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 Austrian Jews desperate for refuge. In the rest of Europe, six million apprehensive Jews were watching Hitler's progress. Germany boycotted the conference, but secretly arranged to send an unofficial representative: Heinrich von Benda, a famous Austrian Jewish physician, released from prison camp specifically to carry Hitler's secret proposal to the conference.

Under certain conditions, Hitler would allow the Jews of Austria and Germany to emigrate. The conditions were horrifyingly simple. The Third Reich would sell its Jews--to the nations of the world--for $250 a head, $1,000 a family. Von Benda was to persuade the delegates at Evian to deliver this ransom. A physician to many of the crowned heads of Europe--now under suspicion by many of the very Jews he presumed to speak for--von Benda was soon known to most of the conferees as an ambassador without portfolio. His tragic, aging figure became a familiar one as he sought out delegate after delegate to plead his cause. Ignoring his failing health and all opportunities to provide for his own safety and that of his family, he summoned every reserve of eloquence and energy to convince the assembled diplomats of the brutal urgency of his mission before it was too late. This story is a fictionalization of that crucial gathering, an event carefully buried in the pages of history--because it might have prevented the slaughter of mil