Die Mission

In July 1938, less than five months after Hitler's rape of Austria, Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the International Conference on Refugees, at Evian-les-Bains, a small French spa. The official purpose of the conference was to deal with the growing number of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe. Thirty-two nations attended the conference, as well as observers from the Vatican, Jewish organizations in the United States, France and Britain, and Zionist groups from Palestine. The questions facing the delegates at Evian were hard ones, both political and moral. There were half a million German and…