The Anschluss and Eichmann's program of forced emigration in Austria escalated an international refugee problem. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for an international conference to address the issue. From July 6 to 15, 1938, the delegates of 32 nations and the representatives of 39 private relief agencies (21 of them Jewish) met at the French resort of Evian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva, near the Swiss border. Nazi Germany did not attend but permitted representation from the German and Austrian Jewish communities. Although the delegates expressed sympathy for the Jewish refugees, they also made excuses: The doors of their countries could not be opened.

The most important result of the Evian Conference was that it undermined the illusion that forced emigration could really solve the Nazis' "Jewish problem." Later in the year, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop would succinctly sum up the situation for Hitler by recalling a conversation with Georges Bonnet, Ribbentrop's French counterpart. Bonnet had insisted that France did not want to receive any more Jews from Germany, and in fact wanted to ship 10,000 Jews elsewhere. Ribbentrop told Hitler that he had replied to Bonnet "that we all wanted to get rid of our Jews but that the difficulties lay in the fact that no country wished to receive them."