Evian and the St. Louis, 1938 and 1939

What happened

Delegates from 32 countries met at Evian-les-Bains, on the French side of Lake Geneva, from July 6 to July 15, 1938, to discuss where Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and newly annexed Austria could go. ³ President Franklin Roosevelt sent Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and personal friend, rather than the secretary of state or anyone else of comparable rank. ³ Country after country expressed sympathy and then gave its reasons for refusing more refugees. ³ Golda Meir, then Golda Meyerson, sat in the hall as an observer and later described listening to delegates say "how terribly sorry they were that they unfortunately could not." ³

With one exception, no nation at Evian agreed to admit more refugees. ¹ The Dominican Republic alone offered to take a larger number, motivated in part by a wish to repair its international standing after a massacre and by its own economic interests. ² The conference did produce an institution, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which was given little authority and almost no money or support from the governments that had created it. ² The German government noted with satisfaction that foreign critics of its treatment of Jews would not open their own doors when the opportunity came. ¹

Roughly 525,000 Jews lived in Germany when the Nazis took power, and about 150,000 had left by 1938. ² The Anschluss that March had put another 185,000 Austrian Jews under Nazi rule. ²

The American position at Evian followed from law written fourteen years earlier, when Congress set immigration quotas by national origin in 1924. ⁵ Germany's annual quota was 25,957, raised to 27,370 after Roosevelt merged the German and Austrian numbers following the Anschluss. ⁵ A quota was a ceiling rather than a target, and unused slots did not carry over to the next year. ⁵ Applicants also had to produce an affidavit from an American sponsor showing they were not likely to become a public charge, a Depression-era requirement that many historians consider the hardest single obstacle in the visa process. ⁵ In June 1938 there were 139,163 people on the German quota waiting list. A year later there were 309,782. ⁵ A bill sponsored by Senator Robert Wagner and Representative Edith Rogers to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children outside the quota failed to move in the Senate in 1939 and again in 1940. ³

Eleven months after Evian, the St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jewish refugees holding Cuban landing certificates. ⁴ Cuba's president, Federico Laredo Bru, had signed a decree about a week before the ship sailed that invalidated those certificates, closing the arrangement that the country's immigration director had been selling. ⁴⁶ When the ship reached Havana on May 27, 28 passengers were allowed off. ⁴ Lawrence Berenson, negotiating for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was told the rest could land against a bond of $453,500, five hundred dollars a head, and his counteroffer was refused. ⁴

The ship then sailed north along the Florida coast, close enough that passengers could see Miami, with the Coast Guard alongside. ⁶ Captain Gustav Schroeder, who treated the refugees decently throughout, had set suicide watches on board. ⁶ Passengers cabled Roosevelt directly and got no answer. ⁴ The State Department declined to make an exception and told them they would have to wait their turn on the visa list. ⁴ On June 6, 1939, the St. Louis turned back toward Europe. ⁴ Britain took 288 passengers, France 224, Belgium 214, and the Netherlands 181. ⁴ Of the 620 who went ashore on the continent, 254 were later murdered in the Holocaust: 84 from Belgium, 84 from the Netherlands, 86 from France. ⁴

Why it still matters

The shorthand version is that the world did nothing. The record is more specific than that, and worse. The United States admitted more than 100,000 Jewish refugees by 1940, more than any other country, and between 1938 and 1940 more than 60 percent of German and Austrian Jews got out. ² Between 1938 and 1941, 123,868 Jewish refugees entered the United States. ⁵ The German quota was nearly filled for the first time since 1930 in 1939 and again in 1940. ⁵ The door was open at a width fixed in 1924 for reasons that had nothing to do with 1938, and no government at Evian was willing to widen it for the emergency in front of it. ¹

All of this happened while Jews could still leave Germany legally, which is the reason more than 60 percent of German and Austrian Jews were able to flee between 1938 and 1940. ² Nobody at Evian had to organize a rescue or run a blockade. The requirement was a visa, and the delegates who knew what was happening in Germany, and said so in the hall, declined to change a number. ¹ What a government says about Jews and what it will do for them are two separate things.

The St. Louis is the case where that arithmetic has names attached. Its passengers were counted, listed, and later traced, which is how we know 254 of them were murdered. ⁴ Two governments have since said so on the record. The State Department apologized in 2012, and the Canadian prime minister followed in 2018 for Canada's own refusal to take the ship. ⁶

Our explainers on the Holocaust in numbers and on the British Mandate cover the ground around this one. In 1938 and 1939, before the war and while leaving was still possible, the answer a Jewish family got was a bond of five hundred dollars a head from Cuba and a place on an American waiting list 309,782 names long. ⁴⁵

The words you'll hear

The Evian Conference. The July 1938 meeting of delegates from 32 countries at Evian-les-Bains, France, on Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, which produced no increase in admissions from any participant except the Dominican Republic. ³¹

The quota. The annual immigration ceiling set by national origin under the Immigration Act of 1924. Germany's was 25,957, and 27,370 after the German and Austrian quotas were merged in 1938. ⁵

Public charge. The requirement that an applicant prove, usually through an affidavit from an American sponsor, that they would not become dependent on public support. It was the hardest hurdle in the visa process for most refugees. ⁵

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. The body created at Evian to keep working on resettlement, which its member governments then left with little authority and virtually no funding. ²

Decree 937. The Cuban decree signed in May 1939 that voided the landing permits nearly every St. Louis passenger had bought. ⁶

The Wagner-Rogers bill. The 1939 proposal to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the United States outside the quota. It died in the Senate. ³