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

first secretary of the Embassy in Washington, expressed harsh criticism of Hitler and his
regime, categorizing them as betrayers of the “lasting interests of the German
Fatherland…[and] the foe of so many things I had been taught Germany stands for.”
One could not serve the Reich, he argued, if it was necessary to abandon “moral law and
loyalty to the true Germany” while supporting false doctrines of Aryan superiority.
Meyer condemned Nazi anti-Semitism and declared that the German Jew had always
been a “devoted and useful citizen” and to claim otherwise represented “ignorance or
lying.”
The American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, held in
Indianapolis during late December 1937, denounced the suppression of “intellectual
freedom” as “intolerable forms of tyranny.” An earlier resolution, introduced by
physicist Dr. Robert A. Millikan and astronomer Dr. Henry Norris Russell, was
reaffirmed and viewed the “suppression of independent thought and its free expression as
a major crime against civilization itself.” Scientists and all such thinkers were duty
bound to rebuke “all such nations as intolerable forms of tyranny” with whom
compromise was inherently impossible.
On January 17, 1938 a large percentage of leading American publishers
announced that they would withdraw from the annual Leipzig International Congress of
Book Publishers. Such participation, it was felt, would represent a “contradiction of the
very essence of our function as publishers.” They criticized the censorship, banning and
criminalization of the possession of ninety percent of the works of modern German
writers whose works had been translated into English. The German Publishers
Association planned to introduce into the Congress a resolution calling for international
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