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

1933 Convention on Refugees restricted legal safeguards to earlier groups and
individuals who had already been subsumed under the rubric of “refugee.” The flight of
German Jews and non-Aryans from Hitler’s Germany, in essence, created a new class of
stateless refugees who were devoid of legal status and protections, contradicting
Nansen’s 1926 belief that the international refugee problem would remain limited in
scope and soluble by international agreement. 18 By 1933 the willingness of host nations
to accept additional refugees became increasingly constrained by domestic economic and
political conditions as well as rising nationalism. 19 The League, in a half-hearted attempt
to solve this new refugee crisis, created the High Commissioner for Refugees from
Germany under the chairmanship of James G. McDonald in October 1933 but, in contrast
to the support offered to the Nansen Office High Commissioner for Russian Refugees, all
funding for the new establishment had to be derived from private sources as a means of
placating German hostility towards the League and its activities. 20
The checkered past of prior attempts at international cooperation for the
resettlement of refugees led Franklin Roosevelt to believe that an organization separate
and distinct from the League of Nations was necessary if a solution to the problem of
German refugees was to be found. The High Commission for Refugees Coming from
Germany encountered much resistance and many obstacles to the facilitation of
immigration and did not achieve any meaningful results. The primary tasks of the High
Commissioners were to facilitate and coordinate the resettlement of stateless refugees and
18 Marrus, The Unwanted, 109.
19 Simpson, The Refugee Problem, 139.
20 Louise Wilhelmine Holbom, Philip Chartrand and Rita Chartrand, Refugees: A Problem of Our Time,
vol. 1 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), 14.
65