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

converting Jewish firms into Aryan enterprises. 38 1,000-1,500 Jews besieged the
American Consulate in Vienna per day in their quest for immigration visas following the
Reich Marshal’s speech and warning. 39
Dr. Leo Lauterbach, the London based Director of the World Zionist Organization
(WZO) and a secretary of the Zionist Executive, reported from Vienna to the Executive
of the WZO on April 29, 1938 that the new policies within Austria appeared to be
“essentially different from that adopted in Germany” and threatened the “complete
annihilation of Austrian Jewry” by their exclusion from “economic life,” the deprivation
of “all their financial resources” and their ultimate starvation or forced expulsion
“without means,” dependent upon Jewish charity and the “help of such countries as may
be willing to receive them.” 40
A petition was submitted to the Executive Council of the
League of Nations in Geneva calling for an end to the “martyrdom of Austrian Jews” and
warned that failure to intervene would result in suicides. 41
The international press reported that “plunderings, beatings, arrests and
dispossessions were only a forerunner of a more drastic persecution” to come. 42
“Brutal
terrorism” awaited every Austrian regardless of “class or creed” who stood for national
independence. The Jews in Austria were destined to be subjected to “unrelenting
38 Miami Herald, March 27, 1938, 1.
39 Washington Post, March 29, 1938, 10.
40 Leo Lauterbach, “The Situation of the Jews in Austria, April, 1938,” London Zionist Archives, S5/653
available from http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/documents/part1/doc43.html; Internet;
accessed October 8, 2010. Lauterbach was one of the Zionist co-founders of the post-Great War Polish
Zionist student movement, Agudat Herzl. He was an attorney and later general secretary of the leadership
committee of the World Zionist Organization and director of its organizational committee.
41 Tampa Tribune, March 23, 1938, 1.
42 Washington Post, March 15, 1938, 4.
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