Bermuda Conference

   The second of two conferences initiated by the Allies to deal with the wartime refugee crisis (the Evian Conference in 1938 was the other) was convened by the United States and Great Britain on 19 April 1943. Although the ostensible purpose of the conference was to find some form of relief for victims of Nazi persecution, in reality the conference was organized to defuse public protest over revelations that the Germans had embarked on a program of systematically liquidating the Jews of Europe. Great Britain insisted that it would not participate in the conference should the issue of Palestine, as a refuge for Europe’s Jews, be placed on the agenda. The meeting resulted in failure inasmuch as none of the participating countries was willing to liberalize its immigration laws to take in refugees. In addition, the Jewish character of the crisis was minimized through the use of a euphemism that referred to them as “political refugees.”