European democracies cited economic crisis to refuse Jewish refugees in 1938
In 1938, 32 nations met in France but offered no haven for Jews fleeing Nazism, a diplomatic failure driven by economic excuses that signalled to Berlin that the democratic world would not intervene.
From July 6 to 15, 1938, delegates from 32 countries gathered in Évian, France, to address the plight of half a million Jews persecuted in Nazi Germany and annexed Austria. The initiative, led by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, aimed to secure resettlement based on each nation's population size without altering existing immigration quotas. Instead, the conference produced no meaningful commitments.
European democracies uniformly cited the ongoing economic crisis and high unemployment to justify their inaction. Delegates claimed their economies had no need for displaced professors, doctors, or tradespeople. France declared it had reached "the extreme point of saturation" regarding refugees, while the Netherlands and Switzerland offered only transit visas.
Behind the scenes, Washington and London had already agreed to avoid difficult topics: the US would not mention Palestine as a refuge, and the UK would not point out that America was not filling its own immigration quotas. Outside Europe, Canada accepted only wealthy farmers. Australia's delegate, Thomas White, said: "As we have no real racial problems, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign immigration."
The Nazis had forced the 200,000 Jews who had already left Germany to surrender almost all their assets, intending to export destitution to fuel global resentment. The refusal at Évian confirmed this strategy's effectiveness. As author Jochen Thies later noted, if Britain had offered 120,000 to 150,000 spots and the US 200,000, they could have persuaded Latin American nations to follow suit.
The conference concluded by establishing the powerless Intergovernmental Refugee Committee. Golda Meir, an observer who later became Israel's prime minister, wrote in her memoirs: "Sitting there in that magnificent hall and listening to the delegates of 32 countries rise, each in turn, to explain how much they would have liked to take in substantial numbers of refugees and how unfortunate it was that they were not able to do so, was a terrible experience [...]."
The diplomatic fiasco signalled to Berlin that the world would not protect Jewish people. Four months later, the Nazi regime orchestrated the November Pogroms. A correspondent for The New York Times wrote on July 10, 1938: "It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings docking around our consulates in Vienna and other cities, waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian. But the question they underline is not simply humanitarian. It is not a question of how many more unemployed this country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of civilization." Only individual diplomats, like China's Ho Feng Shan in Vienna who issued visas for Shanghai, broke the rules to offer escape.
