The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

weeks prior to the opening of the Evian Conference that the German police had arrested
several thousand people, primarily Jews. These actions were designed to “frighten those
Jews who remain in Germany and thus confirm them in their desire to emigrate.”
Simultaneously, it was a means of “exert[ing] pressure” upon the international
delegations soon to meet on the banks of Lake Geneva. 57
The “civilized nations” owed a “moral obligation” to aid and assist the forced
émigrés but faced the great difficulty of reconciling such obligations with “practical
considerations”: the costs of resettlement, effects upon local economies and jobs and the
fact that the majority of refugees were Jews who were not “universally welcome.”
America, the editorialist believed, approached the Conference with “good intentions” but
was constrained by its existing immigration laws and quotas. The greatest benefit the
United States could offer to enhance the likelihood of the meeting’s success was to
provide funding for resettlement and the creation of an “atmosphere of liberal
mindedness” that would “stimulate” the other attendees to “generous action.” 58
The British journal The Round Table compared the German refugee problem with
that of the Bulgarians and Greeks following the end of the Great War. None of the postwar
refugee problems was “capable of a single radical solution.” The Greeks and
Bulgarians were returning to their national homes whereas the German refugees were
being forcibly expelled and sent onto the world stage as a stateless alien. The first
refugee problem was one of “movements of concentration” while the latter was a
57 “Nazi Round-Up of Jews,” The Times, June 17, 1938, 15 cited in Jonathan Frankel, ed., The Fate of
the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? (Oxford: University Press, 1997), 59.
58 The Glasgow Herald, July 6, 1938, 12.
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