Germany had annexed Austria, including its large Jewish population, in March of 1938, accelerating a Jewish refugee crisis. Of Germany’s original population of 600,000 Jews, about a quarter already had fled since Hitler took power five years before.
After Hitler devoured Austria, another 185,000 Jews fled, seeking entry into neighboring countries or visas elsewhere. But doors were shutting for Jews, including those in the United States, which retained the narrow quotas the nativist Congress had enacted in the 1920s.
Those quotas were still in force in 1938, as were the nativistic and antisemitic sentiments that drove them. A poll that year found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the persecution of German Jews was partly or entirely their fault.
Some Americans worried that any Jewish refugees would compete with them for jobs and social benefits. Meanwhile, a notoriously antisemitic State Department made sure that even the small quotas for Germans were not satisfied: Between 1933 and 1938, only 52,000 German Jews were allowed entry to the United States, barely a third of those allowed and less than 15 percent of those who applied.
However, there was little inclination to fix the situation, as Roosevelt discovered at a Cabinet meeting six days after the annexation. When the president raised the subject of possibly raising the immigration quota to accommodate the new wave of “political refugees” from Austria, his vice president, John Garner, responded that if it were up to Congress there would be no immigration at all. Whereupon Roosevelt dropped the matter.
Still, Roosevelt, alarmed by the reports of the terrors the Nazis were inflicting on their latest victims, felt compelled to do something. “1938 was a pivotal year for Jews in the Third Reich,” Sara J. Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote in an email. “The Nazi regime was clear in its intentions to rid the Reich of Jews by making life so unbearable that they would flee.”
So Roosevelt convened an international conference to discuss the problem. France, as he proudly announced at a news conference March 26, agreed to host it. (Switzerland, fearing Germany’s reaction, refused.)
The Intergovernmental Conference on Political Refugees, as it was called, convened July 6 at the French resort’s gilded Hotel Royal. Representatives from 32 nations gathered, as did delegates from 39 private organizations and more than 200 reporters.
The eyes of the world were on Evian. At stake “were both human lives — and the decency and self-respect of the civilized world,” Vice President Walter Mondale later recounted.