- Headline
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The Evian Conference
- Publication Date
- Thursday, July 7, 1938
- Historical Event
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Evian Conference Offers Neither Help, Nor Haven
This database includes 1,235 articles about this event - Tags
- Article Type
- Newspaper
- Page Section and Number
- 4
- Author/Byline
- --
- Article Text
- If the Evian conference comes anywhere near to accomplishing its great task, the world may see the beginning of the greatest single mass flight of peoples in the history of the world. At the opening meeting yesterday, attended by representatives of 32 nations including the United States, an Austrian refugee leader declared It his belief that 4,500,000 of his countrymen would leave their homeland if places could be found for them. It is the conference's mission to seek out new homelands for refugees of the Hitler terror.
This colossal figure, representing 75 per cent of Austria's total population, may suffer grossly from exaggeration. But at the same time it is a graphic indication of the state of mind prevailing in Hitler's new province.
Jews are far from being the only persons desirous of escaping the Hitler terror. Writing in the Herald Tribune, Vincent Sheean, ace European correspondent, said this week that a minimum of 50,000 Austrian liberals, intellectuals, communists, Jews, aristocrats, Heimwehr, teachers, workers, trades unionists, social democrats and Catholics have been herded into concentration camps since Hitler's annexation. Terror is the portion of all opposed to the Nazis. Flight is their only salvation.
The part the United States is playing in the conference is thus far commendable. Myron C. Taylor, former U. S. Steel head, and leader of the American delegation, is out to urge no mass embarkation of the would-be refugees to this country. It would be doing neither them nor the U. S. any favor to have them come here, to add to the unemployment problem.
U. S. participation has been described as of "helpfulness rather than direction." That is as it should be. Aggressive leadership would accomplish no good purpose. But moral support and counsel may have effective results. - History Unfolded Contributor
- Steve J.
- Location of Research
- Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)
Learn More about this Historical Event: Evian Conference Offers Neither Help, Nor Haven
- Emigration and the Evian Conference (Encyclopedia Article)
- The Evian Conference (The Holocaust: A Learning Site for Students)
- German Jewish Refugees, 1933–1939 (Encyclopedia Article)
Bibliography
Breitman, Richard and Alan Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Caron, Vicki. Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Feingold, Henry L. Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
Feingold, Henry L. The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945. New York: Holocaust Library, 1970.
Gurock, Jeffrey S., ed. America, American Jews, and the Holocaust. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Hamerow, Theodor. While We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust. New York: Norton, 2008.
Wyman, David S. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York: The New Press, 1998.
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