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

proven to be] pathetically inadequate.” Ominously and presciently he warned, “Only the
catastrophic techniques of war and civil war would remain.” 77
Robert Gellately maintained that Germany could not be swayed by issues of
morality and “far from shaming the Nazis into relenting” the Evian Conference and its
evident impotency merely encouraged the regime to adopt more radical approaches to
solving the Jewish Question. 78 Norman Neimark described the Conference as a “tragic
failure” and concluded that any “protestations” regarding the difficulties or undesirability
of accepting stateless refugees was underpinned by a global anti-Semitism that “played a
central role” in the ultimate failure of the Conference. 79
Rabbi Jonah B. Wise, the National Chairman of the Joint Distribution
Committee and private observer at the proceedings of the Evian Conference, however,
lauded the actions of Myron C. Taylor. Despite the reticence of the various delegations
to agree to modification of their respective immigration laws and policies Wise opposed
any lessening of American immigration requirements for German and Austrian refugees.
If the aid provided by the JDC and other relief organizations for those “escaping
oppression…interfere[d] with helping Americans, then we wouldn’t do it.” He noted that
the JDC provided more aid funding for use within the United States than for foreign
relief. 80
77 Oscar Jászi, “Political Refugees” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
203, Refugees (May 1939): 93.
78 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (NY: Vintage Books,
2008), 323.
79 Norman M. Neimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 68.
80 “Our Needy First, J.B. Wise Asserts,” New York Times, July 21, 1938, 10.
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