Madagascar Plan Was Another Escalation

Madagascar Plan was another escalation by the Nazis (and thus a major step on the Road to Holocaust) because it envisioned the establishment of a “slow death factory” (not unlike then-abandoned Nisko reservation) – this time on the island of Madagascar in Indian Ocean. Which was, indeed, a major escalation (serial killer – style) compared to relatively humane forced emigration. Escalation to genocide.

The Madagascar Plan was proposed in June of 1940 – right after the Fall of France – by Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office. According to this plan, all Jews under German control were to be deported to the island of Madagascar (taken away from France).

The plan was submitted to Adolf Eichmann (then head of the “Jewish” department in RSHA) who two months later released a memorandum on 15 August 1940 calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years, with the island being governed as a police state under the SS. Eichmann assumed that many Jews would succumb to its harsh conditions should the plan be implemented (hence the major escalation for the Nazis). The RSHA would control all aspects of the plan.

Interestingly, this was not a novel idea – Paul de Lagarde, an antisemitic Orientalist scholar, first suggested deporting the European Jews to Madagascar in 1878. With the cooperation of the French, the Polish government commissioned a task force in 1937 to examine the possibility of settling Polish Jews on the island. 

The head of the commission, Mieczys;aw Lepecki, determined the island could accommodate no more than 7,000 families, but Jewish members of the group estimated that, because of the climate and poor infrastructure, only 500 or even fewer families could safely be accommodated. So much for four million.

Rademacher envisioned the founding of a European bank that would ultimately liquidate all European Jewish assets to pay for the plan. G;ring’s office of the Four-Year Plan would oversee the administration of the plan’s economics.

The Nazis expected that after the invasion of the UK, they would commandeer the British merchant fleet to transport the Jews to Madagascar (fat chance). However, with the failure to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, the proposed invasion of the UK was postponed indefinitely on September 17, 1940.

This meant the British merchant fleet would not be at Germany’s disposal for use in deportations, and planning for the Madagascar proposal stalled. The plan was officially shelved within the Foreign Office in February 1942. British forces took the island from Vichy France in November 1942 and gave it to the Free French.