The Evian Conference: When the World Turned Away

A Beautiful Place for an Ugly Truth

In July 1938, delegates from thirty-two nations gathered at the elegant Hotel Royal in Evian-les-Bains, a resort town on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. The setting was beautiful — the Alps rising behind the lake, the summer weather perfect. The purpose was urgent: to address the growing crisis of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

The conference had been called by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the escalating persecution following Germany’s annexation of Austria (the Anschluss) in March 1938. Approximately 150,000 Austrian Jews were now added to the hundreds of thousands of German Jews seeking escape. The question was simple: who would take them?

The answer, delivered over nine days of speeches, was devastating: almost no one.

The Refugee Crisis

By 1938, Nazi Germany had been implementing anti-Jewish legislation for five years. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had stripped Jews of citizenship. Jewish businesses were being “Aryanized” — confiscated and transferred to non-Jews. Jewish professionals were barred from their fields. Violence and harassment were daily realities.

Jews were desperate to leave. But leaving required somewhere to go, and nation after nation had erected barriers to immigration. The United States had strict quota systems. Britain limited immigration to Palestine. European countries cited economic hardship. Latin American nations pleaded inability to absorb refugees. The world was entering the period that historians have called “the closing of doors.”

Roosevelt’s initiative in calling the Evian Conference appeared humanitarian, but the fine print revealed its limitations. The U.S. invitation stipulated that “no country would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.” In other words, the conference was designed from the start to avoid requiring any nation to actually change its policies.

What the Nations Said

One by one, the delegates rose and explained why their countries could not help:

The United States announced that its existing quota for German and Austrian immigrants — approximately 27,000 per year — was already being filled. No increase was offered.

Great Britain expressed sympathy but focused its statement on the economic difficulties of absorbing refugees. It explicitly excluded Palestine from discussion, despite Jewish immigration there being the most obvious solution.

France declared that it had already reached its “saturation point” for refugees.

Australia’s delegate, T.W. White, delivered the conference’s most infamous statement: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.”

Canada, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela — the list went on. Each had reasons why accepting more Jewish refugees was impossible, impractical, or undesirable.

Only one country stepped forward. The Dominican Republic — ruled by the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had his own political reasons — offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees. In practice, only a few hundred ever settled there, in the agricultural colony of Sosúa.

The Jewish Response

Jewish organizations were allowed to present testimony but not to participate as delegates. Golda Meir, then representing the Jewish Agency, attended as an observer. “I wanted to get up and scream at them all,” she later wrote. “I wanted to say, ‘Don’t you know that these so-called numbers are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps?’”

The failure of Evian deepened the conviction among many Jewish leaders — including David Ben-Gurion — that the Jewish people could not depend on the goodwill of other nations. The conference became a powerful argument for Zionism: if no one would take the Jews, then the Jews needed their own state.

The Consequences

The aftermath of Evian was swift and devastating:

Kristallnacht occurred just four months later, on November 9-10, 1938. Nazi mobs destroyed synagogues, businesses, and homes across Germany and Austria. Approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The escalation from persecution to organized violence was enabled, in part, by the world’s demonstrated indifference at Evian.

The SS St. Louis sailed from Hamburg in May 1939 carrying 937 Jewish refugees who were turned away from Cuba, the United States, and Canada before returning to Europe. More than a quarter of its passengers were ultimately killed in the Holocaust.

The Nazi regime took explicit notice of Evian’s failure. If the world did not want the Jews, the regime concluded, it would not object too strenuously when Germany dealt with “the Jewish problem” in its own way.

The Moral Lesson

The Evian Conference stands as one of the most damning episodes in modern diplomatic history. It was not a case of nations failing to foresee a catastrophe — the persecution of Jews was well known, widely documented, and actively discussed. It was a case of nations choosing inaction, prioritizing domestic politics over human lives, and hiding behind bureaucratic procedures while real people suffered.

The conference’s failure helped shape the post-Holocaust international order: the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the founding of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees were all, in part, responses to the shame of Evian.

For the Jewish people, Evian became a byword for the danger of depending on others for survival — and a founding argument for the State of Israel, established exactly ten years later.