Useful Enemies

A lone New York Times reporter, Anne O’Hare McCormick, sought to challenge Roosevelt, the conference attendees, and the American public. With amazing insight and clarity, she wrote:

It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings around our consulates in Vienna and other cities waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian…. It is not a question of how many unemployed this country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of civilization…. Can America live with itself if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination?

Roosevelt wasn’t listening. His invitation to Evian had reduced the conference to a cruel charade even before the first tap of the gavel. It said in part: “No country would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of immigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.” Having said that, the conference challenged the participating countries to accept more German and Austrian (Jewish) refugees either under their quota systems or current immigration laws, something the United States itself was unwilling to do.

Evian was little more than a ten-day paid vacation at the Royal Hotel, a luxury resort on Lake Geneva. Casino gambling, pleasure cruises on the lake, outings to Chamonix for summer skiing, five-star dining, mineral baths, massages, golf… In the end, the conference turned out to be historic, but not in the way Roosevelt had anticipated or hoped.

Hitler believed that Western democracies were cowardly and hypocritical. Evian proved him right. The United States did not send a single government official, high or low, to represent it at the conference because it didn’t want to antagonize Hitler. Instead, Roosevelt chose a friend, steel tycoon Myron C. Taylor, and gave him the title of “Ambassador Extraordinary Plenipotentiary.” One of Taylor’s mandates was to ban the use of the words German… Hitler… Jew during the conference, to which Third Reich observers had been invited. Roosevelt didn’t want to upset them.

Prior to the conference, the United States and Great Britain struck an under-the-table deal: Britain agreed not to bring up the fact that the United States was not even filling its legal German- Austrian emigration quota, if America would not propose that Palestine accept more Jews. As a result, the word Palestine was added to the list of verboten words. Also verboten would be any mention of the fact that out of its 1938 combined German-Austrian emigration quota of 27,370, the United States had only granted 18,000 visas so far that year. Of course, any Jew from these two countries could apply for a visa at the appropriate U.S. consulate. But there was a hitch. The United States required a certificate of good conduct from the German police from whom the Jews were fleeing.

Ambassador Taylor tried to put a positive spin on U.S. reluctance to admit more refugees. He promised that more German and Austrian refugees would be accepted under its existing quota and that U.S. consuls would be instructed to make it easier for them to acquire visas. In effect, the United States offered nothing. Taylor was hoping, of course, that countries with large territories and small populations, like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, would open their borders.

One by one the conference delegates took the microphone and repeated the same message as if rehearsed before the conference: We are saturated with refugees and, therefore, regrettably cannot accept any more; we are willing to accept refugees as long as they are agricultural experts (by law there were no Jewish farmers in Germany and Austria); and we already have too many merchants and intellectuals and, regretfully, cannot accept any more (thus eliminating most Jews). Although the underlying anti-Semitism in the country-by-country refusal was unspoken in most instances, it was blatant in the responses of several countries:

• Australia said it currently had no real racial problem and was not eager to import one.

• Brazil said it would accept refugees if a Christian baptismal certificate were attached to the visa application.

• Great Britain promised to accept refugee children but not their parents out of fear of an anti-Semitic backlash. It did eventually accept nine thousand Jewish children.

• New Zealand noted its policy of admitting only immigrants of British birth or heritage. Since the conference invitation said participating countries were not expected to change their immigration laws, New Zealand said it wouldn’t.

• Switzerland brazenly stated that it had as little use for Jews as Germany had and promised to adopt measures to protect Switzerland from being swamped by Jewish refugees. Switzerland would soon require all German Jewish passports to be stamped with a large J.

None of the Evian attendees seemed to understand the scope of the refugee problem confronting them. It was not just about a few thousand homeless German and Austrian Jews. It was about the soon-to-be millions of homeless non-Jewish refugees who were certain to overwhelm Europe. As one analyst at the time put it: “Viewed as a whole… this potential problem is vast and almost unimaginable.”

The conference ended with a resolution to establish a permanent Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees to study the problem and design a framework to deal with it. The only one who thought Evian was a success was Myron Taylor, who reported to the State Department: “I am satisfied that we accomplished the purpose for which… the meeting at Evian was called.”

The Evian Conference was a bonanza for the Third Reich. The pro-Nazi German press interpreted it as a tacit approval of the Reich’s handling of the Jewish problem. And Hitler laughed all the way to Auschwitz. Evian only proved what Hitler had suspected all along: He could do anything he wanted to European Jews and the Western democracies would turn a blind eye. To some Jewish observers, Evian had become “Hitler’s Green Light to Genocide.”

No one explained the Jewish perception of Evian clearer or better than Golda Meir, a conference observer who would later become prime minister of Israel. In her memoir, My Life, she wrote with great angst:

I don’t think that anyone who didn’t live through it can understand what I felt at Evian—a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror. I wanted to get up and scream at them all. “Don’t you know that these numbers are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps or wandering around the world like lepers, if you won’t let them in?”

In sum, the Evian Conference of July 1938 betrayed the Jews who trusted in world humanity, rendered them worse off than before, and opened the door to genocide. As one Jewish analyst put it: The thirty-two countries met, ostensibly, to help the Jews out of the jaws of the German beast; instead they tossed them to the sharks.

Four months after Evian, the Nazis celebrated Kristallnacht, during which thousands of Jewish businesses and shops were destroyed, hundreds beaten to within an inch of their lives, and hundreds more imprisoned and killed. Hitler was right. The world responded to Kristallnacht as it did at Evian—with shock, condemnation, and no action.

In May of the following year, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis steamed down the Elbe River into the North Atlantic. Flags were flapping in the wind and well-wishers waved from the Hamburg pier. On board the eight-deck ship were 938 paying passengers, all but one of whom were Jews fleeing Germany for their lives. They had all purchased landing permits from the Cuban government. Several had relatives, spouses, or children waiting for them in Havana. Most were on the waiting list for visas to the United States and planned to stay in Cuba until America granted them entry.

The voyage was a setup. Cuba had no intention of letting them off the ship. Caving in to anti-Semitic pressure, Cuban president Federico Laredo Bru signed “Decree 938” eight days before the ship departed Germany. The decree invalidated the landing permits. No one had told the passengers.

It was more than hiding the truth. The Reich was playing an espionage game and the St. Louis passengers were its pawns. Havana was the center of German intelligence and espionage activities directed against the United States. Nazi intelligence officers there had purchased top-secret documents detailing U.S. submarine designs and needed a way to smuggle them into Germany. The plan was simple: A Nazi agent, planted as a St. Louis crewman, would disembark in Havana, rendezvous with a Nazi intelligence agent there, carry the documents back to the ship, and deliver them to Berlin as soon as the St. Louis returned to Hamburg with its Jewish cargo.

Over and above the espionage payoff was the PR factor. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels couldn’t