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

later. 156 Skran asserted that the Anschluss, coupled with the failure of the Evian
Conference and the November 1938 pogrom transformed a “manageable refugee flow
into an uncontrollable flood”; a situation worsened by the expropriatory practices of the
Nazis conjoined with rising nationalism and increasingly restrictive immigration policies
within many Continental powers. 157 Expressions of international sympathy without
meaningful actions demonstrated to the Nazi leadership that Western rhetoric would not
interfere with the German handling of the Jewish Question. Prior to Evian Jews faced
increasing levels of discrimination and economic and civil disenfranchisements but the
post-Evian period was marked by mass deportations, forced relocations and wide-ranging
pogroms on a nationwide scale. The Nazis realized that little interference could be
expected from the democratic nations in their drive to make Greater Germany jüdenrein.
The Reich Government was determined to become free of its internal Jewish
menace but its conflicting policies of forced emigration coupled with economic
marginalization raised formidable and often insurmountable obstacles to overseas
resettlement. Lack of meaningful cooperation with the newly created Intergovernmental
Committee for Political Refugees aggravated the situation. Thus, the Sicherheitsdienst or
Security Service noted that the current rate of Jewish emigration would prevent rapid
resolution of the Jewish Question. 158 Consequently, a more radical and aggressive policy
156 Yitzhak Arad, Reuven Dafni, Gideon Greif and Yehudit Levin, eds., The Pictorial History of the
Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), 314.
157 Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, 53.
158 Karl A. Schleues, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933-1939
(Urbana, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1970), 65.
297