German Paper Ridicules Evian Conference

No One Wants To Have Them
Fruitless Debates at the Jew-Conference in Evian
Evian, 12 July.

The Jew-Conference at Evian ended its so-called great pronunciations yesterday. This week, there will still be closed meetings dealing with details, mostly of an organizational nature. It is then planned to have the ceremonial closing session on Friday, when the participants leave the luxurious resort of Evian, in which the emigrants felt so well.

Aside from the purely administrative creation of a committee that will maintain contact between the interested governments, the so called Intergovernmental Committee which is to be established either in Paris or in London under American directorship, the results of this conference are very meager. Any substantial work will be the task of the Intergovernmental Committee.

To the great disappointment of all Marxists, church and all non-Jewish emigrants, it was clear that the conference at Evian dealt only with the Jewish question in Germany.

It was proven also that the Jewish organizations represented at Evian were not of one opinion regarding the goals. For example, the so-called World Jewish Congress is mostly interested in protesting against the German racial laws that have stimulated interest all over the world. In contrast, the Zionists wish to exploit the departure of the Jewish masses from European countries as an argument to have more enter Palestine. The development of the Evian Conference so far is very embarrassing for the Marxists, because according to them, it leads to an international legalization of German antisemitic policy.

In accordance with their democratic ideology and political tendencies, the official statements made by the representatives of the United States, France and – to a lesser degree – England, made noises of moral outrage over the liquidation of the Jewish problem in Germany. At the same time, however, England and France were so reserved when it came to declaring readiness to accept more emigrants, that the representatives of other states, who did not wish to speak out at all at the outset, found the courage to express one after the other their reluctance to permit new Jewish emigration.

The European countries did this, while pointing to the fact that they had reached the point of saturation; the south Americans spoke unanimously of the agricultural structure of their countries which permitted the emigration of farmers, not of merchants and city intellectuals. Some of them, as for example the representative of Brazil, let it be understood that Jews often would enter disguised as farmers, only to move to the city at the earliest opportunity.

The representative of the British Dominions made excuses based on the situation of the labor market (Canada), the wish for a uniform population (Australia), or the danger of increasing antisemitism.

It seems, therefore, that the United States alone can be considered a target for Jewish emigration of any significant proportion. In his opening speech, the American representative pointed out the now combined immigration quota for Germany and Austria (approximately 27,000 per annum). Beyond this, most of the delegates are convinced, and the Swedish representative said so openly today, that a real solution to the Jewish emigration problem can only be solved on a territorial basis, in which the Jews will be among themselves and where, besides the German emigrants, within time also millions of Polish and other Jews can be settled. The English representative referred to the African colony of Kenya in this respect, but all this was dependent on present developments. Other colonial powers did not mention their colonies at all (France, Belgium) or they have declared that they were not fit for white settlers (Belgium, Holland).

Source: "Voelkischer Beobachter," North German edition, 13 July 1938.