Madagascar Plan
Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, proposed the idea in June 1940, shortly before the Fall of France.
It was postponed after the Nazis lost the Battle of Britain in September 1940, and it was permanently shelved in 1942 with the commencement of the Final Solution, the policy of systematic genocide of Jews, towards which it had functioned as an important psychological step.
Paul de Lagarde, an antisemitic Orientalist scholar, first suggested evacuating the European Jews to Madagascar in his 1878 work Deutsche Schriften ("German Writings").
[9] Adherents of territorialism split off from the main Zionist movement and continued to search for a location where Jews might settle and create a state, or at least an autonomous area.
[18] In his May 1940 memorandum to Hitler, Concerning the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler declared that he hoped to see "the term 'Jew' [...] completely eliminated through the massive immigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony".
[19] Initial discussions began to take place in 1938 among Nazi ideologues such as Julius Streicher, Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, and Joachim von Ribbentrop.
[23] Franz Rademacher, recently appointed head of the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, forwarded on 3 June to his superior, the diplomat Martin Luther, a memorandum on the fate of the Jews.
[24] Rademacher recommended that the French colony of Madagascar should be made available as a destination for the Jews of Europe as one of the terms of the surrender of France, which the Germans had invaded on 10 May 1940.
By 18 June, Hitler and Ribbentrop spoke of the Plan with Italian leader Benito Mussolini as a possibility that could be pursued after the defeat of France.
Most Nazi bureaus, including the Foreign Office, the Security Police, and the General Government (the occupied portion of Poland) pinned their hopes on the plan as the last chance to "solve the Jewish problem" through emigration.
[29] In particular, Hans Frank, governor of the General Government, viewed the forced resettlement to Madagascar as being preferable to the heretofore piecemeal efforts at deportation into Poland.
[31] The Nazis expected that after the invasion of the United Kingdom in Operation Sea Lion that they would commandeer the British merchant fleet to transport the Jews to Madagascar.
[30] In late August 1940, Rademacher entreated Ribbentrop to hold a meeting at his ministry to begin drawing up a panel of experts to consolidate the plan.
[37] Once it became apparent that the war against the Soviet Union would drag on much longer than expected, Heydrich revised his plans to concentrate on the Jewish population then under Nazi control.
Since transporting masses of people into a combat zone would be impossible, Heydrich decided that the Jews would be killed in extermination camps set up in occupied areas of Poland.
