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

Chapter 14
Ominous Tidings
Conclusions: The “Unintended Signal”
The Holocaust was certainly a Jewish tragedy. But it was not only a Jewish tragedy. It was also a
Christian tragedy, a tragedy for Western civilization, and a tragedy for all humankind. 1
Although the democracies cannot be blamed for the Holocaust it was evidently
clear that the resistance of the Evian Conference attendees and their respective
governments to accept the stateless refugees would lead to drastic consequences. The
failure of the Talks marked a “turning point” towards a more radical solution in Nazi
Jewish policies. It was obvious to contemporaries that Jews could no longer remain
within the Reich and that the “need for rescue was painfully clear” but any “opportunity
was lost” by October 1941. 2
Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned in
October 1938 that Jews faced an existential threat and that unless “we do not move
mountains” the Jews of Germany were doomed to the same fate as the Armenians of the
Ottoman Empire during the Great War. 3
A memorandum was dispatched from the State Department to the Foreign
Ministry in Berlin formally advising the German Government that the Evian Conference
had resulted in the creation of the Inter-Governmental Committee whose stated purpose
1 Wyman, Abandonment, xvi.
2 Wyman, Paper Walls, vii-viii.
3 Yair Auron, Zionism and the Armenian Genocide: The Banality of Indifference (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2003), 28.
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