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

significant obstacles in the paths of the refugees and claimed that the Administration had
called for the conference “lest these victims of persecution be exterminated.” 114
Theodore C. Achilles, a State Department official and member of the U.S. delegation,
attributed the failure of the meeting to the simple fact that “nobody wants any more
Jews.” 115
Yepes, the Columbian delegate, compared the character of the Evian
Conference to that of a “modern wailing wall.” 116 New York department store Ira
Hirschmann, who attended the conference as an observer, left early after becoming
convinced that the senselessness and indolence of the meeting was a “façade behind
which the civilized governments could hide their inability to act.” 117
A German plan to ransom forty thousand Jews ($200-400/head and evacuated
by August 1) as a means of raising foreign capital was conveyed unofficially by an
eminent Jewish Viennese physician, Dr. Heinrich von Neumann, but failed due to moral
objections to “head money” and resistance of potential countries of refuge to allocate the
necessary funds. 118 Bérenger met with Neumann and would take his plan “under
114 Cordell Hull, Memoirs (NY: Macmillan Company, 1948), vol. 1, 578 cited in Arnold A. Offner,
American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1969), 88.
115 Peter Wyden, Stella (NY: Anchor Books, 1992), 63.
116 “Proceedings,” July 9, 1938, 25.
117 Ira Hirschman, Lifeline to a Promised Land (NY: Vanguard Press, 1946), 102 cited in Feingold,
Politics of Rescue, 33.
118 Wyden, Stella, 63. Dr. Neumann gained prominence after treating the Duke of Windsor for an ear
problem and later served as the central figure of a novel about the conference, The Mission, written by
Hans Habe in 1966. Von Neumann’s professional relationship with FDR advisor Bernard Baruch resulted
in the granting of an entry visa outside of the annual quota to the doctor and his family as well as a possible
meeting with Myron Taylor at the Evian Conference. The rescue of Von Neumann represented the system
of Protektion in which the elite would act to rescue individuals of note. The famous Viennese psychiatrist,
Dr. Sigmund Freud, represented another example of such salvation, aided by British Dr. Ernest Jones, the
British Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and U.S. Ambassador to France William C. Bullitt and Secretary
of State Cordell Hull and FDR himself. Wyden, Stella, 64.
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