From July 6 to 15, 1938, representatives from 32 countries and dozens of humanitarian organizations gathered for a conference in the upscale spa town of Evian on the French side of Lake Geneva. The idea was to address the issue of how to deal with half a million Jews being persecuted in the Third Reich.

This was five and a half years after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany and three and a half months after the annexation of Austria. The Nazi regime had not yet begun itssystematic process of mass murder — but the situation for Jewish people had been deteriorating steadily since 1935.

The racist Nuremberg Laws, which were enacted in 1935 and stripped Jews of German citizenship, were internationally known — as was the fact that Jews had been excluded from schools, universities and public life, and that those who wanted to leave what was now "Greater Germany" had to relinquish a large proportion of their assets.

As early as 1933, shortly after the Nazis seized power, the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, appointed the US national James McDonald  to chair the High Commission for Refugees from Germany. He resigned in 1935, despairing at the unwillingness of the world's governments to take the problem seriously.

Emigration only after plunder

Initially, Adolf Hitler and his government actively encouraged Jews to leave the country — by the time of the Evian Conference, approximately 200,000 had already left Germany. However, the Nazis imposed increasingly stringent financial and administrative restrictions: Jewish people had almost all of their property, real estate and savings confiscated before they left the country — and they had to present a visa or travel ticket to leave.

The Nazis' goal was clear: They wanted Jews to leave Germany completely destitute. This was not only because the regime profited from the plunder of Jewish property, but also because poor emigrants would be considered a greater burden in the countries they moved to, which was intended to further fuel resentment towards refugees.

Roosevelt's initiative

The Evian initiative came from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The idea was to encourage states participating in the conference to welcome refugees from Germany and Austriaaccording to their population size. There was no intention of obligating states to change their immigration quota or spend more funds for refugees. 

Even before the delegates arrived at the luxurious hotel where the conference was to take place, the US and the United Kingdomhad already reached an agreement: Washington had promised not to mention the British Mandate of Palestine as a possible place of refuge for Jewish refugees and London in return had promised not to address the fact that the US was not filling its immigration quotas.

Sympathy for Jewish refugees and excuses not to take them in

The meeting was not attended by heads of state, but by lower-ranking diplomats. One after another, they rose to express their deep sympathy — followed by excuses as to why they could not help. European democracies justified themselves by citing high unemployment and the economic crisis, claiming they had no need for professors, artists, doctors or tradespeople.

Canada declared that it was only prepared to accept experienced farmers who had their own capital. The Australian 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." France stated that it had already reached "the extreme point of saturation" regarding refugees. The Netherlands and Switzerland only wanted to issue transit visas. Others, such as Romania and Poland, even asked Western countries to accept their Jewish populations.

A few Latin American countries, including Mexico and Colombia, committed to accepting several hundred Jewish refugees a year for the coming years. The Dominican Republic offered to accept up to 100,000 Jews — but due to bureaucratic problems and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, only a few hundred Jewish people actually reached the Caribbean nation.

Golda Meir: 'A terrible experience'

The Evian Conference ended with the creation of the Intergovernmental Refugee Committee (IGC), a completely powerless body. Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel, attended Evian as an observer in 1938.

In her memoirs in 1975, she wrote: "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 [...]."

While the media in Nazi Germany rejoiced, the press in democratic countries reported on the conference with a mixture of sympathy and shame. The US magazine Time noted: "All nations present expressed sympathy for the refugees but few offered to allow them within their boundaries."

On July 10, 1938, the correspondent for The New York Times wrote: "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."

A signal for Berlin

The Evian fiasco sent a clear signal to the Nazi regime: no one in the world cares about the fate of the Jews, and the democratic world will not lift a finger to protect them.

Jochen Thies, the author of the 2017 German publication "Evian 1938," whose subtitle translates as "When the world betrayed the Jews," said that "the British, with their vast empire, would have had to make a very large offer, let's say 120,000 to 150,000... people, to be spread around. Then the Americans, then Roosevelt, would have had a pretext to convince the US public that they had to follow suit and, proportionally, say 200,000, and then they could have won over some of the South Americans."

Just four months after the Evian Conference, the Nazi regime orchestrated what has become known as the November Pogroms in Germany and Austria.The following year, Germany attacked Poland, thus triggering World War II.

In the years that followed, some Jewish people in Nazi-controlled territories were able to escape the Nazi horrors  thanks to individuals willing to break the rules.

For example, Ho Feng Shan, China's Consul-General in Vienna, issued thousands of visas for the Chinese port of Shanghai — where there were no passport controls. Some other diplomats from Latin American countries did the same.

But millions of Jewish people were deported to  concentration campsor murdered in mass killings. 

This article was originally published in Serbian.