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

conference.” The term “Jews” was substituted by “political emigrants” and Taylor made
it absolutely clear that the United States would not pursue any changes in its immigration
laws or assume any financial burdens nor did it expect any other nation to do otherwise.
The listening audience could not misinterpret the “full impact” of these words and the
effect it would undoubtedly have on the other representatives and their respective
governments. Lord Winterton expressed similar sentiments and dealt a “second blow”
against a successful conference essentially “condemning hundreds of thousands to
death.” 84 William D. Rubinstein concluded that large-scale rescue of Jews during the
Holocaust was not possible “given what was actually known…what was actually
proposed and what was realistically possible” and labeled any criticism of Roosevelt and
the Allies as “inaccurate and misleading, their arguments illogical and ahistorical.” He
described governmental refugee policies during 1933-1940 as “remarkably generous.” 85
William J. vanden Heuven, president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
Institute, had written that American Jews at that time “knew that they never had a better
friend, a more sympathetic leader in the White House [who] opened the offices of
government as never before to Jews.” Roosevelt had to contend with a divided and
economically troubled nation, filled with “profound isolationist sentiments” and
“disillusion” with involvement in European affairs after the Great War. The President, he
maintained, needed to focus on the Hitlerian threat, called for the quarantine of aggressor
84 Perl, The Holocaust Conspiracy, 38-40, 44, 46.
85 William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews
from the Nazis (NY: Rutledge, 1997), X.
340