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

Nobody was prepared for it, neither the members of the Committee, nor
the representatives of the various organizations who had to queue up at
the door of the meeting room to be called in, one after the others, and to
face the 11 members of the Subcommittee, [to] whom they were
supposed to tell their tale within ten minutes at the most. 9
The second technical sub-committee, chaired by Norwegian Judge Hansson, the
director of the Nansen Office, began closed door hearings on the immigration laws and
practices of participating nations, the qualifications and numbers of refugees that could
be accepted and the issue of travel documentation and identification papers. The U.S.
was represented by George Brandt and together with E.N. Cooper of the British Home
Office did the bulk of the work and prepared the final report. During Brandt’s July 8
presentation of American immigration policies he was “roundly attacked” by Sir Neill
Malcolm who complained that if the United States was not prepared to modify its
immigration laws rather than merely merging the annual German and Austrian quotas
then the President should not have initiated an international refugee conference. Taylor
viewed Malcolm’s attitude throughout the Conference as one of “open hostility” and
described the High Commissioner as a “semi-invalid” who performed his office for the
League only when he could “spare time from his duties as head of the North Borneo
Company.” Instead, he credited Malcolm’s Turkish assistant, Mr. Tevfik Erim (a member
of the Political Section of the League Secretariat) and Lord Duncannon with the majority
of the High Commission’s refugee work. Malcolm’s chief attribute, Taylor believed, lay
in his blind obedience to the dictates of the British Foreign Office and the League
9 Adler-Rudel, “Evian Conference,” 255. Solomon Adler-Rudel was born in Czernowitz, Austria-
Hungary on June 23, 1894 and worked as a social worker in Vienna and Berlin. During 1933-1936 he
served as executive secretary of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden and was an executive committee
member of the Zionistische Vereinigung fuer Deutschland. He immigrated to the United Kingdom in 1936
and to Israel in 1949. He served in a variety of posts including the association of Jewish Refugees, the
World Zionist Organization and the Leo Baeck Institute and died on November 14, 1975.
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