Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries: • Évian 1938, The First Solution: A Reacting to the Past Experience

Évian 1938- The First Solution is a Reacting to the Past immersive role-playing experience. 

This game centers on the Évian Conference of 1938, held at the instigation of President Franklin Roosevelt, to find a solution to the problem of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany and recently-annexed Austria. Meeting at the French resort town of Évian, still famous for its water, representatives from the US, Western Europe, Latin America, and the British Empire tried to come up with a collective solution to the problem, while simultaneously doing as little as they could to amend their own immigration laws. In the end they created a new international organization to try and coordinate refugee flows, but gave it no real power, and it was quickly forgotten as the world spiraled to war. 

Over the course of the game participants will debate several major issues including:

• Should a new international agency be in charge of the response to the German-Austrian refugee crisis?
• Should any new agency be led by the League of Nations, or remain independent from it?
• Where should German and Austrian refugees be resettled? What diplomatic and passport rights should these refugees have?
• Should the assembled diplomats try to work with Nazi Germany to facilitate emigration?
• Should conference attendees diplomatically criticize or even publicly denounce Nazi Germany’s actions towards the Jews?

Reacting to the Past is an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games designed for higher education. In Reacting to the Past games, participants are assigned character roles with specific goals and must communicate, collaborate, and compete effectively to advance their objectives

Evian 1938 - The First Solution has been peer-reviewed by the Editorial Board of the Reacting to the Past Consortium (Summer 2021). 

Dr. John Giebfried is a specialist in pre-modern world history, focusing on the Crusades and the Mongol invasions. He holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto (2009), an MA in Crusader Studies from Royal Holloway College, University of London (2010), and a PhD in History from Saint Louis University (2015). He is currently an Assistant Professor at East Georgia State College. 

Before joining East Georgia State College, Dr. Giebfried worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and taught at Saint Louis University, Webster University, and Georgia Southern University. He has published several scholarly articles and book chapters on the Crusades and Mongols, and his first book will cover the career of Baldwin II, the last crusader emperor of Constantinople. Dr. Giebfried believes in student-led classroom assignments, especially the Reacting to the Past series of roleplaying games, and has written two such games including The Remaking of the Medieval World, 1204 and Grandsons of Genghis, The Mongol Qurultai of 1246.