AN INTERVEW WITH THE AUTHOR
TONY MATTHEWS
Hi,
I'm Tony Matthews the author of Tragedy at Évian .
On this page I'd like to share with you a transcription of an interview I've done which will give you loads of information about the Évian conference, why I decided to write the book and also why it took me thirty years to get it written and published.
It's been a mammoth task!
I hope you will find a load of interesting information about the conference in the book and also how events in 1938 have a very real and direct correlation to what's happening globally today in regards to the disturbing rise in ultra-right-wing nationalism and the expansion of authoritarian governments in many parts of the world.
Tony Matthews,
2020.
I'm Tony Matthews the author of Tragedy at Évian .
On this page I'd like to share with you a transcription of an interview I've done which will give you loads of information about the Évian conference, why I decided to write the book and also why it took me thirty years to get it written and published.
It's been a mammoth task!
I hope you will find a load of interesting information about the conference in the book and also how events in 1938 have a very real and direct correlation to what's happening globally today in regards to the disturbing rise in ultra-right-wing nationalism and the expansion of authoritarian governments in many parts of the world.
Tony Matthews,
2020.
QUESTION 1.
What is it that makes this book different from the many others that have been written about the Holocaust?
Actually the book is not really about the Holocaust; it’s more about how the world was then relating to the events that were taking place in Germany and Austria during the lead-up to the Second World War. It’s also a demonstration that we should always be aware of the signs that the world is changing dramatically and that we should ever be conscious that these changes could inflict enormous damage on civilisation and society generally.
We have all seen, of course, very recently, how propaganda can be utilised to influence large numbers of people for political gain. Events since 2016 demonstrate that even subtle influences can be introduced in order to achieve enormous political benefits. The American executive, for example, has wielded these influences with considerable success and usually not with any degree of subtlety. Political manipulation and excessively untruthful propaganda was at the heart of Nazi endeavours during the 1930s, at least at first, to turn the German people against the Jews. Very soon a tidal surge of hatred, influenced largely by Nazi propaganda, was being unleashed against the Jewish people in Germany and Austria, growing almost exponentially as it gathered momentum. We have seen much the same kind of influences being used more recently against Latino people or other immigrants and especially against anyone of Middle Eastern or Iranian descent. More recently the same kind of rhetoric is being used against Asians and especially the Chinese.
It is almost impossible to stop these kinds of insidious campaigns. They take hold within the ephemera of the public’s imagination and are fed and influenced by further and even more sinister political machinations. The Nazis were using this type of manipulation to influence not only an entire nation but an entire continent against the Jews of Europe. I would go so far as to say that the diatribe emanating out of Berlin during the 1930s did much to influence the whole world against the Jews and we saw the result of that at Évian. People believed, firstly, that the Jews were not being treated as badly as was being reported in the press of the day. Not even the Germans would go that far, the general public collectively believed, but they were also influenced by almost incessant propaganda into believing that the Jews themselves were responsible for the persecution then being brought against them. The Germans were telling the world that it was the Jews who had caused the First World War and it was also the Jews who had been responsible for the Wall Street crash and the subsequent Great Depression. The message was clear: Jews were sub-humans. Everyone had suffered terribly because of the war and the subsequent depression – in fact millions had also died of the Spanish influenza brought about because of the war so the Jews were responsible for that too. The world was in chaos, millions had died in the war and during the influenza outbreak and no one could calculate how many people had died or suffered terribly during the Depression. The terrible angst of the past was coming together as a perfect storm. Now all that was going to change. Hitler had arrived on the world stage to make Germany a great nation again and there were millions of his supporters who believed fervently that with Hitler in power all their problems would dissipate and their lives would again become prosperous, safe and free. But before all that could happen the world had to be cleansed of its Jews. That was Hitler’s clear message. It was the only way forward.
QUESTION 2.
As may be seen in your book, the conference at Évian failed miserably in helping to ameliorate the plight of the Jews of Europe in 1938, do you think that President Roosevelt played a significant role in that failure?
I actually have a lot of time for Roosevelt and believe that he was genuinely attempting to help the Jewish people of Europe during the Nazi era but his hands were tied and I think he realised, even early in the Évian project, that any results that might come from the conference would be only minor. Very few countries were willing to change their existing immigration laws to allow more Jewish refugees to enter their countries, largely, I believe, because of the massively damaging influence of hateful German propaganda and fake news. People were really beginning to believe that the Nazis might possibly have been at least partially right in blaming the Jews for all the evils that had descended on the world since the turn of the century. Roosevelt was clever enough to understand that there would be strong resistance to his proposal of countries stepping forward to assist the Jews but even he stated that America would not change its current immigration quota. That was the signal for the world to follow and some countries actually tightened their immigration laws making it even more difficult for Jewish refugees to find any kind of safe harbour. Roosevelt should be applauded for at least trying to do something but he should also be condemned for not doing enough.
QUESTION 3.
Did any of the countries represented at Évian actually do anything to assist the Jews of Europe?
While the conference was taking place there was almost a blanket refusal to do anything to assist the Jewish people in any way. There were some fairly minor adjustments made to proposed immigration levels or more particularly to the types of quotas allowed, but most of the countries refused to accept larger number of immigrants than had already been allocated under the separate immigration laws and requirements of those countries. The one real attempt to do something at Évian was presented by the government of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. They offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees. They even set up an immigrant colony known as Sosua where the refugees could acquire land easily and begin new lives. Yet most of the people coming from Nazi controlled areas were not farmers, they were townspeople and businessmen, so transitioning to a rural agricultural lifestyle in an area that was basically just a wilderness at the time was always going to be problematical. However, it was a sign that at least the Dominicans were trying to do something, which was better than just about everyone else at the conference. Actually, the Sosua settlement went on to become a great success story in the Dominican Republic. Only about eight hundred refugees were able finally to settle there but their descendants are mainly still there today and the region, being right on the coast, is now a major tourist area.
QUESTION 4.
Why didn’t the United Kingdom and Australia do more for the refugees.
The UK was already accepting a reasonable number of European refugees but they, like almost every other country in the world, were frightened that if they took too many it would cause civil unrest. They were already experiencing anti-Semitic unrest at that time with vituperative slogans being painted on walls and Jewish graves vandalised. We have seen just that happening more recently in Germany and Greece for example, with the influx of refugees from Iraq and Syria. Australia too was plagued by these doubts. There was more than adequate land available in Australia for refugees but the possibility of social unrest and particularly of jobs being taken by immigrants was a primary concern to the government of Joseph Lyons. Unemployment was still a major issue. People had fairly recently come through the Great Depression with all its associated suffering and hardship; they did not want a return to the days when men would have to go on the road in search of work and people were surviving on government rations and charities.
QUESTION 5.
What happened in Germany immediately after the failure of Évian?
The growing persecution of European Jewry escalated dramatically after Évian. For example, on 7 November, 1938, the assassination of German diplomat Ernst von Rath took place at the German Embassy in Paris. The assassin was a seventeen-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, the son of a deported Polish Jew. Although Von Rath lingered for a while his injuries were severe and death was virtually a certainty. He died on 9 November.
Utilising the assassination of Ernst von Rath as an excuse, the infamous Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, exploded in a rampage of anti-Semitic fury throughout Germany and Austria. This was a carefully orchestrated programme of destruction that raged through almost every city, town and village in those countries. 267 synagogues and congregational buildings were burnt to the ground. Thousands of Jewish shops had their front windows broken, Jews were evicted from their homes and thrown from trams and moving trains. Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentrations camps. Women and children were harnessed to wagons and whipped through the streets like beasts of burden. There was a flurry of lynchings and even the Germans themselves admitted to hanging summarily thirty-three people – although according to British and American journalists present at the time this figure was grossly understated by the Nazis and hundreds of Jews were actually murdered.
Following the shooting of Von Rath, Herman Goering, then president of the Reichstag, the German Legislature, issued a decree fining German Jews one thousand million marks, the equivalent of £80 million at that time. He also decreed that all Jews were barred from retail and wholesale trade, Jewish owners of shops and residences damaged in the riots would have to pay for all damages while the Reich confiscated all the insurance claims.
The pogrom included the suppression of cultural performances, bans on imports of all Jewish publications and the banning of meetings. Jewish children were refused admittance to German primary schools.
Jews remained indoors all day for fear of riots and Nazi leaders met to draw up plans for what was described at the time as being, ‘an intensified anti-Jewish drive’. The German controlled press became virtually hysterical, demanding in huge headlines the: ‘Extermination of the Jewish Menace’. People were no longer talking about mass deportations. They were beginning to use words like extermination.
All these events occurred after Évian. The Germans realised that there would now be no mass emigration of the Jewish people from Germany and Austria so they decided to step up the persecution exponentially.
QUESTION 6.
How did the failure of Évian give Hitler a virtual Carte Blanche to proceed with the Holocaust?
At the time of the annexation of Austria in 1938 the German and Austrian Jewish population amounted to only about 570,000 people. Actually we don’t know the accurate population figures but these were the numbers estimated at the time. Nazi figures later given at the notorious Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 stated that the number of Jewish people in both Germany and Austria were considerably lower. However, even if the figure was as high as 570,000 people, these could easily have been assimilated into the thirty-two countries whose representatives at Évian called themselves the ‘Nations of Asylum’. If each of the thirty-two nations represented at Évian had allowed just eighteen thousand Jewish refugees into their countries, Hitler would have been forced to reconsider his plans for the ‘Final Solution’ as he would have understood, firstly, that the world did not regard the Jewish people as ‘vermin’, or a ‘problem’ as did the Nazi regime, that countries were willing to do what they could to assist their fellow human beings, and that if large numbers of Jewish people had been allowed to leave Germany and Austria then that would have been a reasonable solution. The history of the Holocaust as we know it could have been vastly different.
Naturally we have to theorise a little here. No one can know for certain what would have happened had the Nations of Asylum taken large numbers of Jewish refugees. If the Jewish population figures presented to the Nazis at the Wannsee conference were anywhere close to being accurate then it would have been easily possible for the Nations of Asylum to have offered refuge to every single Jew then under Nazi control.
Yet there is no known document which demonstrates with any clarity when, by whom and in what way the Nazis decided to embark on the Holocaust. It is believed that the order to kill every Jew in Europe was never given in writing but ordered orally by Hitler during the summer of 1941, although by that time, of course, concentration camps were in existence and many others were being constructed. By that time too an uncountable number of Jewish people had already been killed. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 the number of killings grew exponentially. As a terrible utilitarian experiment a number of Soviet prisoners-of-war were killed with Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz in September 1941 – a clear indication that Hitler’s oral instructions to commence the Jewish genocide were being placed rapidly into effect and the Wannsee Conference in January the following year laid the plans and created the organisational structure to bring all the Jews of Europe into extermination camps, principally in Poland.
Could the decisions made at Évian have prevented this? The answer to that question is complex. If all the Jews had been allowed to emigrate from Germany and Austria then obviously hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. But then there were millions of Jewish people in many other areas which came under Nazi domination following the invasion of Russia and the occupation of countries such as France, Belgium, Norway, Holland, Denmark and the eastern states. Almost certainly most of the Jews in these regions would have been killed although far larger numbers might have survived. Germany was in need of labour, without slave labour the Reich could not continue to prosecute the war and without any remaining Jewish population in either Germany or Austria – those populations having theoretically emigrated – then very significant numbers of Jewish people might have been saved from the gas chambers and placed instead into forced-labour camps. Évian could never have prevented the Holocaust per se unless the ‘Nations of Asylum’ had been willing to take millions of additional Jewish people from those areas which later came under Nazi control – even presuming that the Jews would have been allowed to emigrate, which was highly unlikely – but the decisions made at Évian, the refusal to take any significant numbers of Jewish refugees, even from Germany or Austria, delivered a clear message to Hitler – that the world did not care, and would never care, about the fate of the Jews. Hitler saw the failure of Évian as a blank cheque and moved forward ruthlessly with his plans for the Holocaust believing that the world generally had expressed total antipathy towards the Jewish people. If the Évian conference had not failed it’s possible that it might have given Hitler pause to reconsider his plans and it would certainly have mitigated the eventual horror, possibly to a very significant degree.
The failure of Évian served to ramp up Nazi hostility towards the Jewish people. The Nazis were angry that they were to be left to deal with the ‘Jewish Problem’ alone, and now that mass emigration was out of the question they could see no alternative but to resort to industrial-scale genocide. The publication, Danziger Vorposten, clearly stated that the reaction of the delegates at the conference only served to, ‘...justify Germany’s policy against Jewry’. A damning article appeared in the Das Schwarze Korps – the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi SS – which stated: ‘Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world screeching, and because, after all, no power on earth can hinder us, we will now bring the Jewish question to its totalitarian solution.’ There followed detailed steps that would be taken towards the slaughter which was to be implemented. The article ended: ‘The result will be the actual and definite end of Jewry in Germany and its complete extermination.’
German newspapers reported heavily on the results of Évian, claiming that anti-Semitism was right and just and that the results of Évian proved that no one wanted the Jews. The National Zeitung reported: ‘… We have reports from Australia and South Africa that those countries are closed to Jews. Poland refused to take her own nationals, Holland will not accept Jews in her colonies, thus overpopulated Germany is forced to tolerate these parasites.’
Even the language was changing. Suddenly people were beginning to talk in more specific terms and Nazi party officials were already learning to code their actual intentions when committing anything to paper. ‘Evacuation east’ became a euphemism for deportation to the extermination camps while being ‘firm’ or ‘severe’ mean that people could be killed summarily. After Évian, there was no longer any pretence that Germany would allow mass Jewish migration. Every known Jew under Nazi control was ultimately scheduled to be killed.
QUESTION 7.
During your research did you interview any of the delegates who took part in the conference?
Almost all the research I did for this book was based upon previously secret or otherwise classified documentation, although there were several people I interviewed who were able to provide me with first-hand information. One of these was a man named Gosta Engzell who was the head of the legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swedish delegate to Évian. Most of the delegates to the conference had died by the time I began researching this book but Gosta was still alive and I was able to have a lengthy discussion with him. He gave me many insights into how people were feeling about the conference as it progressed and why the decisions made at Évian helped to seal the doors against immigration in many countries. Gosta himself was very empathetic to the plight of the Jewish people but his hands had been tied by Swedish government policy. The Swedes wished to remain neutral and not annoy the Germans whom they saw as a major trading partner. Gosta represented the Swedish government at Évian but virtually had to do exactly as he had been instructed by his government and that went for everyone who attended the conference, including the Americans who had called the conference in the first place.
QUESTION 8.
You have included in the book many stories of those who actually assisted the Jewish refugees. Was that in order to give the book some sense of balance?
That was exactly the reason. Thirty-two countries around the world had largely abandoned the Jewish people so I decided to include two full chapters in the book to honour those individuals, men and women and also a number of organisations, who went to extraordinary lengths to assist the persecuted Jews of Europe. Many people placed their lives on the line and a large number of these were either killed by the Nazis for having done so or they were also terribly persecuted and sometimes imprisoned in concentration camps. The courage of these people, many of whom were not Jews, cannot be overstated. They risked everything, and I felt that their marvellous endeavours and their shining example of courage should never be forgotten.
QUESTION 9.
Were you able to interview any of the Jewish people who managed to flee from Nazi control or who were incarcerated in one of the concentration camps?
Sadly, no. Almost all of the firsthand information I obtained about personal experiences came through information I obtained from the Holocaust Museum in the United States. They have an enormous database of personal information which has been provided to them either in documented form or as oral histories. It was from these that I largely gained an understanding of some of the personal experiences of Jewish refugees. I did, however, interview one man, not a Jew, who had been incarcerated at Dachau for several years. He survived the ordeal and his descriptions of life in a Nazi concentration camp were compelling. While I was researching the history of the Evian conference I did speak on ABC Radio nationally about my search to find people who had either been at the conference or who had knowledge of the event. I was also wanting to speak with people who felt strongly about the results of Évian and what they meant to the Jewish people of that time. However, despite such wide publicity I was unable to find even a single person who knew anything about the Évian conference which made me even more determined to write the book because I wanted people to know what had happened back then and the disastrous results of the failure of the conference. Making people aware of what happened at Évian has been a driving force behind the writing and publication of this book.
QUESTION 10.
Do you think your book will make a difference to our understanding of the Holocaust and will it make a difference to our current attitudes to political and religious refugees?
I principally wrote this book so that people would have a better understanding not so much of why the Holocaust occurred but why the world allowed it to happen. Admittedly, in 1938, no one could have foreseen what the Nazis would do once they had come to realise that the world had little real interest in helping to resettle the Jews of Europe. The warning signs were there clearly enough but it would have taken someone with considerable prescience to know that the Jewish people of Europe would have been murdered in their millions and on such a brutal and industrialised scale. The concept of such mass extermination was almost unknown to us prior to the Second World War. Of course there have been many other mass killings in history but nothing like the Holocaust. In fact just the term genocide did not exist prior to the war. It was actually coined in Poland during the Holocaust and comes from the Greek words ‘Genos’ or ‘race’, and the Latin ‘cide’ for ‘killing’. It was subsequently defined by the United Nations as an act committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. We have seen genocides since that time, many of them: Rwanda; Bosnia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, but apart from Stalin’s infamous forced famine of the 1930s there was nothing in the world’s recent history at that time that would have led us to believe that the Nazis were about to launch themselves into the greatest mass murder in history.
My role in writing this book was simply an attempt to demonstrate that we will always have to look for the warning signs. The persecution of the Jews of Europe was a powerful signpost indicating that a great evil was taking place and that greater evil would follow if something were not done quickly to prevent it. We see today many such warning signs with the dramatic increase of ultra-right-wing nationalism, the suppression and illegalisation of anti-fascist organisations and the massive surge in well armed militia groups coupled with insidious political manipulation. Even Germany, which, since the war, has been at the forefront of crushing any semblance of ultra-right-wing nationalism, is now facing considerable problems with the growth of neo-Nazi influences. These are all warning signs of a dangerous future which will be exacerbated by political and social unrest brought about through deadly pandemics, the clashes of political ideologies, automated social media propaganda and other forms of global influences such as dramatic climate change.
QUESTION 11.
What made you want to write this book?
I was almost compelled to write this book. As a child I was an incessant reader; I read every book I could lay my hands on and could often be found beneath the blankets at night reading in the light of a rapidly dimming torch. When I was about twelve years of age I read a brief description of the Holocaust which led me to borrow books from the local library and I came to gain a reasonable understanding of what had happened. I have always had an extremely vivid imagination and suddenly I could almost see the suffering those people had gone through in the concentration camps and it affected me greatly. I literally felt sick. I found that for a while I was too upset even to eat properly. I knew what was happening to me, I understood that it was being caused through the vivid pictures I was seeing in my mind, but I thought I would eventually get over it and I did. Yet the discovery of the history of the Holocaust left a indelible stain on me and I could never understand why so many people had been murdered so callously. When, as an adult and full-time research historian and author, I eventually discovered what had happened during the Évian conference and what the conference meant to the ultimate fate of the Jewish refugees I felt that it was really important for me personally to write a history of this tragedy so that the world generally would know what had happened. Before I even began to write the book I also needed to know how many people knew about the Évian conference and its influence on the Jewish people of Europe. I asked many people I knew, or came into contact with, and without exception they had never heard of it. I then wrote a feature article about the conference which was published in both the Canberra Times and Brisbane’s Courier Mail and after those articles had been published I received many calls from the public telling me that this was a story that needed to be told in detail to the world. When I began expressing the need for such a book online I received a similar response from people in other countries, many of them insisting that I write the book, not only to expose the terrible injustice of it all but also to pay tribute to those millions of men, women and children who were killed during the Holocaust and also to signal a warning that this could all too easily happen again during our own lives.
QUESTION 12.
Why would people enjoy reading your book?
I’m reasonably sure that no one will actually ‘enjoy’ reading this book but almost everyone who reads it will be astonished at its content, I believe. Relatively few people know of these events, especially outside academia, so the details of the Évian conference, its ramifications to global history and to our experiences of the parallels of what is occurring in the world today will be both surprising and shocking.
QUESTION 13.
What do you hope that readers take away from reading this book?
I believe that this book will make people think about the Holocaust in a different way. Up until now the blame for the Holocaust has always been placed solely upon the architects of National Socialism, and quite rightly, of course, but there was another aspect to consider and that was universal apathy to the plight of the Jewish people leading up to the Second World War. Between 1933 when Hitler came to power and 1938 when the Évian conference took place, that apathy was so disbursed internationally that it was hardly noticeable. Of course the press in various countries were publishing articles and making statements about how terrible the Jews of Europe were being treated but these articles were not making any difference whatever and having little impact on the growing tide of persecution that was taking place in Germany and Austria and even in other countries not then under Nazi domination – places such as Poland and Hungary, for example. Yet when the conference was arranged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the delegates to thirty-two countries came together to discuss ways of ameliorating the plight of the European Jews, that was the perfect opportunity to act. The whole issue was no longer spread thinly over the grounds of Europe with just a few journalists or human rights activists raising their hands in protest. Now the entire issue was deeply in focus for the whole world to see and especially for the delegates at Évian to see clearly. This was the time to come together and act, but every one of the delegates at Évian failed to do so in any effective manner. Hitler, who was watching the developments at Évian keenly, came to understand that the Jews of Europe would not be welcomed anywhere in the world and that was reason enough, in his murderous mind, to decide to proceed with the only other alternative he could imagine to mass deportation – mass extermination.
QUESTION 14.
How long did it take to prepare?
This book has been developed and written periodically over approximately thirty years.
QUESTION 15.
Are there any interesting anecdotes about its preparation?
One of the people I met during the course of the research for this book was a former inmate of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich during the Second World War. He was not a Jew but because of his years of incarceration he was able to give me vital firsthand information about the camps. He was one of the more interesting people I ever interviewed having managed to escape from Dachau and remain at large for some considerable time disguised as a priest. Apparently he even married a few Germans while on the run. He was later recaptured and while an inmate he had also been taken to a luxurious villa at Millstatt in Austria and there forced to dig secret pits in which large Nazi boxes, presumably containing looted goods such as gold and other valuables, were buried. This man was later returned to Dachau, threatened with death if he ever spoke of the events and remained at the camp until its liberation when he personally witnessed American soldiers summarily executing German camp guards. I later wrote a detailed account of his experiences in another of my books, True Blue Queenslanders.
QUESTION 16.
What do you see as the major theme and raison d’etre of the book?
The possibilities of prevention, or more realistically, a significant mitigation of the holocaust is the central theme of this book. It tells the story in a clear, chronological way, without embellishment or academic hypotheses, and poses one simple question: Why did we not, as a world community, come together to act effectively to assist the Jewish refugees of Europe when they were facing what became the worse case of genocide in history? Why did we not see that the Holocaust was coming? How can we use this example to be aware of similar issues which might affect us now or at some time in the future?
The book draws a universal word-picture of events and acts as a virtual window into the past so that readers can see and gain a better understanding of the vital importance of the conference to world history. It also signals a ‘clear and present danger’ of where the world is today in respect to authoritarian governments and the international plight of refugees, particularly in light on ongoing military conflicts and the dangerous rise in ultra-right-wing nationalism within Western democracies such as the United States, Australia and Europe.
I decided to write this book about thirty years ago after realising that there was little information of any real significance available to the general public on the subject of the Évian conference. Indeed, my investigations revealed that few people were aware that such a conference had taken place or how important it had been to the survival, or otherwise, of the Jewish refugees then attempting to flee from Nazi persecution.
I spoke with many teachers, librarians and even academics who told me they had never heard of the Évian conference. Holocaust studies and Jewish history studies in many universities, of course, now refer to the conference; a few theses have been written on the event and it is a subject that is now sometimes investigated in comparative world studies and modern history courses in schools and universities. However, my book is based upon previously secret and highly confidential documents of the U.S. Department of State and I believe that few of the educational courses currently on offer to students have instant access to the documents upon which my book is based. The book, therefore, should be of significant interest to libraries, universities, schools, colleges, Holocaust centres and museums. The book is written principally for the general public, although it will be of interest to anyone who needs to be informed of modern Jewish or European history. This book is unusual in that rather than describing the historical details of the Holocaust, it examines how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. Whereas most other books about the Holocaust focus on the actual events, this book takes a unique look at the tragedy, delving into many of the overarching reasons of why the Holocaust was allowed to take place. Almost everyone today is aware of the horrific events concerning the Holocaust but few among the general public know of the Évian conference and how it failed to protect those who were destined to end their lives in the gas chambers and crematoria of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.
What is it that makes this book different from the many others that have been written about the Holocaust?
Actually the book is not really about the Holocaust; it’s more about how the world was then relating to the events that were taking place in Germany and Austria during the lead-up to the Second World War. It’s also a demonstration that we should always be aware of the signs that the world is changing dramatically and that we should ever be conscious that these changes could inflict enormous damage on civilisation and society generally.
We have all seen, of course, very recently, how propaganda can be utilised to influence large numbers of people for political gain. Events since 2016 demonstrate that even subtle influences can be introduced in order to achieve enormous political benefits. The American executive, for example, has wielded these influences with considerable success and usually not with any degree of subtlety. Political manipulation and excessively untruthful propaganda was at the heart of Nazi endeavours during the 1930s, at least at first, to turn the German people against the Jews. Very soon a tidal surge of hatred, influenced largely by Nazi propaganda, was being unleashed against the Jewish people in Germany and Austria, growing almost exponentially as it gathered momentum. We have seen much the same kind of influences being used more recently against Latino people or other immigrants and especially against anyone of Middle Eastern or Iranian descent. More recently the same kind of rhetoric is being used against Asians and especially the Chinese.
It is almost impossible to stop these kinds of insidious campaigns. They take hold within the ephemera of the public’s imagination and are fed and influenced by further and even more sinister political machinations. The Nazis were using this type of manipulation to influence not only an entire nation but an entire continent against the Jews of Europe. I would go so far as to say that the diatribe emanating out of Berlin during the 1930s did much to influence the whole world against the Jews and we saw the result of that at Évian. People believed, firstly, that the Jews were not being treated as badly as was being reported in the press of the day. Not even the Germans would go that far, the general public collectively believed, but they were also influenced by almost incessant propaganda into believing that the Jews themselves were responsible for the persecution then being brought against them. The Germans were telling the world that it was the Jews who had caused the First World War and it was also the Jews who had been responsible for the Wall Street crash and the subsequent Great Depression. The message was clear: Jews were sub-humans. Everyone had suffered terribly because of the war and the subsequent depression – in fact millions had also died of the Spanish influenza brought about because of the war so the Jews were responsible for that too. The world was in chaos, millions had died in the war and during the influenza outbreak and no one could calculate how many people had died or suffered terribly during the Depression. The terrible angst of the past was coming together as a perfect storm. Now all that was going to change. Hitler had arrived on the world stage to make Germany a great nation again and there were millions of his supporters who believed fervently that with Hitler in power all their problems would dissipate and their lives would again become prosperous, safe and free. But before all that could happen the world had to be cleansed of its Jews. That was Hitler’s clear message. It was the only way forward.
QUESTION 2.
As may be seen in your book, the conference at Évian failed miserably in helping to ameliorate the plight of the Jews of Europe in 1938, do you think that President Roosevelt played a significant role in that failure?
I actually have a lot of time for Roosevelt and believe that he was genuinely attempting to help the Jewish people of Europe during the Nazi era but his hands were tied and I think he realised, even early in the Évian project, that any results that might come from the conference would be only minor. Very few countries were willing to change their existing immigration laws to allow more Jewish refugees to enter their countries, largely, I believe, because of the massively damaging influence of hateful German propaganda and fake news. People were really beginning to believe that the Nazis might possibly have been at least partially right in blaming the Jews for all the evils that had descended on the world since the turn of the century. Roosevelt was clever enough to understand that there would be strong resistance to his proposal of countries stepping forward to assist the Jews but even he stated that America would not change its current immigration quota. That was the signal for the world to follow and some countries actually tightened their immigration laws making it even more difficult for Jewish refugees to find any kind of safe harbour. Roosevelt should be applauded for at least trying to do something but he should also be condemned for not doing enough.
QUESTION 3.
Did any of the countries represented at Évian actually do anything to assist the Jews of Europe?
While the conference was taking place there was almost a blanket refusal to do anything to assist the Jewish people in any way. There were some fairly minor adjustments made to proposed immigration levels or more particularly to the types of quotas allowed, but most of the countries refused to accept larger number of immigrants than had already been allocated under the separate immigration laws and requirements of those countries. The one real attempt to do something at Évian was presented by the government of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. They offered to accept up to 100,000 refugees. They even set up an immigrant colony known as Sosua where the refugees could acquire land easily and begin new lives. Yet most of the people coming from Nazi controlled areas were not farmers, they were townspeople and businessmen, so transitioning to a rural agricultural lifestyle in an area that was basically just a wilderness at the time was always going to be problematical. However, it was a sign that at least the Dominicans were trying to do something, which was better than just about everyone else at the conference. Actually, the Sosua settlement went on to become a great success story in the Dominican Republic. Only about eight hundred refugees were able finally to settle there but their descendants are mainly still there today and the region, being right on the coast, is now a major tourist area.
QUESTION 4.
Why didn’t the United Kingdom and Australia do more for the refugees.
The UK was already accepting a reasonable number of European refugees but they, like almost every other country in the world, were frightened that if they took too many it would cause civil unrest. They were already experiencing anti-Semitic unrest at that time with vituperative slogans being painted on walls and Jewish graves vandalised. We have seen just that happening more recently in Germany and Greece for example, with the influx of refugees from Iraq and Syria. Australia too was plagued by these doubts. There was more than adequate land available in Australia for refugees but the possibility of social unrest and particularly of jobs being taken by immigrants was a primary concern to the government of Joseph Lyons. Unemployment was still a major issue. People had fairly recently come through the Great Depression with all its associated suffering and hardship; they did not want a return to the days when men would have to go on the road in search of work and people were surviving on government rations and charities.
QUESTION 5.
What happened in Germany immediately after the failure of Évian?
The growing persecution of European Jewry escalated dramatically after Évian. For example, on 7 November, 1938, the assassination of German diplomat Ernst von Rath took place at the German Embassy in Paris. The assassin was a seventeen-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, the son of a deported Polish Jew. Although Von Rath lingered for a while his injuries were severe and death was virtually a certainty. He died on 9 November.
Utilising the assassination of Ernst von Rath as an excuse, the infamous Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, exploded in a rampage of anti-Semitic fury throughout Germany and Austria. This was a carefully orchestrated programme of destruction that raged through almost every city, town and village in those countries. 267 synagogues and congregational buildings were burnt to the ground. Thousands of Jewish shops had their front windows broken, Jews were evicted from their homes and thrown from trams and moving trains. Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentrations camps. Women and children were harnessed to wagons and whipped through the streets like beasts of burden. There was a flurry of lynchings and even the Germans themselves admitted to hanging summarily thirty-three people – although according to British and American journalists present at the time this figure was grossly understated by the Nazis and hundreds of Jews were actually murdered.
Following the shooting of Von Rath, Herman Goering, then president of the Reichstag, the German Legislature, issued a decree fining German Jews one thousand million marks, the equivalent of £80 million at that time. He also decreed that all Jews were barred from retail and wholesale trade, Jewish owners of shops and residences damaged in the riots would have to pay for all damages while the Reich confiscated all the insurance claims.
The pogrom included the suppression of cultural performances, bans on imports of all Jewish publications and the banning of meetings. Jewish children were refused admittance to German primary schools.
Jews remained indoors all day for fear of riots and Nazi leaders met to draw up plans for what was described at the time as being, ‘an intensified anti-Jewish drive’. The German controlled press became virtually hysterical, demanding in huge headlines the: ‘Extermination of the Jewish Menace’. People were no longer talking about mass deportations. They were beginning to use words like extermination.
All these events occurred after Évian. The Germans realised that there would now be no mass emigration of the Jewish people from Germany and Austria so they decided to step up the persecution exponentially.
QUESTION 6.
How did the failure of Évian give Hitler a virtual Carte Blanche to proceed with the Holocaust?
At the time of the annexation of Austria in 1938 the German and Austrian Jewish population amounted to only about 570,000 people. Actually we don’t know the accurate population figures but these were the numbers estimated at the time. Nazi figures later given at the notorious Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 stated that the number of Jewish people in both Germany and Austria were considerably lower. However, even if the figure was as high as 570,000 people, these could easily have been assimilated into the thirty-two countries whose representatives at Évian called themselves the ‘Nations of Asylum’. If each of the thirty-two nations represented at Évian had allowed just eighteen thousand Jewish refugees into their countries, Hitler would have been forced to reconsider his plans for the ‘Final Solution’ as he would have understood, firstly, that the world did not regard the Jewish people as ‘vermin’, or a ‘problem’ as did the Nazi regime, that countries were willing to do what they could to assist their fellow human beings, and that if large numbers of Jewish people had been allowed to leave Germany and Austria then that would have been a reasonable solution. The history of the Holocaust as we know it could have been vastly different.
Naturally we have to theorise a little here. No one can know for certain what would have happened had the Nations of Asylum taken large numbers of Jewish refugees. If the Jewish population figures presented to the Nazis at the Wannsee conference were anywhere close to being accurate then it would have been easily possible for the Nations of Asylum to have offered refuge to every single Jew then under Nazi control.
Yet there is no known document which demonstrates with any clarity when, by whom and in what way the Nazis decided to embark on the Holocaust. It is believed that the order to kill every Jew in Europe was never given in writing but ordered orally by Hitler during the summer of 1941, although by that time, of course, concentration camps were in existence and many others were being constructed. By that time too an uncountable number of Jewish people had already been killed. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 the number of killings grew exponentially. As a terrible utilitarian experiment a number of Soviet prisoners-of-war were killed with Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz in September 1941 – a clear indication that Hitler’s oral instructions to commence the Jewish genocide were being placed rapidly into effect and the Wannsee Conference in January the following year laid the plans and created the organisational structure to bring all the Jews of Europe into extermination camps, principally in Poland.
Could the decisions made at Évian have prevented this? The answer to that question is complex. If all the Jews had been allowed to emigrate from Germany and Austria then obviously hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. But then there were millions of Jewish people in many other areas which came under Nazi domination following the invasion of Russia and the occupation of countries such as France, Belgium, Norway, Holland, Denmark and the eastern states. Almost certainly most of the Jews in these regions would have been killed although far larger numbers might have survived. Germany was in need of labour, without slave labour the Reich could not continue to prosecute the war and without any remaining Jewish population in either Germany or Austria – those populations having theoretically emigrated – then very significant numbers of Jewish people might have been saved from the gas chambers and placed instead into forced-labour camps. Évian could never have prevented the Holocaust per se unless the ‘Nations of Asylum’ had been willing to take millions of additional Jewish people from those areas which later came under Nazi control – even presuming that the Jews would have been allowed to emigrate, which was highly unlikely – but the decisions made at Évian, the refusal to take any significant numbers of Jewish refugees, even from Germany or Austria, delivered a clear message to Hitler – that the world did not care, and would never care, about the fate of the Jews. Hitler saw the failure of Évian as a blank cheque and moved forward ruthlessly with his plans for the Holocaust believing that the world generally had expressed total antipathy towards the Jewish people. If the Évian conference had not failed it’s possible that it might have given Hitler pause to reconsider his plans and it would certainly have mitigated the eventual horror, possibly to a very significant degree.
The failure of Évian served to ramp up Nazi hostility towards the Jewish people. The Nazis were angry that they were to be left to deal with the ‘Jewish Problem’ alone, and now that mass emigration was out of the question they could see no alternative but to resort to industrial-scale genocide. The publication, Danziger Vorposten, clearly stated that the reaction of the delegates at the conference only served to, ‘...justify Germany’s policy against Jewry’. A damning article appeared in the Das Schwarze Korps – the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi SS – which stated: ‘Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world screeching, and because, after all, no power on earth can hinder us, we will now bring the Jewish question to its totalitarian solution.’ There followed detailed steps that would be taken towards the slaughter which was to be implemented. The article ended: ‘The result will be the actual and definite end of Jewry in Germany and its complete extermination.’
German newspapers reported heavily on the results of Évian, claiming that anti-Semitism was right and just and that the results of Évian proved that no one wanted the Jews. The National Zeitung reported: ‘… We have reports from Australia and South Africa that those countries are closed to Jews. Poland refused to take her own nationals, Holland will not accept Jews in her colonies, thus overpopulated Germany is forced to tolerate these parasites.’
Even the language was changing. Suddenly people were beginning to talk in more specific terms and Nazi party officials were already learning to code their actual intentions when committing anything to paper. ‘Evacuation east’ became a euphemism for deportation to the extermination camps while being ‘firm’ or ‘severe’ mean that people could be killed summarily. After Évian, there was no longer any pretence that Germany would allow mass Jewish migration. Every known Jew under Nazi control was ultimately scheduled to be killed.
QUESTION 7.
During your research did you interview any of the delegates who took part in the conference?
Almost all the research I did for this book was based upon previously secret or otherwise classified documentation, although there were several people I interviewed who were able to provide me with first-hand information. One of these was a man named Gosta Engzell who was the head of the legal department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Swedish delegate to Évian. Most of the delegates to the conference had died by the time I began researching this book but Gosta was still alive and I was able to have a lengthy discussion with him. He gave me many insights into how people were feeling about the conference as it progressed and why the decisions made at Évian helped to seal the doors against immigration in many countries. Gosta himself was very empathetic to the plight of the Jewish people but his hands had been tied by Swedish government policy. The Swedes wished to remain neutral and not annoy the Germans whom they saw as a major trading partner. Gosta represented the Swedish government at Évian but virtually had to do exactly as he had been instructed by his government and that went for everyone who attended the conference, including the Americans who had called the conference in the first place.
QUESTION 8.
You have included in the book many stories of those who actually assisted the Jewish refugees. Was that in order to give the book some sense of balance?
That was exactly the reason. Thirty-two countries around the world had largely abandoned the Jewish people so I decided to include two full chapters in the book to honour those individuals, men and women and also a number of organisations, who went to extraordinary lengths to assist the persecuted Jews of Europe. Many people placed their lives on the line and a large number of these were either killed by the Nazis for having done so or they were also terribly persecuted and sometimes imprisoned in concentration camps. The courage of these people, many of whom were not Jews, cannot be overstated. They risked everything, and I felt that their marvellous endeavours and their shining example of courage should never be forgotten.
QUESTION 9.
Were you able to interview any of the Jewish people who managed to flee from Nazi control or who were incarcerated in one of the concentration camps?
Sadly, no. Almost all of the firsthand information I obtained about personal experiences came through information I obtained from the Holocaust Museum in the United States. They have an enormous database of personal information which has been provided to them either in documented form or as oral histories. It was from these that I largely gained an understanding of some of the personal experiences of Jewish refugees. I did, however, interview one man, not a Jew, who had been incarcerated at Dachau for several years. He survived the ordeal and his descriptions of life in a Nazi concentration camp were compelling. While I was researching the history of the Evian conference I did speak on ABC Radio nationally about my search to find people who had either been at the conference or who had knowledge of the event. I was also wanting to speak with people who felt strongly about the results of Évian and what they meant to the Jewish people of that time. However, despite such wide publicity I was unable to find even a single person who knew anything about the Évian conference which made me even more determined to write the book because I wanted people to know what had happened back then and the disastrous results of the failure of the conference. Making people aware of what happened at Évian has been a driving force behind the writing and publication of this book.
QUESTION 10.
Do you think your book will make a difference to our understanding of the Holocaust and will it make a difference to our current attitudes to political and religious refugees?
I principally wrote this book so that people would have a better understanding not so much of why the Holocaust occurred but why the world allowed it to happen. Admittedly, in 1938, no one could have foreseen what the Nazis would do once they had come to realise that the world had little real interest in helping to resettle the Jews of Europe. The warning signs were there clearly enough but it would have taken someone with considerable prescience to know that the Jewish people of Europe would have been murdered in their millions and on such a brutal and industrialised scale. The concept of such mass extermination was almost unknown to us prior to the Second World War. Of course there have been many other mass killings in history but nothing like the Holocaust. In fact just the term genocide did not exist prior to the war. It was actually coined in Poland during the Holocaust and comes from the Greek words ‘Genos’ or ‘race’, and the Latin ‘cide’ for ‘killing’. It was subsequently defined by the United Nations as an act committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. We have seen genocides since that time, many of them: Rwanda; Bosnia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, but apart from Stalin’s infamous forced famine of the 1930s there was nothing in the world’s recent history at that time that would have led us to believe that the Nazis were about to launch themselves into the greatest mass murder in history.
My role in writing this book was simply an attempt to demonstrate that we will always have to look for the warning signs. The persecution of the Jews of Europe was a powerful signpost indicating that a great evil was taking place and that greater evil would follow if something were not done quickly to prevent it. We see today many such warning signs with the dramatic increase of ultra-right-wing nationalism, the suppression and illegalisation of anti-fascist organisations and the massive surge in well armed militia groups coupled with insidious political manipulation. Even Germany, which, since the war, has been at the forefront of crushing any semblance of ultra-right-wing nationalism, is now facing considerable problems with the growth of neo-Nazi influences. These are all warning signs of a dangerous future which will be exacerbated by political and social unrest brought about through deadly pandemics, the clashes of political ideologies, automated social media propaganda and other forms of global influences such as dramatic climate change.
QUESTION 11.
What made you want to write this book?
I was almost compelled to write this book. As a child I was an incessant reader; I read every book I could lay my hands on and could often be found beneath the blankets at night reading in the light of a rapidly dimming torch. When I was about twelve years of age I read a brief description of the Holocaust which led me to borrow books from the local library and I came to gain a reasonable understanding of what had happened. I have always had an extremely vivid imagination and suddenly I could almost see the suffering those people had gone through in the concentration camps and it affected me greatly. I literally felt sick. I found that for a while I was too upset even to eat properly. I knew what was happening to me, I understood that it was being caused through the vivid pictures I was seeing in my mind, but I thought I would eventually get over it and I did. Yet the discovery of the history of the Holocaust left a indelible stain on me and I could never understand why so many people had been murdered so callously. When, as an adult and full-time research historian and author, I eventually discovered what had happened during the Évian conference and what the conference meant to the ultimate fate of the Jewish refugees I felt that it was really important for me personally to write a history of this tragedy so that the world generally would know what had happened. Before I even began to write the book I also needed to know how many people knew about the Évian conference and its influence on the Jewish people of Europe. I asked many people I knew, or came into contact with, and without exception they had never heard of it. I then wrote a feature article about the conference which was published in both the Canberra Times and Brisbane’s Courier Mail and after those articles had been published I received many calls from the public telling me that this was a story that needed to be told in detail to the world. When I began expressing the need for such a book online I received a similar response from people in other countries, many of them insisting that I write the book, not only to expose the terrible injustice of it all but also to pay tribute to those millions of men, women and children who were killed during the Holocaust and also to signal a warning that this could all too easily happen again during our own lives.
QUESTION 12.
Why would people enjoy reading your book?
I’m reasonably sure that no one will actually ‘enjoy’ reading this book but almost everyone who reads it will be astonished at its content, I believe. Relatively few people know of these events, especially outside academia, so the details of the Évian conference, its ramifications to global history and to our experiences of the parallels of what is occurring in the world today will be both surprising and shocking.
QUESTION 13.
What do you hope that readers take away from reading this book?
I believe that this book will make people think about the Holocaust in a different way. Up until now the blame for the Holocaust has always been placed solely upon the architects of National Socialism, and quite rightly, of course, but there was another aspect to consider and that was universal apathy to the plight of the Jewish people leading up to the Second World War. Between 1933 when Hitler came to power and 1938 when the Évian conference took place, that apathy was so disbursed internationally that it was hardly noticeable. Of course the press in various countries were publishing articles and making statements about how terrible the Jews of Europe were being treated but these articles were not making any difference whatever and having little impact on the growing tide of persecution that was taking place in Germany and Austria and even in other countries not then under Nazi domination – places such as Poland and Hungary, for example. Yet when the conference was arranged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the delegates to thirty-two countries came together to discuss ways of ameliorating the plight of the European Jews, that was the perfect opportunity to act. The whole issue was no longer spread thinly over the grounds of Europe with just a few journalists or human rights activists raising their hands in protest. Now the entire issue was deeply in focus for the whole world to see and especially for the delegates at Évian to see clearly. This was the time to come together and act, but every one of the delegates at Évian failed to do so in any effective manner. Hitler, who was watching the developments at Évian keenly, came to understand that the Jews of Europe would not be welcomed anywhere in the world and that was reason enough, in his murderous mind, to decide to proceed with the only other alternative he could imagine to mass deportation – mass extermination.
QUESTION 14.
How long did it take to prepare?
This book has been developed and written periodically over approximately thirty years.
QUESTION 15.
Are there any interesting anecdotes about its preparation?
One of the people I met during the course of the research for this book was a former inmate of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich during the Second World War. He was not a Jew but because of his years of incarceration he was able to give me vital firsthand information about the camps. He was one of the more interesting people I ever interviewed having managed to escape from Dachau and remain at large for some considerable time disguised as a priest. Apparently he even married a few Germans while on the run. He was later recaptured and while an inmate he had also been taken to a luxurious villa at Millstatt in Austria and there forced to dig secret pits in which large Nazi boxes, presumably containing looted goods such as gold and other valuables, were buried. This man was later returned to Dachau, threatened with death if he ever spoke of the events and remained at the camp until its liberation when he personally witnessed American soldiers summarily executing German camp guards. I later wrote a detailed account of his experiences in another of my books, True Blue Queenslanders.
QUESTION 16.
What do you see as the major theme and raison d’etre of the book?
The possibilities of prevention, or more realistically, a significant mitigation of the holocaust is the central theme of this book. It tells the story in a clear, chronological way, without embellishment or academic hypotheses, and poses one simple question: Why did we not, as a world community, come together to act effectively to assist the Jewish refugees of Europe when they were facing what became the worse case of genocide in history? Why did we not see that the Holocaust was coming? How can we use this example to be aware of similar issues which might affect us now or at some time in the future?
The book draws a universal word-picture of events and acts as a virtual window into the past so that readers can see and gain a better understanding of the vital importance of the conference to world history. It also signals a ‘clear and present danger’ of where the world is today in respect to authoritarian governments and the international plight of refugees, particularly in light on ongoing military conflicts and the dangerous rise in ultra-right-wing nationalism within Western democracies such as the United States, Australia and Europe.
I decided to write this book about thirty years ago after realising that there was little information of any real significance available to the general public on the subject of the Évian conference. Indeed, my investigations revealed that few people were aware that such a conference had taken place or how important it had been to the survival, or otherwise, of the Jewish refugees then attempting to flee from Nazi persecution.
I spoke with many teachers, librarians and even academics who told me they had never heard of the Évian conference. Holocaust studies and Jewish history studies in many universities, of course, now refer to the conference; a few theses have been written on the event and it is a subject that is now sometimes investigated in comparative world studies and modern history courses in schools and universities. However, my book is based upon previously secret and highly confidential documents of the U.S. Department of State and I believe that few of the educational courses currently on offer to students have instant access to the documents upon which my book is based. The book, therefore, should be of significant interest to libraries, universities, schools, colleges, Holocaust centres and museums. The book is written principally for the general public, although it will be of interest to anyone who needs to be informed of modern Jewish or European history. This book is unusual in that rather than describing the historical details of the Holocaust, it examines how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. Whereas most other books about the Holocaust focus on the actual events, this book takes a unique look at the tragedy, delving into many of the overarching reasons of why the Holocaust was allowed to take place. Almost everyone today is aware of the horrific events concerning the Holocaust but few among the general public know of the Évian conference and how it failed to protect those who were destined to end their lives in the gas chambers and crematoria of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.