society. German Jews were stripped of their citizenship and were banned from marrying non-Jews. Meanwhile German doctors stopped treating Jewish patients while Jewish children were banned from public schools. Eventually, Jews were completely segregated from German cultural, political, social and economic life. When Germany annexed Austria, about 200,000 Austrian Jews became stateless and persecuted.
With nations all of the world shutting their doors to Jewish immigration, the Jews of Germany and Austria had no place to escape the increasingly unbearable life in the Third Reich. Attended by representatives of thirty-two countries and twenty-four voluntary organizations, the conference sought to find a solution for the rapidly increasing number of stateless and persecuted Jews of Europe. Interestingly, all invited countries were assured in advance that they would not be pressured into changing their present refugee admission quotas.
The Evian Conference did not yield any constructive results. Its only achievement could be described as a series of superficial written and oral statements implying a refugee problem that needed a solution. To avoid infuriating the German government, the resolutions failed to mention Germany or the Jews, instead opting for vague language. Statements such as a call to “Consider that the question of involuntary emigration has assumed major proportions and that the fate of the unfortunate people affected has become a problem for intergovernmental deliberation,” deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. The fear to stand up to Hitler’s policies played a major role in the reluctance of the participants of the conference to help the Jews.
Domestic anti-Semitism, from both governments and the general public, played a large role in the inadequacy of the Evian Conference. The British Mandate of Palestine closed its doors to Jews as a result of growing opposition by the local Arab community. Moreover, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced mounting pressure from within the U.S. Congress to prevent Jewish entry in the United States. William Lyon Mackenzie, the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, while stating his desire to “keep this part of the continent free from unrest and from too great an inter-mixture of foreign strains of blood”, had also written in his journal that Hitler was "a reasonable and caring man ... who might be thought of as one of the saviors of the world."
Others, such as the Australian government, stated that mass refugee admission would result in a substantial increase in unemployment, as well as an anti-Semitic response from the local population. The Dominican Republic was the only country that opened its doors to Jewish immigration at time, as it offered to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees. However, between 1940 and 1945, only 645 Jews reached the Dominican Republic.
In fact, Nazi propagandists used the failure of the conference as ammunition. Meanwhile Hitler proclaimed, “It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.”
Nowadays, many historians refer to the Evian Conference as “Hitler’s Green Light for Genocide”. In the Allied countries, those critical of the conference and its lack of results, were quick to point out that Evian became naive when spelled backwards.
