Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
The author did a lot of research to put this book together. The focus is in the title: the tragedy Evian, which doesn't get talked about much. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Holocaust and history of Hitler.

Thank you to Netgalley and Pen And Sword for the arc of How the world allowed hitler to proceed with the holocaust.

5 stars- There was a conference at Évian-les-Bains, France, to discuss the persecution and possible emigration of the European Jews, specifically those caught under the anvil of Nazi atrocities. However, most of those nations rejected the pleas then being made by the Jewish communities, thus condemning them to the Holocaust.

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How the World Allowed Hitler to Proceed with the Holocaust: Tragedy at Évian by Tony Matthews takes a look at the international 1938 conference in Évian-les-Bains. Representatives from all over the world came together to especially discuss the possible emigration of European Jews. Mr. Matthews is a published historian specializing in Australian, as well as world history.

Not as famous as the conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, The Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees meeting met in France, July 1938 to discuss an international cooperative specifically to solve the massive refugee crisis caused by the Nazis. Mr. Matthews reviews both official and unofficial policies of the countries involved, as well as the failure of the conference. Of course, feel the reverberations of that failure to this day.

The nations rejected the pleas of the Jewish communities; indeed condemning them to a prolonged death at the hands of the Nazis. The outcome of the Évian, undeniably set the stage for the murder of millions of people by giving Nazi Germany the signal that the civilized Western nations will not stand in their way.

I am not a historian, but reading between the lines of How the World Allowed Hitler to Proceed with the Holocaust: Tragedy at Évian by Tony Matthews , it seemed to me that the conference was set up to fail, its value only in propaganda. President Roosevelt, while sympathetic, wouldn’t expend any political capital on this unpopular domestic, and political issue.

Sadly, not much has changed, as the influx of refugees due to the brutality of ISIS in the Middle East has shown. The reasoning for not helping them are eerily familiar, and the right-wing policies across Europe and the US show xenophobia is still alive and well. Argentina, for example, steadily refuse to accept any refugees, but had no issues allowing ex-Nazis take residence after World War II.

Reflecting on the past is always important. The issue of how the world simply sat back and let millions of people get murdered, a genocide, is something we need to face.

Mr. Matthews takes the time to highlight the stories of several very brave individuals who risked their lives helping the Jewish people. These are few of many, and their stories don’t get told nearly as often.

The failure of the majority of the world’s powers to secure a safe path for Jewish refugees to flee Nazi occupied Europe in 1938 is one of the biggest “what if” situations and tragedies in history. There’s always this tendency to look at World War II from an American viewpoint and lean into 80 years of propaganda that we were the glorious infallible good guys that did no wrong. The truth is, we were largely apathetic as a country to the plight of the Jews, had many times where we could have stopped the Holocaust, and we did nothing. But it wasn’t just us, much of the world was just as anti-Semitic as Germany, Germany just happened to be the ones that did the thing other countries talked about. This book tells the story of the disastrous conference at Évian-les-Bains to discuss the persecution and possible emigration of the European Jews, where we basically sealed the fate of six million men women and children.

As you can tell by the tone I am using above, this book was infuriating for me to read. I knew this happened, but was unaware of the inane political nonsense going on that ultimately led to nothing of value being decided. This book is filled with instances that are almost identical to modern discussions about refugees all leading to the very same inaction and ambivalence today. Having recently visited a Holocaust exhibition in Kansas City, Missouri that made me equal parts sad and angry, I recall being moved to almost tears at a point when you saw a small child’s shoes with balled-up socks in them. The child was told to take them off before taking a “shower” and was killed. We could have stopped it, but as typical humanity is a stain on this planet. Hopefully, books like this keep getting released because I fear that far too many people are forgetting what happened in those camps.

This was an awesome book, very well researched, and very important. I highly recommend it to anyone that doesn’t quite understand geo-politics of the World War II era other than a gross simplification of “us=good, Hitler=bad”. Be prepared to be angry, and be prepared to be sad, as this book will not help one be very patriotic as most countries involved look pretty terrible.

This account of the failure of the Evian Conference of 1938 to secure a managed and safe emigration of the primarily Jewish populations of Germany and Austria, is a frightening inditement of the ‘refuge nations’ attitude to those peoples. There was to be collective blame as to what caused the failure of producing any successful outcome of the conference however, the constraint imposed by the USA when calling for the conference that no change to immigration law was to be applied, predicated failure.
Despite the evidence that had been obvious since 1933 that persecution of certain minorities, especially the Jews, was an essential mantra of Hitlers’ ethnic philosophy, the majority of the world’s nations were ambivalent to halting the process. The book takes us through the convoluted maneuverings over the selections of delegates to the Conference and the constraints imposed on those delegates by their host governments compounding the inability to reach a meaningful solution.
Today, we are well aware what continued to develop into the holocaust but, the accounts at the end of the book that recount the actions by individuals to facilitate, at great personal risk, to secure the emigration of certain numbers of Jewish people especially children, is heartening and shows there was and still is good in this world.

The book was very well written and informative. The author had done a lot of research on this topic. Overall I liked the book

This has to be one of the most disturbing books I have ever read. In spite of all the teeth gnashing and moral outrage expressed at the end of WWII about the Holocaust, this book proves, time and time again, that the opportunities to prevent this annihilation of a group of people whose only crime was to be born a Jew were not simply missed, they were actively ignored and almost universally avoided. While there might be a small concession that the enormity of what would happen was beyond their ken, the leaders of the world decided to speak platitudes but do nothing.

The conference at Evian, about which much of the book focuses, was but one cog. The fact that the conference was held proves there was a recognition of a terrible situation. One would have needed to be deaf and blind to have not seen the increasing degradation of the Jews in Germany and Austria. Many voices were crying out for help. Why they were ignored is the most frightening part of it all. Why were nations not prepared to welcome the immigrants from Europe, often highly educated and successful people before Hitler came to power. One merely has to look back for two millennia and track the entrenched anti-semitism that has dogged Jews from place to place and country to country.

This was nothing new. Pogroms were a fact of life particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia. Whenever something went wrong, it was easier to find a scapegoat and the Jews were a convenient one for the Christian world. Many of the countries around the world that could have provided sanctuary refused and not just European ones but Canada, the United States Australian, essentially the entire world with very few exceptions like Denmark. Unlike the Germans who wanted to eradicate the “infection”, the declining countries did not wish to contaminate their people. It is a very thin line between the two.

While their inactions did not endorse Hitler, it convinced him that no one would care if he instituted a Final Solution. At the time he was probably right. It was only afterwards when faced with the reality of what occurred did nations stop and think and denounce. If lessons had been learned and hearts changed, there might have been some good to come out of such evil. Sadly anti-semitism is still just under the surface in many places and the same hatred shown to them has been replicated many times throughout the years since. The same slurs, the same vitriol, the same stupidity lives. Not in the vast numbers of the Holocaust but simply replace one group for another and you will hear the hatred perpetrated to this day- perhaps even amplified by the anonymity of the internet.

What is most distressing is the knowledge, the surety, that this could happen again. And if it does, will the world respond any better than it did in the late 1930s. I have my doubts.

Five stars and one paw up.

Very interesting read. Gives you a lot to think about. The book is very well written. Would recommend this book. It’s always an interesting topic of conversation. Could be a great book for a book club

This book was an exceptional read!
n July 1938 the United States, Great Britain and thirty other countries participated in a vital

conference at Évian-les-Bains, France, to discuss the persecution and possible emigration of the European Jews, specifically those caught under the anvil of Nazi atrocities. However, most of those nations rejected the pleas then being made by the Jewish communities, thus condemning them to the Holocaust.

There is no doubt that the Évian conference was a critical turning point in world history. The disastrous outcome of the conference set the stage for the murder of six million people. Today we live in a world defined by turmoil with a disturbing rise of authoritarian governments and ultra right-wing nationalism. The plight of refugees is once more powerfully affecting public attitudes towards those most in need. Now, on the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of the Second World War, it’s time to reflect on the past to ensure we never again make the same mistakes.

Tragedy at Évian also shines a spotlight on some of the astonishing and courageous stories of heroic efforts of individuals and private organisations who, despite the decisions made at Évian, worked under extremely dangerous conditions, frequently giving their own lives to assist in the rescue of the Jewish people.

Read over 2 days. Well researched and fully engaging!