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

through” due to lack of adequate funding. 5
Helen Fein had argued that the limitation of
American action to the consolidation of the German and Austrian annual quotas
implied that the Conference was a simple “exercise in Anglo-American collaborative
hypocrisy.” 6
Harold Ginsburg, the representative of the Joint Distribution Committee noted,
during a June 27, 1938 meeting of the Council for German Jewry, that conversations held
with members of the American delegation to the Evian Conference led him to believe that
the conferees themselves would determine both the goals of and the methodologies
adopted by the meeting. The U.S. delegation preferred that sessions be held in private,
while seeking “unofficial agreements” that would avoid contentious subjects such as the
Jewish problem in Eastern Europe. Dr. Jonas Wise noted that the Presidential Advisory
Committee for Political Refugees, established by Roosevelt, was constituted without a
dialogue with relevant Jewish organizations. In addition, with the exception of Secretary
of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and Bernard Baruch, all of the original selectees were
Christians. Consequently, to those who were monitoring the progress of the Conference it
became readily apparent that “no constructive plan” had been formulated prior to the
convening of the meeting and therefore, it represented “little more than a feeble
improvisation.” 7
Ismar Elbogen and Moses Hadas viewed the Evian Conference as symbolic of
the “complete hopelessness” of the democratic nations of Europe whose representatives
5 “Record of Interdepartmental Meeting on June 30, 1938,” PRO FO 371/22538, W8713/104/98, f. 281
cited in London, Whitehall, 90.
6 Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide (NY: The Free Press, 1979), 167.
7 Adler-Rudel, “The Evian Conference,” 240.
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