“The Évian Conference was convened 6–15 July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany.
It was the initiative of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt who perhaps hoped to obtain commitments from some of the invited nations to accept more refugees, although he took pains to avoid stating that objective expressly.
Historians have suggested that Roosevelt desired to deflect attention and criticism from American policy that severely limited the quota of refugees admitted to the United States.
International Representation by 32 Countries
The conference was attended by representatives from 32 countries, and 24 voluntary organizations also attended as observers, presenting plans either orally or in writing.
Golda Meir, the attendee from British Mandatory Palestine, was not permitted to speak or to participate in the proceedings except as an observer. Some 200 international journalists gathered at Évian to observe and report on the meeting.
The Soviet Union refused to take part in the conference, though direct talks on resettlement of Jews and Slavs between German and Soviet governments proceeded at the time of the conference and after it.
In the end, the Soviet Union refused to accept refugees and a year later ordered its border guards to treat all refugees attempting to cross into Soviet territory as spies.
Parallels to the United Nations Security Meetings Spirit in 2024
The conference was ultimately doomed, as aside from the Dominican Republic and later Costa Rica, delegations from the 32 participating nations failed to come to any agreement about accepting the Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich.
The conference thus inadvertently proved to be a useful tool for the Nazi propaganda. Adolf Hitler responded to the news of the conference by saying that if other nations agreed to take the Jews, he would help them leave”.
Consequences of the Évian Conference 1938 Spirit of Apathy
“The result of the failure of the conference was that many of the Jews had no escape and so were ultimately subject to what was known as Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.
Two months after Évian, in September 1938, Britain and France granted Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. In November 1938, on Kristallnacht, a massive pogrom across the Third Reich was accompanied by the destruction of over 1,000 synagogues, massacres and the mass arrests of tens of thousands of Jews.
In March 1939, Hitler occupied more of Czechoslovakia, causing a further 180,000 Jews to fall under Axis control, while in May 1939 the British issued the White Paper which barred Jews from entering Palestine or buying land there.
Following their occupation of Poland in late 1939 and invasion of Soviet Union in 1941, the Nazis embarked on a program of systematically killing all Jews in Europe”.