The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  With tensions so high, it is not surprising that the Nazis increased their attacks on those they perceived as their enemies inside the Reich. But political considerations of tactics – and especially timing – still existed. On 21 June 1938, at a meeting attended by both police and party representatives, a decision was made not to adopt the heavily restrictive proposals on Berlin Jews put forward, after Goebbels’ initiative, by the Berlin chief of police, Count Helldorff. This was a particularly sensitive time in the relationship between the Nazis and the international community, because the Nazis wanted other countries to accept hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian Jews. And this very question was about to be debated at Evian-les-Bains, a spa town on the banks of Lake Geneva in France.

  This meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees had first been proposed by President Roosevelt back in March 1938 in the wake of the Anschluss, but had taken four months to organize. By now the situation was even worse for the Jews than it had been at the time Roosevelt suggested the conference. For as the delegates to the Evian conference settled into their rooms at the luxurious Hôtel Royal, they knew that the attack on the Austrian Jews had resulted not in the nations of the world opening their borders, but in many cases on ever greater controls on immigration.

  In the wake of the Anschluss the Dutch had refused to accept Austrian passports as legitimate documents. Luxembourg and Belgium had increased security at their frontiers, while the Foreign Office in London had expressed the view that Britain was ‘an old country’ both ‘highly industrialized’ and ‘densely populated’ and thus, by implication, an unsuitable destination for large numbers of immigrants.45 One MP in parliament warned in a debate on 22 March 1938 of the ‘difficulty’ that the British would face in the event of the arrival of large numbers of Jews, because the police would have to ensure that ‘our own people are protected against those who might quite easily slip in – drug traffickers, white slave traffickers, people with criminal records’.46 The Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, said in a cabinet committee in July that ‘there was a good deal of feeling growing up in this country … against the admission of Jews’ to British colonies.47 As for the Swiss, they had imposed draconian visa restrictions in order to prevent large numbers of Jews entering the country. They had even refused to host the intergovernmental conference on Swiss soil. The original suggestion had been to hold the conference in Geneva, but after the Swiss had refused to cooperate, the venue was moved to Evian, further along Lake Geneva. Nor did the United States agree to relax immigration rules in response to the Austrian crisis. Indeed, when the Americans called for the Evian conference they had explicitly said that no country which attended would be required to take more immigrants than it was already doing.

  Roosevelt’s own attitude to the conference was ambiguous. While the gathering was his idea, he chose to send as head of the American delegation not a member of his government but a close friend, Myron C. Taylor, former head of US Steel. Nor was this even officially a conference about helping the ‘Jews’ – the proposal for the conference euphemistically mentioned ‘political refugees’ only.

  The most likely, albeit uncharitable, explanation of all this is that although Roosevelt was concerned about the fate of the Jews in the Reich he did not necessarily expect the Evian conference to result in much practical assistance to them. This interpretation is confirmed by the content of a confidential memo written before the conference by George Strausser Messersmith, Assistant Secretary of State. He said that not many countries were ‘approaching the problem with enthusiasm’, and he feared that delegates would merely ‘render lip service’ to the idea of helping the ‘refugees’.48

  This is particularly relevant because Messersmith, more than most in the Roosevelt administration, knew the true nature of the Nazi regime. In a letter he wrote in June 1933 from the US embassy in Berlin to William Phillips in the State Department, he said that he believed the German government wanted ‘to make Germany the most capable instrument of war that there has ever existed’ and that ‘a psychology is being developed that the whole world is against Germany.’ Furthermore, ‘with few exceptions, the men who are running this government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.’49

  While Roosevelt was thus well aware of the nature of the Nazi regime, he was always careful never to move too far ahead of American public opinion. He once confided to his speechwriter Samuel Rosenman: ‘It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead and find no one there.’50 Roosevelt knew from opinion polls that a majority of Americans were against admitting large numbers of refugees into the country51 and he was not about to go directly against the wishes of American voters – especially when he faced re-election as President in 1940.

  However, even if Roosevelt had called the Evian conference only to publicize the fate of the Jews, he was still more sympathetic to the problem than a number of other statesmen in the free world. Take the views of Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, for example. On 29 March 1938 he wrote in his diary: ‘A very difficult question has presented itself in Roosevelt’s appeal to different countries to unite with the United States in admitting refugees from Austria, Germany etc. That means, in a word, admitting numbers of Jews. My own feeling is that nothing is to be gained by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one.’ King recognized that Canada might be seen as a refuge for Jews because of ‘our great open spaces and small population’, but still, ‘We must nevertheless seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood … I fear we would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted numbers of Jews.’52

  King knew Germany well – he had been a student in Berlin at the turn of the century. When he met Hitler on 29 June 1937, he told him that he had personally witnessed ‘the constructive work of his regime’. Furthermore, he ‘hoped that that work might continue. That nothing would be permitted to destroy that work. That it was bound to be followed in other countries to the great advantage of mankind.’ King formed the opinion that Hitler ‘is really one who truly loves his fellow men, and his country, and would make any sacrifice for their good. That he feels himself to be a deliverer of his people from tyranny.’ In particular, King was ‘impressed’ by Hitler’s eyes: ‘There was a liquid quality about them which indicate keen perception and profound sympathy.’53 What King did not raise in his meeting with Hitler, according to his diary, was the persecution of the Jews. Nor did he mention the concentration camps, nor the suppression of human rights, nor the elimination of democracy.

  The following day King met with Neurath, the German Foreign Minister. Neurath told King that he ‘would have loathed living in Berlin with the Jews’. Neurath went on to claim that the Jews had been gaining control of German business and finance and so it had been necessary to curb their power.54 King does not appear to have made any protest about these anti-Semitic remarks. Instead, he and Neurath moved on to attend a luncheon party together which ‘was one of the pleasantest I have ever enjoyed’.

  Despite this background, the Evian conference still remained ‘the only hope’, as far as the World Jewish Congress was concerned, for ‘hundreds of thousands of Jews who are today barbarously persecuted and evicted from positions which they had held for centuries’. A memorandum addressed to the delegates of the conference by Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, not only called for the international community to offer refuge for ‘at least’ 200,000 to 300,000 German and Austrian Jews over the coming years, but also touched on two further issues that were even more contentious. The first was the request that the conference should ‘do everything in its power’ to convince the German government to allow Jews to leave the Reich with some of their wealth intact. The second was that the conference should accept that ‘The Jewish refugee problem cannot be discussed
without taking into account the immense possibilities of Palestine as an outlet for Jewish immigration. The majority of the Jewish people has recognized a long time ago that nothing short of creating a Jewish State can restore the normal structure of the dispersed Jewish community.’55

  There was never any possibility of the delegates at Evian supporting the demands of the World Jewish Congress. The British, in particular, were not about to announce a radical change to the status quo in Palestine where Arabs currently outnumbered Jews. Indeed, the British were not prepared to discuss anything about Palestine at Evian. There were even concerns within the Foreign Office that any attempt to make it easier for ‘refugees’ to leave Germany might result in other eastern European countries trying to use the same mechanism to expel their ‘refugees’ as well (everyone knew, of course, that ‘refugee’ was code for ‘Jew’). It was therefore possible, by this logic, for officials at the Foreign Office to argue that any attempt to help the German and Austrian Jews could ‘make the refugee problem even worse than it is at present’.56

  Such fears were not entirely groundless. Poland, Hungary and Romania all enacted anti-Semitic legislation during the 1930s. In Poland there were around 3 million Jews – five times as many as in Germany and Austria combined – and by the start of the Evian conference they lived under a variety of restrictive measures. In August 1936, for example, all Polish shops were required to display the name of the owner on their signs. As a consequence it was obvious which shops belonged to Jews. The following year Jews were forbidden from entering the medical profession, and restrictions were placed on their ability to practise law. In March 1938 a new citizenship law was announced, which would take effect on 30 October that year, revoking the citizenship of Poles who had lived abroad for five years and had not kept ‘contact’ with Poland. This would have a devastating effect on Polish Jews living elsewhere.57

  The Polish government was also contemplating removing Jews from Poland altogether. In early 1937 the Poles opened discussions with the French about the possibility of sending large numbers of Polish Jews to the island of Madagascar off the south-east coast of Africa. The idea that Madagascar, then a French colony, could become a Jewish settlement had previously been proposed by the anti-Semitic writer Paul de Lagarde in the nineteenth century. Now the Polish government were taking the notion seriously. In May 1937 a joint Polish–French task force under the direction of the Polish official Mieczysław Lepecki travelled to Madagascar in order to evaluate the idea. But after several months on the island, Lepecki and his team concluded that at most 60,000 Jews could be accommodated there – a small fraction of the 3 million Polish Jews.58 So this fantastical idea was scrapped – only, as we shall see, for it to be resurrected by the Nazis three years later.

  The Polish Madagascar initiative acted as a powerful reminder to the delegates at Evian that anti-Semitic initiatives were not just the preserve of the government of the Third Reich. The desire of other European countries in the 1930s to persecute and even remove their Jews has largely been forgotten in the public consciousness today – dwarfed by the scale and ferocity of the subsequent Nazi Holocaust.

  The Evian conference began on 6 July 1938. The tone was set by the opening speech of Myron Taylor, head of the American delegation, who acknowledged the extent of the problem but refused, on behalf of America, to increase the number of refugees allowed into the USA from the existing 27,000 a year. Then, one after another, the remaining delegates followed the same script; they all deplored the current situation but couldn’t promise to do much to help. The reasons given were many and various – high existing unemployment, the risk of creating racial unrest, the need for agricultural workers not ‘clerical’ types and so on.

  Only the Dominican Republic offered to take large numbers of German and Austrian ‘refugees’, but that proposal was most likely a publicity stunt by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. His international reputation was in tatters because he had presided over the massacre of up to 20,000 Haitians the year before. Ultimately only a handful of Jews were admitted to the Dominican Republic and Trujillo’s grand promises came to nothing.

  Golda Meir, later Prime Minister of Israel, witnessed personally the combination of hot air and hypocrisy that characterized the Evian conference. She wrote that she felt a ‘mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror’ and wanted to ‘scream’ at the delegates that these ‘numbers’ were ‘human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps, or wandering around the world like lepers, if you don’t let them in’.59

  At the final session of the Evian conference on 15 July 1938, Myron Taylor announced that the many speeches and discussions had achieved something concrete – the creation of a new committee: the Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees from Germany. It was a pitiful response to one of the most terrible human crises of modern times.

  However, it must also be acknowledged that the delegates at Evian faced a tough dilemma. Even if their governments had allowed genuine discussion about the possibility of increasing the number of refugees that each country would accept, there remained, as we have seen, the concern that some countries in eastern Europe might then demand that their Jews be offered exit visas via the same process. And since the rest of the world was not prepared to accept several hundred thousand German and Austrian Jews, what hope was there of accommodating several million more? Equally, if the delegates at the conference had suggested that only the refugees from Germany and Austria should be offered safe haven, because of the intensity of the persecution they suffered, might that not have encouraged other eastern European nations to increase their own anti-Semitic actions, on the basis that the world community accepted Jews only after they had been appallingly mistreated?

  Against that background, it is hard to see how anything of substance could have been accomplished at Evian without allowing discussion of the status of Palestine. Not only did the World Jewish Congress believe that ‘a Jewish State’ could solve the problem, but the Polish government also supported the idea of allowing large numbers of Jews into Palestine.60 In that respect the British authorities must take responsibility for not allowing ‘the immense possibilities of Palestine as an outlet for Jewish immigration’ to be discussed. But by the time of the Evian conference the British must have believed they had enough problems controlling Palestine without adding more potential conflict to the existing mix. An Arab revolt had broken out in 1937, triggered by the report of a British Royal Commission that had recommended partitioning the country between Jews and Arabs. In May 1939, after the revolt had finally been suppressed, the British rejected the idea of partitioning Palestine and announced that there would be no Jewish state in Palestine after all. Strict limits were placed on Jewish immigration to Palestine in order, many suspected, to ensure that Arabs remained in a majority. It was devastating news for the thousands of Jews who desperately wanted to find a way out of the Third Reich. To supporters of Zionism, who remembered the fine words of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, it was nothing less than a betrayal. Winston Churchill, a supporter of Zionism, called the decision a ‘lamentable act of default’.61 Moreover, it was obvious that the British government had acted in this way in an attempt to mollify the Arabs. Strategic British interests – like the Suez Canal – lay in Arab territory, and geopolitically the Jews had little to bargain with by comparison. As the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, stated at a meeting of a cabinet committee on Palestine on 20 April 1939, it was of ‘immense importance’ that Britain should ‘have the Muslim world with us’. Consequently, ‘If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.’62 Once again political pragmatism triumphed over compassionate humanitarianism.

  There were even some officials who, in rejecting Jewish requests, revealed their own anti-Semitic beliefs. Charles Frederick Blair, director of Canada’s Immigration Branch, stated in a memo in October 1938 that even though the Jews faced potential ‘extinction’63 in Europe, they should still
not be allowed in large numbers into Canada. In an earlier letter, written after the Evian conference, he said that it ‘might be a very good thing’ for Jews to ask themselves the question ‘why they are so unpopular almost everywhere’.64

  The delegates at the Evian conference could not even come together to condemn the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Arguably, some feared making the situation in the Reich worse for the Jews if they spoke out. William Shirer wrote that the British, French and Americans seemed ‘anxious not to do anything to offend Hitler’. It was an ‘absurd situation’, thought Shirer, because they ‘want to appease the man who is responsible for their problem’.65

  The Nazi regime’s view of the outcome of the Evian conference could not have been more blunt: the headline of the Völkischer Beobachter on 13 July was ‘No One Wants to Have Them’, with the strapline ‘Fruitless debates at the Jew-conference in Evian’.66 Hitler, in a speech at Nuremberg in September 1938, ridiculed the ‘hypocritical’ actions of the ‘democratic empires’. Germany, he said, was criticized for acting with ‘unimaginable cruelty’ against the Jews, but then the same democratic countries who voiced this attack refused to accommodate the Jews, saying ‘there is regretfully no space’ for them.

  Hitler couched his argument against continuing to accept the presence of the Jews – ‘these parasites’ as he called them – in terms of population density. He claimed that Germany had more than 140 people per square kilometre whereas the ‘democratic world empires’ had only a ‘few people’ per square kilometre.67

  Hitler spoke these words at the same time as he planned on taking military action to gain Germany more space: first in Czechoslovakia and subsequently, as he had outlined thirteen years before in Mein Kampf, in the western regions of the Soviet Union. The two obsessions of his political life – his racial hatred of the Jews and his desire for Germany to gain more land – were, as we have seen, intertwined. There would be no point, as far as Hitler was concerned, in gaining the extra space that Germany needed if that space contained large numbers of Jews, which, in the case of Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union, it most certainly did. The potential for a catastrophic fate to befall millions of Jews thus lay once again in the subtext of this September 1938 speech, a year before the war began.