The Évian Conference and the Americas - für Antisemitismusforschung

The irony of my contribution to this conference is that the two countries I have focused on in recent research—the Dominican Republic that took in under 2,000 refugees and Portugal that allowed around 80,000 refugees to transmigrate in or-der to embark for the Americas—had, respectively, limited or no connection to Evian.¹ But first a few words about the context, starting with the United States—

a rather well-known story—and moving southward to Latin America and then to the sunny Caribbean, the Dominican Republic. As is well-known, although Americans strongly opposed refugees,² President Roosevelt called for a confer-ence on the refugee crisis in July 1938.³ Yet, even before Évian, the United States 1 A few months after Évian, Portugal was invited to join the Intergovernmental

Commit-tee on Refugees set up by Évian, but Portugal declined the invitation. Avraham Milgram, Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews, Jerusalem 2011, p. 60, n. 3.

2 Even after the violence of the Austrian annexation, 67 percent of Americans did not want to let in more refugees. See Robert A. Rockaway, The Roosevelt Administration, the Holocaust and the Jewish Administration, in: Reviews in American History 3/1 (March 1975), p. 114. The U.S. had 11 million unemployed that year. Also: Edwin Harwood, American Public Opinion and U.S. Immigration Policy, in: Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 487 (Sept. 1986), p. 202.

3 Eric Estorick, The Evian Conference and the Intergovernmental Committee, in: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 203 (May 1939), p. 136 at http://

links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162%28193905%29203%3C136%3ATECATI%3E2.0.C0

%3B2-B [Sept. 19, 2018]. See also Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refu-gees in the Twentieth Century, Oxford 1985, p. 170. According to Estorick, the following countries were officially represented: Australia, the Argentine Republic, Belgium, Boli-via, Brazil, United Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The Union of South Africa sent an observer, and Polish and Rumanian representatives attended in an unofficial capacity.

had promised that no country would be asked to raise its immigration quotas.⁴ Surveys of that time show “Roosevelt’s policies of speaking out against Hitler’s atrocities, but yet doing nothing to facilitate more Jews to enter the United States as refugees…”⁵ One might add that by not setting an example of raising its quotas, the U.S. set precisely the opposite example.

That fall, even after the cruelty of the November Pogrom and despite American public opinion being “solidly against the Nazis’ treatment of Jews,” only 23 percent of Americans surveyed would have allowed more refugees into the country.⁶ To make matters worse, until 1938 the U.S. had admitted only a small p ercentage 4 David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941, Amherst, MA

1968, p. 43. In resisting refugees, the United States did not stand alone at Évian. The repre-sentative of the United Kingdom considered it “fully populated” with considerable unem-ployment. Regarding its territories and colonies, the British declared that local conditions hindered significant immigration—a direct allusion to Arab opposition to Jewish immi-gration into Mandatory Palestine as well as anxiety about racial and political tensions in other parts of an unstable British Empire. France’s delegation believed it had reached “the extreme point of saturation” and smaller European nations agreed to admit only refugees in transit. Sparsely populated lands, like Australia and New Zealand, also declined. On Latin America, see Estorick, Evian Conference, p. 137; Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge:

A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration, New York 1989, p. 440. Herbert Strauss shows 38,400 German Jews entering Palestine from 1933 through 1938. See: Herbert Strauss, Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses, part II, in: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1981), p. 346; Wyman, Paper Walls, p. 49 and Paula Hyman, The Jews of Modern France, Berkeley 1998, p. 153; Australia absorbed between 7,000 and 8,000 refugees between 1933 and 1939. See also Sanders, Shores of Refuge, p. 441–442 and Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, at http://www.holocaustcentre.org.nz/remember/ref-uge-in-nz/government-response [Sept. 6, 2016]; Ecuador and the Dominican Republic had offered land for agricultural settlements in 1935. Jeff Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables:

Brazil and the Jewish Question, Berkeley 1995; Marion Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945, New York 2008; “Too many,” in: Haim Avni, The War and the Possibilities of Rescue, in: Asher Cohen/Yehoyakim Cochavi/

Yoav Gelber (eds.), The Shoah and the War, New York 1992, pp. 384–388; and idem, Latin America and the Jewish Refugees. Two Encounters, 1935–1938, in: Judith Laikin Elkin/

Gilbert W. Merkx (eds.), The Jewish Presence in Latin America, Boston, MA 1987.

5 Susan Welch, American Opinion Toward Jews During the Nazi Era: Results from Quota Sample Polling during the 1930s and 1940, at www.researchgate.net/publica tion/260604054_American_Opinion_Toward_Jews_During_the%20Nazi_Era_

Results_from_Quota_Sample_Polling_During_the_1930s_and_1940s [May 29, 2018].

6 Ibid.

of its yearly quota of people from Germany and Austria, and these immigrants included non-refugee Germans and non-Jewish refugees.⁷ Only in response to the open violence against Jews in Germany on November 9, 1938, did the US ful-fill its yearly quota of German-Austrian immigrants. We don’t have to rehearse the world-wide Great Depression, American unemployment, or American anti-semitism at this conference, but like the situation today, the Asst. Sec. of State, Breckinridge Long insisted in June 1940: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls, to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”⁸ Nearly 200,000 quota places from Germany and Axis-occupied countries sat unused during the Roosevelt years, and the U.S. quota for immigrants from Germany was filled in only one of those twelve years (and in most of them, it was less than one-quarter filled).

Canada, it should be noted, proved even more reluctant than the United States, admitting only 5,000 Jewish refugees in the 1930s. A book entitled None is too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948 captures Canadian govern-ment and public opinion between 1933 and 1948.⁹

7 1933: 5,3%; 1934: 13,7%; 1935: 20,2%; 1936: 24,3%; 1937: 42,1%. In: Strauss, Emigration, p. 359.

8 Memo from Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, to State Department Offi-cials dated June 26, 1940, outlining effective ways to obstruct the granting of U.S. visas at https://www.facinghistory.org/rescuers/breckinridge-long-memorandum [May 29, 2018]. Today, “the flow of refugees to the United States has slowed nearly to a halt, dem-onstrating that what President Trump’s administration could not achieve by executive order, it is accomplishing by bureaucracy. The administration has cut the staff that con-ducts clearance interviews overseas and intensified the screening process for refugees.

As a result, if the trickle of refugees admitted continues at its current pace, just 20,000 are projected to enter the United States by the end of this year, the lowest figure since the resettlement program was created with passage of the Refugee Act in 1980,” in: The New York Times, May 16, 2018 at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/refugee-admissions.html [May 29, 2018].

9 Harald Troper/Irving Arbella, None is too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–

1948, Toronto 1983. Canada accepted about 35,000 Jewish refugees in the ten years after the war.

At the grassroots, as Jews realized that the countries they had aimed for refused them asylum and they could not use the new languages they had studied, gallows humor made the rounds of a small German town: “‘What language are you learn-ing?’ ‘The wrong one, of course.’”¹⁰ More sadly, one refugee summed up: “Every door and portal is firmly locked and bolted—and so is every heart… ”¹¹ By the end of the war, the U.S. admitted 35 percent and the rest of the world 65 p ercent of the refugees—all could have taken more.¹²

This can be said for Latin American countries as well. Altogether, these gov-ernments officially permitted about 84,000 Jewish refugees to immigrate between 1933 and 1945, less than half the number admitted during the previous fifteen years.¹³ Two examples can suffice: Argentina, which had allowed 79,000 Jewish

10 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Oxford 1999, p. 59.

11 Salamon Dembitzer, Visas for America: A Story of an Escape, Sydney 1952, p. 201.

12 Dennis Ross Laffer, The Jewish Trail of Tears: The Evian Conference of July 1938, Uni-versity of South Florida, 2011, p. 388 and Appendix A, Graduate Theses and Disserta-tions at http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3195 [August 7, 2019]. Laffer gathered data from 1933–1945 and assumed that additional thousands of Jewish refugees found shelter in places like South Africa, Japan, Spain, and Portugal. Totals included: United States, 200,000; Palestine, 138,000; Latin America, 85,000; and Great Britain, 70,000. His sta-tistics included: Canada 5,000; Australia 15,000; Switzerland 22,000; Shanghai 18,000;

Sweden 12,000 for a total of 565,000. To enter Great Britain, 14,000 Jewish women agreed to work as domestic servants. See Deborah Dwork/Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933–1946, New York 2009, p. 150. Even some of those in transit through the U.S. to Canada faced hostility, since many Americans saw them as ene-mies rather than as victims, in: The Globe and Mail, April 24, 2009 (Toronto) at http://

www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/serpa-pinto-voyages-of-life-and-death/

article1196753/?page=all [Nov. 5, 2014]. Fleeing eastward between 1939 and 1941, about 250–300,00 Polish Jewish refugees crossed into the Soviet Union where its government deported many to remote areas, including Siberia and Central Asia. Still, most survived.

13 USHMM stats from 1933–1940. Of these 25,000 went to Argentina, 15,000 to Brazil, 10,000 to Chile, 9,000 to Bolivia, 2,900 to Cuba, and 21,000 to other countries. Oth-ers give higher figures, see: Avraham Milgram (ed.), Entre la aceptación y el rechazo.

América Latina y los refugiados judios del nazismo, Jerusalem 2003. Laikin Elkin shows that over 29,000 Jews entered Brazil (1931–1942), in: idem, Jews of the Latin American Republics, Chapel Hill, NC 1980, p. 56. Strauss estimated that about 20,000 to 30,000 Jews entered Argentina between 1933 and 1943, about one third without legal papers. See Strauss, Jewish Emigration from Germany, pp. 371–374.

immigrants between 1918 and 1933, officially admitted only 24,000 between 1933 and 1943. Brazil allowed in 96,000 Jewish immigrants between 1918 and 1933, but only 12,000 between 1933 and 1941.¹⁴ Jews, were certainly not the only refu-gees seeking admittance in the 1930s and 1940s, and non-Jews had better pros-pects. Mexico, for example, allowed in 16,000 refugees of the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (1938–1945) compared to only 1,850 Jewish refugees (1933–1945), and also issued over 1,400 visas to Catholic Polish refugees between 1939 and 1941. These governments claimed difficulties although they had a surfeit of unpopulated land. They argued that low wages and unemployment inhibited the absorption of new populations. And, some of the countries, like Brazil and Argentina, had large German populations and trade arrangements with Germa-ny.¹⁵ They viewed German reactions to Jewish immigration both domestically and internationally with trepidations. Antisemitism played a role too, as Nativ-ist, Nazi, or Christian groups frequently opposed Jewish entry and representa-tives privately announced they already had “too many Jews.”¹⁶ Additionally, Latin American countries needed farmers, not the urban, middle-class businesspeople or professionals that were fleeing Central Europe. By the end of the 1930s, Latin American governments passed increasingly tight immigration laws. Noting their flowery excuses and apologies at Evian, Henry Feingold concluded that “repre-sentatives of the Jewish organizations despaired as […] hope for immediate action drowned in a sea of Latin eloquence.”¹⁷

Additional Jews, however, entered these countries through semi-legal or ille-gal channels. For example, another 20,000 Jews entered Argentina illeille-gally, cross-ing the border from neighborcross-ing countries. Refugees crossed borders i llegally

14 Strauss, Jewish Emigration from Germany, 371–374. For example, Brazil had insti-tuted a series of Jewish quotas in 1937 and https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.

php?ModuleId=10007824 [May 28, 2018].

15 The largest numbers entered Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia. For an evocative description of a small group of Jewish Bolivian settlers, see: Leo Spitzer, Hotel Bolivia, New York 1998.

16 See Patrik von zur Mühlen, Alternative Lateinamerika. Das deutsche Exil in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Berlin 1994.

17 Henry L. Feingold, Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945, New Brunswick, MJ 1970, p. 32.

or without proper visas, bribed consuls or port officials, and even converted to Catholicism. Some did this with the help of the future Pope John XXIII, who authorized baptismal certificates without conversions.¹⁸ Argentina later legalized some 10,000 illegal Jewish immigrants between 1948 and 1950. Werner T. Angress tells the story of how his father and he, having fled Berlin for Amsterdam, entered the consulates of “one South American legation after another.” They got nowhere, although some officials “said they could do something for us if we would, as they delicately expressed it, cross their hands with silver, which Papa refused to do.”¹⁹

In contrast, to these Latin American countries, the Dominican government invited Jews to come as farmers if the American Jewish Joint Distribution Com-mittee supported them. Moreover, unlike other Latin American governments, Dominican officials in Ciudad Trujillo, the capital city (renamed by Rafael Tru-jillo, the Dominican dictator, after himself in 1938), encouraged Jewish immigra-tion. Dominican governments and society had allowed Jews to integrate earlier, in the nineteenth century, and in 1882, its leaders had even invited a mass immigra-tion of Jews fleeing Russian pogroms. And in the twentieth century, they offered admittance to Jews starting in 1933 and continued to accept Jewish refugees from Shanghai even after the war.

Clearly, other countries took in more Jews. At its height, Sosúa amounted to no more than 500 Jewish settlers, although another 200 had passed through. Still, the Dominicans may have saved over 3,000 lives, if one includes those living in the capital and those possibly saved as a result of holding Dominican visas.²⁰

Why did this country swim against the tide and take in these hapless refugees?

First, a brief background: The Dominican Republic, had offered land for a gricultural 18 Conversions were required by Colombia and Venezuela. Laikin Elkin, Jews of the Latin

American Republics, p. 79, 86.

19 Werner T. Angress, Witness to the Storm: A Jewish Journey from Nazi Berlin to the 82nd Airborne, 1920–1945, Durham, NC 2012, p. 177.

20 Statistics fluctuate due to the different years for which they are available, whether 1933–

1943, 1931–1942, or 1933–1940. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s statistics from 1933 until 1940 show 84,000 refugees entered Latin America, among whom 25,000 went to Argentina, 15,000 to Brazil, 10,000 to Chile, 9,000 to Bolivia, 2,900 to Cuba, and 21,000 to other countries. Others give higher figures, see: Milgram, Entre la aceptación y el rechazo. Laikin Elkin shows that over 29,000 Jews entered Brazil (1931–1942), idem:

Jews of the Latin American Republics, p. 56.

settlements in 1935. Soon after Evian, the Dominican government made a confiden-tial offer of land for settlement to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees and again in “strict confidence” in August 1939.²¹ It proposed to receive 50,000 to 100,000 settlers. And, the DR did not just make a one-time offer. At the end of 1940, its dictator, Rafael Trujillo, anticipated providing another 50,000 acres to establish another 1,000 colonists during 1941. In those days, his proposals appeared extremely generous, “little short of a miracle.”²² In hindsight, the offer looks even better, considering that by the time the war broke out and immigration slowed to a standstill, only 95,000 Jews had entered the United States, 60,000 went to Palestine, 40,000 to Great Britain, and about 75,000 to Central and South America.

So, what motivated the Dominican government? From 1930 to 1961, Rafael Trujillo ran the Dominican Republic as his own personal possession and with the approval of the U.S. He terrorized and murdered opponents, broke unions, became one of the world’s richest men, owned vast tracts of land, held monopolies on salt, and to a large degree controlled the butter, cattle and milk industries.²³ There are many theories to consider. Of most immediacy was Trujillo’s attempt to attain some positive publicity, especially in the United States, after the scandal caused by the Dominican massacre of Haitians in October 1937, just nine months prior to Évian. A long history of racial tension, beginning with the Haitian occu-pation of the Dominican Republic from 1822 to 1844, affected the relationship between the people of that island. Moreover, border disputes continued into the twentieth century as did Haitian immigration. Many Haitian immigrants took on the most arduous work, such as sugar cane cutters, and remained in the Domini-can Republic, especially near the border. Trujillo formulated his own solution to the “problem” of Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border. He mur-dered them. The numbers were staggering, with estimates fluctuating between

21 Telegram from Johnson, Chargé in the U.K. to the Secretary of State, August 12, 1938, in: Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1938, vol. 1, Washington, DC 1955, 764 [Document 840.48 Refugees/655: Telegram 753].

22 Barbara Schwartz, “El Benefactor” of the Dominican Republic and his 300 Jews, in: World Jewry 2 (April 1959), p. 12 quoted by Allen Metz, Why Sosúa? Trujillo’s Motives for Jewish Refugee Settlement in the Dominican Republic, in: Contemporary Jewry 11/1 (1990), p. 4.

23 Charles A. Thomson, Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, in: Foreign Policy Reports (April 15, 1936) in: Joint Archives, folder #40 Administration: Publicity, 1936, 1939–1941.

12,000 and 20,000.²⁴ Trujillo’s gesture towards the refugees was an attempt to dis-tance himself from his own atrocities and recover some stature in world opinion.²⁵ One observer considered his post-Evian offer “one of the boldest masterstrokes of m odern press agentry.²⁶

Moreover, since Trujillo’s genocide had depopulated land, left crops untended, and reduced harvests, he may have hoped that the Jews would make up for the Haitian farmers he had lost. And, Jewish Dominicans would not be a burden on the state since Jewish organizations, specifically those in the United States, would supply the funding, the machinery, and the subsistence of the new settlers until they got on their own feet. Jews could repopulate part of the island while bringing in needed capital with which to increase agricultural production. The Dominicans would thus derive real and symbolic capital, energizing their northern agricul-tural economy and winning gratitude from the refugees and those who hoped to save them.²⁷

24 For 12,000 see Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945, Durham 1998, chap. 5 and for 15,000 see: Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History, Stanford 2003. Some articles and web-sites refer to 20,000, such as the article used here, by Metz.

25 Turits, Foundations of Despotism, p. 197.

26 Metz, Why Sosua?, p. 11 citing German E. Ornes, Trujillo: Little Caesar of the Carib-bean, New York 1958, p. 94.

27 Trujillo may also have known that the Dominican government had welcomed Jews before. In fact, Sephardic Jews had come there in the early 19th century from other Caribbean islands. A small group of merchants, they identified with the Dominicans when Haiti invaded the Dominican part of the island in 1822. When the Haitians were driven back in 1844, Jews integrated into Dominican elite society, welcomed for their commercial skills and for their light skin color. Some decades later, in 1882, General Luperon, leader of the Dominican Republic, wrote to Baron Rothschild in France and to the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The pogroms in Eastern Europe had sparked a mass migration of Jews toward Western Europe and the United States. Luperon, who sought to

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