The Évian Conference: When the World Said No

In July 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries gathered at the Hôtel Royal, a grand resort overlooking Lake Geneva in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains. They had come, at the invitation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to address one of the most urgent humanitarian questions of the decade: what to do about the hundreds of thousands of Jews desperate to leave Nazi Germany and newly annexed Austria. Over nine days of speeches, the world's democracies each explained, in careful diplomatic language, why they could not take them in.

The Évian Conference produced no quotas, no new visas, and no rescue. It is remembered today less for what it did than for what it revealed: that in the summer of 1938, with the persecution of German and Austrian Jews plain for all to see, the nations of the world knew what was happening and chose to keep their doors closed.

Why Évian Happened

The crisis that brought the delegates to Évian had been building for five years. Since Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany's roughly 525,000 Jews had been stripped of their livelihoods, their citizenship, and their place in public life. About 150,000 had already emigrated. Then, on 12 March 1938, German troops marched into Austria. The Anschluss placed a further 190,000 Jews under Nazi rule overnight, and the violence in Vienna was immediate and public. Jews were dragged from their homes and forced to scrub the pavements on their hands and knees while crowds looked on. Thousands queued outside foreign consulates seeking any visa to anywhere.

Within two weeks of the Anschluss, Roosevelt proposed an international conference on the refugee problem. The gesture was widely praised. But the invitation carried two conditions that shaped everything that followed. No country would be expected to receive more immigrants than its existing laws already permitted, and the cost of resettlement would fall on private organizations rather than governments. The United States, in other words, was asking the world to act while promising in advance that it would not change its own quota system, which at the time admitted a maximum of 27,370 people a year from Germany and Austria combined.

Germany itself was not invited. Italy declined to attend. The conference would be a meeting of the democracies, talking among themselves about a problem the Nazi state had created and was watching with interest.

Nine Days at the Hôtel Royal

The conference opened on 6 July 1938. Roosevelt did not send his Secretary of State or a senior diplomat. The American delegation was led by Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and former chairman of U.S. Steel, whose opening address called for concerted action while making clear that the United States would do no more than fill its existing quota. Britain, represented by Lord Winterton, refused to allow Palestine to be discussed at all, and stated that the United Kingdom was not a country of immigration. France's delegate, Henry Bérenger, announced that his country had reached "the extreme point of saturation."

The pattern repeated itself around the table. Australia's representative, T. W. White, declared that "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one." Canada's delegation made no offer; a senior Canadian official, asked how many Jews the country should admit, is recorded as replying "none is too many." Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands expressed concern about being used as transit countries. Latin American states cited economic hardship. Delegate after delegate expressed sympathy for the refugees and regret that their own nation was, for reasons of unemployment, geography or social cohesion, unable to help.

Only one government made a substantial offer. The Dominican Republic, under the dictator Rafael Trujillo, announced that it would accept up to 100,000 refugees. The motives were mixed and the logistics daunting; in the end only around 750 Jewish refugees settled at the agricultural colony of Sosúa. But it remains the sole concrete pledge to emerge from Évian.

Representatives of thirty-nine private and Jewish relief organizations had travelled to Évian to plead the refugees' case. They were granted brief hearings before a sub-committee and had no vote. Among the observers was Golda Meir, then a delegate from the Jewish community in Palestine, who was permitted to listen but not to speak. She later wrote of sitting in that ornate room, hearing the delegates of thirty-two countries explain how much they wished they could help, and feeling a mixture of sorrow, rage and frustration she would never forget.

What the Conference Produced

The conference closed on 15 July with the creation of a single new body, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, to be based in London under the American lawyer George Rublee. Its mandate was to negotiate with Germany over an orderly emigration and to find countries of settlement. The Committee had no funds of its own, no authority over any government's immigration policy, and no leverage over Berlin. Rublee spent months in talks with Nazi officials over a scheme that would have allowed Jews to leave in exchange for a large share of their confiscated property being used to finance German exports. The plan collapsed with the outbreak of war in September 1939, having rescued almost no one.

The Nazi leadership drew its own conclusions. German newspapers reported the conference with open satisfaction. Hitler had said in March that he could only hope the countries so full of sympathy for the Jews would be generous enough to turn that sympathy into practical aid; now the Nazi press could point out that none of them had. The German Foreign Office noted in an internal circular that the democracies had confirmed what Germany had long argued: that no one wanted the Jews.

The Months That Followed

Évian did not cause what came next, but it removed any remaining illusion that the outside world would intervene. Four months after the delegates left the Hôtel Royal, on the night of 9–10 November 1938, the Kristallnacht pogrom swept across Germany and Austria. Hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish businesses destroyed, and some 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The pressure to emigrate became a matter of immediate survival.

Some doors opened a little. Britain agreed to admit unaccompanied Jewish children, and the Kindertransport eventually brought nearly 10,000 to safety; their parents, for the most part, were left behind. In the United States, a bill to admit 20,000 German refugee children above the quota was introduced in Congress in early 1939 and died without a vote. In June 1939 the liner St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees, was turned away from Cuba and the United States and forced to return to Europe. By the time emigration from the Reich was banned in October 1941, roughly half of Germany's and two-thirds of Austria's Jews had managed to leave. Those who remained were trapped.

Why Évian Still Matters

Historians are careful not to overstate what Évian could have achieved. No conference in 1938 could have foreseen the systematic murder that began in 1941, and even a generous outcome would have saved a fraction of those later killed across occupied Europe. But the conference marks a moment when rescue was possible on a scale that later became unthinkable. The people seeking to leave Germany and Austria in 1938 were not yet in ghettos or camps. They needed only a visa.

Évian is remembered because it shows how catastrophe is enabled not only by those who commit it but by those who decline to act when action is still cheap. The delegates were not monsters. They were officials answering to electorates worried about jobs, wary of foreigners, and inclined to believe that the problem belonged to someone else. That is what makes the conference an uncomfortable and necessary subject for education today. The question it poses is not what the Nazis did, but what everyone else was prepared to do about it.