The so-called Madagascar Plan (also known as the Madagascar Plan) was a National Socialist regime of Germany at the beginning of the Second World War Four million European Jews on the island off the east coast of Africa Madagascar, at that time a French colony, to be deported.
The anti-Semitic Plan was drawn up according to the Defeat France in June 1940 in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and in the Federal Foreign Office of German Empire elaborated. However, it was never implemented, in particular because of the Naval War against Great Britain and the thus non-existent sovereignty over the corresponding sea routes. Thus, the work on the Madagascar Plan ended in the same year. Instead, a large part of the European Jews were ultimately involved in the Holocaust Murdered.
Background in an international context
For the first time, the idea of a Deportation of the Jews to Madagascar from the Antisemitic German Orientalists and politicians of the Prussian Conservative Party, Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827–1891). He proposed in 1885 that all Eastern European Jews to the island of Madagascar. After the First World War The Madagascar Plan was adopted by British and Dutch anti-Semites such as Henry Hamilton Beamish (Founder of the anti-Semitic organization The Britons, 1919), Arnold Leese or Egon van Winghene[1] grabbed. Arnold Leese, who founded the Imperial Fascist League in 1928, wrote in Devilry in the Holy Land in 1938.:
"A National Home for the Jews must be found; the best place is Madagascar. For this, France and the displaced natives should receive full compensation from Jewish funds. Once in Madagascar, or, if that island cannot be made partly available to them, in a National Home elsewhere, no Jew should be allowed outside it on pain of death. There is no other way. Hedge how you like, there is no other way." "A home for the Jews must be found; the best place is Madagascar. For this, France and the local natives were to receive full compensation through Jewish funds. Once in Madagascar, or if this island cannot be partially made available to them, elsewhere, Jews should be forbidden to leave this area under threat of the death penalty. There is no other way." – Arnold Leese 1938
The leading representative of the Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), wrote in his novel published in 1902 Old new territory about Madagascar as a possible Country of emigration. In contrast to the Uganda Program But Madagascar was never seriously discussed by Zionists, because such ideas were for Zionists as a whole only Marginal Considerations. Their primary goal was to provide a home for Jews as their own People of the State in Eretz Israel can be found.
1926/27 Poland and Japan the possibility of persons living on their territory ethnic minorities to madagascar. The island was larger than the then German Empire or the then Poland, but with about 4 million indigenous inhabitants, Madagascar was comparatively sparsely populated in the mid-1930s.
Polish Commission 1937
Proposed settlement sites in the Polish Commission's plan
On 5 May 1937, the Polish government, which had received approval from France, sent a three-member examination commission to Madagascar. This commission was headed by Mieczyslaw Lepecki. His two (Jewish) companions were Leon Alter, director of the Jewish Emigration Association (JEAS) in Warsaw, and Salomon, agricultural engineer from Warsaw. Tel Aviv. They came to different conclusions: Lepecki believed that 40,000 to 60,000 Jews could be deported to the highlands. According to Leon Alter, however, only 2,000 people would have space on the whole island. The estimates of Salomon, who, like Leon Alter, preferred Palestine anyway, were even lower. Independently, by the mid-1930s, 25,000 French colonists had already settled on the island. Although the Polish government overestimated lepecki's outcome and the Malagasy population demonstrated against a wave of immigration, they continued negotiations with France. In addition to Poland and France, great Britain, the Netherlands and the Joint Distribution Committee (an aid organization of American Jews for Jewish co-religionists, which is mainly active in Europe).
Józef Lipski (diplomat)
Józef Lipski (* 5 June 1894 in Wroclaw; † 1 November 1958 in Washington, D.C.) was a Polish Politician and Diplomat.
Life
Józef Lipski entered the diplomatic service in 1919 and was Polish envoy from 3 July 1933 to 28 October 1934, from 29 October 1934 to 1 September 1939 Polish Ambassador in Berlin. He signed with Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath on 26 January 1934 the german-Polish Non-Aggression Pact. In September 1938 he responded to a proposal by Hitler to deport Jews from Germany, Poland and Hungary.Madagascar Plan) with the sentence that a monument to Hitler would be erected in Warsaw for this purpose.[1][2]
After the start of the Second World War He volunteered in the Polish army in France. From 1941 to 1945 he served as Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Polish government in exile in London.
In 1947 he emigrated to the UNITED STATES, from where he continued to exercise his office.
Józef Lipski (left) with Carl Eduard of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (middle) and Joseph Goebbels (1935)
First considerations during the Nazi regime in Germany (before 1940)
The original plan of the National Socialists was to deport the Jews to a demarcated state. The Security Service (SD) published proposals for the deportation of German Jews in 1937. Palestine, Palestine, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. On March 2, 1938, Adolf Eichmann the mandate for a "foreign policy solution to the Jewish question". After the Conference of Évian, which met from 6 to 15 July 1938, Madagascar also came into the focus of the deliberations. Numerous Nazi politicians, including Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher (Editor of The striker), Alfred RosenbergForeign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and President of the Reich Bank Hjalmar Shaft, took up this idea. On November 12, 1938, Göring declared at a meeting in the Reich Aviation Ministry in which the further Jewish policy after the November pogroms It was agreed that Hitler had told him on November 9 that he wanted to "finally make a foreign policy push first with the powers that raised the Jewish question, in order to then actually come to the solution of the Madagascar question."[2] In December 1939, von Ribbentrop presented Pope Pius XII. an offer of peace mentioning the emigration of the Jews to Madagascar. But it was not until 1940, shortly before the german military victory over France and the occupation of its northern half, that the plan took on more concrete forms.
Start of planning (1940)
At the beginning of 1940, the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler all European Jews in the General Government – most of Poland, which is occupied by Germany. This met with resistance from Hans Frank, which prompted Goering to issue a decree of 24 March 1940 suspending the resettlements until further notice. From then on, the Madagascar Plan was publicly discussed. On May 29, 1940, Himmler presented his plan to Hitler and proposed "the emigration of all Jews to Africa or otherwise to a colony." Himmler said in another context that this would still be the mildest and best way, since one "the Bolshevik Method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-European and impossible"[3] Reject. Hitler agreed to the elaboration of the Madagascar Plan, since after the beginning of the Western Campaign an early victory over France was expected.
On June 18, 1940, Hitler and Ribbentrop informed at a conference about the future of France Benito Mussolini and the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs Ciano about the Madagascar Plan. On June 20, Hitler shared his intentions grand admiral Erich Raeder with. He suggested that the Jews move to the north of Portuguese.Angola to be deported. On August 17, 1940, Reich Propaganda Minister noted Joseph Goebbels in his diary about a conversation with Hitler: "We want to transport the Jews to Madagascar later. There they can build their own state."
Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, declared himself in a letter to Ribbentrop on 24 June for a territorial "Final Solution of the Jewish Question==References== From then on, the planning was carried out both in the Federal Foreign Office and in the SS propelled. In the General Government, Jews were temporarily no longer admitted to ghettos due to the solution now envisaged. The Ghetto Lodz Remaining Jews, who were supposed to be resettled in august in the General Government, remained temporarily unmolested. Meanwhile, Rademacher in the Federal Foreign Office and Eichmann in the department "Jewish and eviction matters" of the Reich Security Main Office. Heydrich commissioned Eichmann, who had been involved in the resettlement of Jews to the General Government since the end of 1939. Eichmann then informed the Reich Association of Jews in Germany and representatives of the Jewish communities in Prague and Vienna, it was planned to transfer about four million Jews to another country, whose name he did not mention.Otto Hirsch the board of the Reichsvereinigung then drafted a detailed memorandum on the education that would become necessary for a life on the tropical island.
The idea, put forth by Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was to hand over Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the French surrender terms. The project was approved by Adolf Hitler. On Aug. 15, 1940, he ordered Adolf Eichmann to start the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years to Madagascar as a police state under the SS. The project was eventually shelved as the Nazis opted for the systematic genocide of the Jewish population instead.
One of the reasons why the Madagascar Plan was abandoned is linked to the fact that Germany failed to defeat Britain and take control of the Navy fleet, a necessary step in order to implement the logistics of the deportation. The project was still being considered by Hitler until 1942, when British forces eventually wrestled control of Madagascar away from Vichy France, putting a definite end to the plan.
The Malagasy blog My Asa Mada retrieved a collection of historical archives that depict battles that occurred between British forces and Vichy France in Madagascar in 1942. Here are some of the photographs and videos from that period from their blog post:
Soldiers on the beach of Madagascar.
Royal Air Force in Madagascar.
The following video shows the British Navy fleet arriving in Madagascar accompanied by the Free French Forces:
Plans for implementation
Rademacher Plan
Adolf Hitler and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop instructed the Head of Unit for "Jewish Issues" at the Federal Foreign Office, Franz Rademacherto draw up a plan for the implementation of the deportations to Madagascar. On June 3, 1940, Rademacher formulated three possibilities for "solving the Jewish question":
Banishment of all Jews from Europe, Madagascar is mentioned as a possible goal.
Only Jews from West and Central Europe are shipped to Madagascar. All Eastern European Jews will be according to Lublin deported and taken hostage for the good conduct of the United States.
All Jews are deported to Palestine. Rademacher rejected this possibility, fearing that the Jews could rule the whole world from a "second Rome".
Rademacher published his plan on July 2, 1940 under the title The Jewish Question in the Peace Treaty. Madagascar was to become a "Jewish dwelling place under German sovereignty", which meant a kind of "large ghetto". The plan involved four million Jews (Polish and Russian Jews were not included). In the plan, Rademacher proposed the following:
The Federal Foreign Office is drawing up a peace treaty with England and France with a number of other European countries.
That Vichy regime hands over the colony of Madagascar to Germany.
Germany is given the right to establish military air and naval bases in Madagascar.
The 25,000 European settlers (mostly French) have to leave Madagascar.
The emigration of the Jews is a forced resettlement.
The project is financed from the Jewish assets of the respective home countries.
The Chancellery of the Fuehrer coordinates the transports.
The SS collects all Jews and deports them to Madagascar.
For the propaganda, the Federal Foreign Office and the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda responsible.
A police governor appointed by Himmler manages the island. The Jews may only be involved in the local administration.
Disputes of competence
Immediately afterwards, Reinhard Heydrich, who had received the overall competence for the Jewish question, now felt ignored and claimed the leadership of the Madagascar project for himself, intervened.
In the Reich Security Main Office, Adolf Eichmann now also dealt with the plans. He obtained expert opinions and had the need for transport ships determined. According to his calculations, 1,000,000 people per year could have been shipped to Madagascar, so the duration of the action was estimated at four to five years. – Since the documents of the RSHA have not been found, further details of the planning are not known.
On Rademacher's plan, Governor-General Frank ordered the expansion of all Ghettoes in his domain. In doing so, he conjured up a conflict with Arthur Greiser up, the Head of the Civil Administration in the Poznań Military District. He did not believe that the Madagascar plan could be realized before the onset of winter. An agreement was not reached.[7] Those responsible had several expert reports which (unlike the Polish expert reports) considered the influx of 5 to 6.5 million Jewish settlers to Madagascar to be possible. According to a verdict of the historian Magnus Brechtken these opinions are inconclusive; they came to a conclusion that had been signalled politically as desirable. "Whoever thought this plan through to the end ... had to come to the verdict that a deportation to Madagascar in this form was tantamount to a death sentence..."[8]
Failure of the Madagascar Plan
The conditions for the implementation of the Madagascar Plan were not met. A peace with Great Britain was not within reach, and the execution of the plan was not possible with the domination of the British Navy, and also the French Vichy regime defended himself against the cession of his colony Madagascar to Germany.
On 5 May 1942, when the British Navy joined the Operation Ironclad Landing in Madagascar and conquering and occupying the island against the resistance of the French army, the implementation of the plan had become obsolete.
As early as September 1940, work on the Madagascar Plan had not been continued anyway. Hitler and the National Socialist politicians responsible for Jewish policy, however, hoped that he could later become topical after all: Alfred Rosenberg Wanted to publish an article on the Madagascar Plan, Hitler had him on November 3, 1940 through his secretary Martin Bormann That the article should not be published at the moment, "but perhaps in a few months".[9] On 3 December, Eichmann increased the number of deportees to Madagascar to 6 million. In a meeting in December 1940, it was decided to prepare the Jews for the possibility of a "group and mass settlement" and a circular was sent to all communities mentioning a "Jewish settlement" outside Palestine. Meanwhile, subordinate Gauleiter were already busy with their territories "free of Jews==References==
On 10 February 1942, Rademacher sent to Harald Bielfeld, the head of the Pol X department in the Federal Foreign Office, Hitler's final decision "that the Jews should not be deported to Madagascar, but to the East. Madagascar therefore no longer needs to be earmarked for the Final Solution."[10]
Classification in the context of the Holocaust
The classification of the Madagascar Plan in the Holocaust is interpreted differently. A number of historians and social scientists, most of whom are responsible for Functionalists is based on the assumption that the decision to commit genocide did not take place until the Second World War. Other ways of getting rid of the Jews had been seriously considered. According to this interpretation, the "Madagascar Plan" was for a short time a serious consideration to solve the "Jewish question" through forced resettlement in the form of a cross-continental emigration program. "If high Nazi functionaries suspended the deportations planned for August and stopped the establishment of ghettos in the General Government, this was not a cleverly devised deception maneuver. [...] Rather, they made decisions on the basis of the Madagascar Plan, which in the summer of 1940 effectively constituted National Socialist Jewish policy."[11] The Madagascar Plan is seen as a psychological milestone towards the Holocaust.[12]
The historian Eberhard Jäckel, which is the Intentionalists On the other hand, the genocide of the Jews, as it was actually and increasingly systematically implemented on an industrial basis from the beginning of the 1940s, was already decided by the highest level in 1939.[13] Hitler himself, even before the beginning of the Second World War, had given a public speech on the anniversary of his "Takeover" on 30 January 1939 in front of the Reichstag in the Krolloper announced the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of a new war; of the war, which he himself had already prepared for a long time and for which he attributed the blame to the Jews in advance with propagandistic intent. According to this interpretation, which is also shared by other intentionalist historians, the Madagascar Plan was ultimately never a serious option for the National Socialist leadership, but merely a consideration presented to the outside world in order to conceal from the public the actual goal of murdering up to 11 million people.
Too Götz Aly The project appears retroactively "completely absurd, so it is not uncommon for it to be described as Metaphor for the allegedly already firmly planned genocide". Due to the control of the Italian and French colonies in Africa, Berlin initially saw the realization as probable. When, due to the superiority of the British Mediterranean fleet a few weeks later, the resettlement proved to be unrealistic, the Warsaw Ghetto finally sealed off in November 1940.[14]
BACK TO BEGININING
The first Zionist Congress in Basel on August 31, 1897
Dreaming Theodor Herzl
The first Zionist Congress in Basel on August 31, 1897, adopted a resolution calling for the "creation of a home in Palestine secured under public law for those Jews who cannot or do not want to assimilate elsewhere."
In Basel's Stadtkasino, a good 200 delegates elected the Austrian publicist Theodor Herzl as the first president of the newly founded Zionist World Organization. This gave secular Jewish nationalism an internationally anchored network, which was propagated by Herzl in his book "Der Judenstaat." (1896). The aim was to counter the rampant anti-Semitism in Europe with the project of an independent state.
After the conclusion of the Basel Congress, Herzl wrote: "I founded the Jewish state in Basel. If I say that out loud today, a burst of universal laughter would answer me. Perhaps in five years, at least in fifty, everyone will see it."
It took 50 years indeed. On May 14, 1948, following a U.N. resolution, the independent state of Israel on Palestinian territory was proclaimed, and that is when all the trouble started.
In 1922, Great Britain had received the mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations, the predecessor of the U.N. The British faced a difficult task as they were to fulfill the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that, on the one hand, committed them to promote a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. On the other hand, they were also to protect the rights of existing non-Jewish communities in their mandated territory.
But long before Herzl's Judenstaat, the question of what to do with the Jewish minority in a Christian occident had stirred the mind of theologist and linguist Paul de Lagarde. The Professor in Göttingen wrote in 1885 in an essay über nach Madagaskar auszuschaffende Juden (about Jews to be deported to Madagascar). As a representative of ethnic anti-Semitism, he stressed that because of Madagascar's isolated situation, a mixing of Jews with other peoples could almost be ruled out.
Later Lagarde's idea was taken up by British publisher Henry Hamilton Beamish. He was the founder of the anti-Semitic "The Britons" organization. In his journals, Beamish demanded the expulsion of Jews to the African island of Madagascar from the twenties onwards. "The Briton" flyer mocked that the problem for the Zionists was "solved," Madagascar offered space "for 100 million". Beamish was also allowed to spread his ideas in the N.S. press under the name "Der Engländer" (The Englishman). There he wrote, "Where is the paradise that allows all Jews to live in peace and joy? This is Madagascar."
Julius Streicher's anti-Semitic hate paper "Der Stürmer" (translated as The Stormer, Attacker, or Striker) addressed the Madagascar Plan at an early stage - sooner than the Nazi leadership dealt with it. As early as 1933, the paper was already celebrating the idea of "depopulating the island and housing the Jews there." To prevent the escape from the Great Ghetto, "fast and vigilant police ships would have to circle the island permanently."
"Prudently, they omitted to ask us, the Malagasy."The trunk is marked Wien Madagaskar (Vienna-Madagascar)
A caricature from 1938 shows a desperate Jew pressed against a globe in the typical degrading Nazi pictorial language. Above the cynical headline: "Madagascar - The End."
Later in 1940, the leader of Referat D III, i.e., the Judenreferat in Ribbentrop's Foreign Affairs Ministry, Franz Rademacher, was the first to draw up a roughly sketched Madagascar plan. He presented it to his superior Martin Luther, "The solution to the Jewish question can be found within the framework of peace with France, through a revival of the Madagascar plan."
Luther took the mad plan with a sympathetic attitude. He even saw the possibility of propagandistically selling those millions of forced deportations as "Germany's magnanimity." After all, a state would be given to the Jews.
Soon almost all top Nazi functionaries, including Eichmann, Göring, Rosenberg, and Heydrich, were interested in the distant African island. Also, Hitler demanded that "Madagascar be used to house Jews under French responsibility" and initiated Mussolini into the idea.
A commemorative stamp for Reinhard Heydrich
issued in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
one year after the Protector
had been assassinated in Prague.
As early as 1927, the Nazi chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, praised Paul de Lagarde as "prophet of the new world view and co-builder of the national state."
Following the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where Heydrich outlined that European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps in the General Government (the occupied part of Poland), the Madagascar plan was paper waste.
After the war, Franz Rademacher disappeared, but in 1952 was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for aiding and abetting 1300 Serbian Jews. Followed a typical post-war biography of an N.S. offender, i.e., an early release and a career in the BND, Germany's FBI.
In 1968 Rademacher was still mourning his Madagascar idea, "If it had been realized, we wouldn't have a Middle East crisis today." HAHA
Wannsee Conference
Germany [1942]
Wannsee Conference, meeting of Nazi officials on January 20, 1942, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the “final solution” (Endlösung) to the so-called “Jewish question” (Judenfrage). On July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had issued orders to Reinhard Heydrich, SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) leader and Gestapo (Secret Police) chief, to prepare a comprehensive plan for this “final solution.” The Wannsee Conference, held six months later, was attended by 15 Nazi senior bureaucrats led by Heydrich and including Adolf Eichmann, chief of Jewish affairs for the Reich Central Security Office.
The conference marked a turning point in Nazi policy toward the Jews. An earlier idea, to deport all of Europe’s Jews to the island of Madagascar, off of Africa, was abandoned as impractical in wartime. Instead, the newly planned final solution would entail rounding up all Jews throughout Europe, transporting them eastward, and organizing them into labour gangs. The work and living conditions would be sufficiently hard as to fell large numbers by “natural diminution”; those that survived would be “treated accordingly.”
The men seated at the table were among the elite of the Reich. More than half of them held doctorates from German universities. They were well informed about the policy toward Jews. Each understood that the cooperation of his agency was vital if such an ambitious, unprecedented policy was to succeed.
Among the agencies represented were the Department of Justice, the Foreign Ministry, the Gestapo, the SS, the Race and Resettlement Office, and the office in charge of distributing Jewish property. Also at the meeting was a representative of the General Government, the Polish occupation administration, whose territory included more than 2 million Jews. The head of Heydrich’s office for Jewish affairs, Adolf Eichmann, prepared the conference notes.
Heydrich himself introduced the agenda:
Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.
The men needed little explanation. They understood that “evacuation to the east” was a euphemism for concentration camps and that the “final solution” was to be the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews, which is now known as the Holocaust. The final protocol of the Wannsee Conference never explicitly mentioned extermination, but, within a few months after the meeting, the Nazis installed the first poison-gas chambers in Poland in what came to be called extermination camps. Responsibility for the entire project was put in the hands of Heinrich Himmler and his SS and Gestapo.
Uganda's Plan
Zionist Archive A355/47/1m
The Uganda Scheme was a plan in the early 1900s to give a portion of British East Africa to the Jewish people as a homeland, as a response to the outbreaks of violence against Jews in Russia (the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903) . The Scheme was initiated by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. and gained support from Theodor Herzl as a temporary refuge for European Jews facing anti-Semitism The scheme included 13,000 square kilometres at Uasin Gishu, an isolated area in modern Kenya (and not, as its name suggests, Uganda).