By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — History knows many varieties of antisemitism. However, the significance of one or another of its varieties becomes clear many years later and from comparison with other events that mark and emphasize the results of the tragedy more clearly.
The Evian Conference was an international conference with representatives from 32 countries that addressed the issues of helping Jewish refugees from Hitler’s regime in Germany and Austria. The conference was convened after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 on the initiative of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and was named after the city of Evian-les-Bains (France), where it was held at the “Hotel Royal” from July 5 to 16, 1938. It was about saving 504,000 Jews of Germany and 185,000 Jews of Austria, that is, almost 700,000 German-speaking Jews.
They were threatened by the Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazis in September 1935: The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor and The Reich Citizenship Law. The vast majority of the countries participating in the conference said they had already done everything possible to alleviate the plight of Jewish refugees. Their migration quotas had been exhausted. About 400,000 Jews fled Germany and Austria, but about 300,000 were actually victimized by the unwillingness of the Evian Conference participants to save the Jews from the Nazis. The Soviet Union showed no interest in participating in the conference and in saving the Jews.
Hitler’s reaction to the results of the Evian Conference was as follows: “The whole world is crying crocodile tears over the fate of the Jews in Germany, but is not really prepared to do anything for their sake.”
On January 31, 1939, the day after Hitler delivered his scathing words in the Reichstag about the behavior of democratic countries shedding tears over the fate of the unfortunate German Jews while denying them entry documents, Reinhard Heydrich, head of Nazi Germany’s General Directorate for Imperial Security, announced the creation of a center to implement the Madagascar Plan of “the Führer’s successor,” Heinrich Göring.
The plan required England and France to establish a Jewish reserve for millions of people in Madagascar, Guyana, or Alaska. The Nazis had not yet decided to exterminate the Jews. They wanted to relocate them from Germany and Austria, but European countries refused to help Jewish refugees this time, too. In the terms of today’s Russian propaganda, the “collective West” ignored the rescue of persecuted Jews. Jewish refugees of World War II were denied the right to “humanitarian aid,” considered a moral axiom after that war and during the current wars.
In the work of Russian historian Gennady Kostyrchenko Stalin’s Secret Policy there is a letter dated February 9, 1940, written by the head of the Resettlement Department of the Council of People’s Commissars, Yevgeny Chekmenev, to the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov, which reads: “The Resettlement Department under the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union received two letters from the Berlin and Vienna Resettlement Bureaus on the issue of organizing the resettlement of the Jewish population from Germany to the USSR – specifically to Birobidzhan (Jewish region created by the USSR in the Far East in 1934 to resettle Soviet Jews there) and the Western Ukraine.
The letter was signed by Adolf Eichmann for the Berlin bureau and by Franz Josef Huber, chief of the Vienna Gestapo, for the Vienna bureau. At that time, the solution to the Jewish question by the Nazis was not yet thought of as extermination, but as emigration. Stalin said no. He had before him the opportunity to save the Jews of Germany and Austria, but he refused.
There was still a long time before the decision on the detailed program of mass extermination of the Jews, adopted on January 20, 1942 at the conference in Wannsee. The Nazis hesitated, and the Europeans and Americans resolutely refused the Jews asylum. The refusal to accept Jewish refugees was an act of indifference to the enormous dangers they faced. After the Second World War, the world community showed fervent sympathy and provided enormous material aid to Palestinian refugees. Millions of Ukrainian refugees of Russia’s war against Ukraine found refuge in various countries of Europe and America.
Jewish refugees of World War II were left to their fate. Centuries-old antisemitic traditions according to which Jews are tricksters who have circled around the fingers of the Christians had taken their toll. Since Jews are such masters of intrigue and business, they will find their own way out, they will settle. But many Jews did not find a way out, they did not settle, but became victims of the Holocaust. This indifference and lack of solidarity with people in distress was a stigma against Jews, a derivative of traditional antisemitism. It was a half latent antisemitism. Such a policy is not called antisemitism, but as a result, its proponents became complicit in the crime. They were standing by as passive observers, indifferent spectators, bystanders. Some part of the six million victims of the Holocaust is on their conscience, but the exact number of these victims is impossible to calculate.
Canadian historian Michael Marrus introduced the concept of “negative history,” the history of what did not happen, the history of inaction, indifference, insensitivity. At the center of this “negative history” are its creators, the bystanders, the silent, informal collaborators of the Nazi regime, the latent antisemites. There may not have been a conscious conspiracy, but there was a deadening of human feelings. There was silence and even concealment of the precarious situation of the Jews.
In the minds or subconscious minds of bystanders, a collective, uncoordinated alienation from the Jews was born, as if they were protected from annihilation by their destiny to rule the world in the spirit of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The tragedy of the extermination of the Jews was dominated by the prejudice of the omnipotence might of the Jews, a form of blood libel against the Jewish people.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.