Tragedy at Évian
How the World Allowed Hitler
to Proceed with the Holocaust
by
Tony Matthews
BIG SKY PUBLISHING (Australia)
@BigSkyPub
www.bigskypublishing.com.au
Distributed by Simon and Schuster
Pen and Sword Books (U.K. and U.S.A.
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Hello, and welcome to the official website.
Tragedy at Évian is a book that many will find unsettling. It is, after all, a disturbing history of neglect and apathy in the face of mounting genocide and unprecedented evil.
In 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called an international conference at Évian-les-Bains in France to discuss ways in which the plight of European Jews under Nazi control might be ameliorated.
However, despite the rhetoric, the subsequent events at Évian demonstrated that the world collectively had turned its back on the problems of Jewish refugees in Nazi-controlled areas of Europe, condemning them to the gas chambers and crematoria of Hitler’s National Socialism.
Many academic studies have been written about the events at Évian; some are excellent works which do much to provide researchers and the general public about the details of the Évian conference and the impact of the conference on world events.
However, I have attempted, within my book, to write about the events at Évian in a simple, non-academic way, presenting the facts as they unfolded, largely chronologically, and portraying how the attitude of the delegates to the conference, reflecting as they did the attitudes of their respective governments and press, were able to place solid, impenetrable barriers in the way of Jewish refugee immigration — despite all the moral obligations of conscience which demanded a more liberal attitude to such immigration.
It was 1938, the world teetered precariously on the brink of war, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees were attempting to flee from Nazi persecution in Austria and Germany. We have all seen the films and photographs, read the books and press stories; there was no hiding the fact that Germany wanted to be rid of its Jewish population as quickly as possible. For the Jews themselves there was no place in which they could hide from the pogrom that was descending upon them.
Yet the concept of mass extermination, die Endlosung, the ‘Final Solution’ as it became known, had yet to become a reality. In those earlier years, before the outbreak of war, the world collectively did not realise that the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Jewish population of Europe could ever happen. Nobody could believe that millions would be murdered en masse. The concept was too outrageous, too horrific, to be contemplated.
When President Roosevelt called the conference in 1938, the civilised world was urged to do something positive to save the Jews of Europe from persecution. But one by one, as the days of the conference progressed, the delegates of the thirty-two countries in attendance stated that there was little or nothing they or their governments could do to assist the plight of the Jewish refugees. Individual immigration laws then in place, including the immigration laws of the U.S., could not be changed to accommodate the desperate refugees. The intransigence of these ‘Nations of Asylum’, as they called themselves at Évian, meant that millions of people were to be condemned, and although the world did not then realise it, the ashes of those millions were to lay the foundations of a hellish Europe which would exist under Nazi domination.
(For a detailed synopsis of the events that occurred at Évian see the ‘Synopsis’ tag above)
See the video ‘trailer’ for Tragedy at Évian:
https://vimeo.com/388400847
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