The Madagascar Plan, the idea of resettling Europe’s Jews to Madagascar

Title: Tropical Genocide

Location: Madagascar

Document: Map of Madagascar Resettlement Proposal

Time: 1942

The road to the Final Solution was long, bumpy, and didn’t follow a straight line. Until the decision crystallized among the Nazi leadership around October 1941 to systematically massacre European Jewry, the Nazis considered various expulsion “solutions” to the “Jewish problem.”

One of the more insidious proposals was the Madagascar Plan. The idea of resettling Europe’s Jews to Madagascar, a massive tropical island off Africa’s southeastern coast, had arisen years earlier. But the Nazis began giving it practical consideration in June 1940 with the imminent Nazi conquest of France. Since Madagascar was a French colony, the German foreign ministry hoped it would be included in the spoils of the anticipated victory over France — along with the French merchant marine fleet, which could be used to make the expulsion of millions of Jews feasible.

Polish leaders debated sending its burgeoning Jewish population to Madagascar in the 1920s and ’30s. Poland’s Jewish community — Europe’s largest, at 3.3 million — accounted for ten percent of the country’s total population. Although Jews were full Polish citizens with equal rights, rising anti-Semitism and a collapsing economy sparked a widespread desire among them to emigrate. The Polish government was only too happy to show them the door.

But most countries at that time, including the United States, had strict immigration quotas, so the multitudes of Polish Jews seeking a new home were at a loss. Some Polish leaders hit upon the idea of resettling large numbers of Jews in the French colony of Madagascar. The concept was broached with contacts in Paris, presented as mutually beneficial; it would serve as a sort of colonial project for the French, and it would alleviate Poland’s “Jewish problem.”

In 1937, the Polish government dispatched a commission — composed of two Jews, including Leon Alter of the Jewish Emigration Society, and a non-Jew, Mieczyslaw Lepecki — to assess the idea’s feasibility. Their findings were grim. The Jewish representatives dismissed the island as unsuitable for large-scale resettlement, while Lepecki estimated that no more than 15,000 Jews could survive on Madagascar’s northern plateau.

Yet the idea of moving Europe’s Jews to Madagascar continued to percolate throughout the 1930s in Britain, France, and Poland, especially among anti-Semites. Even Jewish groups working on viable emigration options occasionally toyed with the idea.

The Nazis began floating the plan in 1938, but the idea remained in the fantastical realm of rhetoric, ideology, and propaganda. Then with France’s imminent defeat in June 1940, the practical implementation of the plan suddenly seemed feasible. The German high command assumed that following the fall of France, Britain would sue for a peace settlement. When that assumption proved false, the Germans still believed the Luftwaffe would achieve a swift victory over the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain.

Victory over Britain would give Germany control over Mediterranean shipping lanes, the Suez Canal, and the vast British merchant marine fleet. This prospect tantalized the imaginations of senior SS and Foreign Ministry officials, who now viewed the Madagascar Plan as within reach.

In June 1940. Franz Rademacher, a Foreign Office official specializing in the “Jewish question,” proposed a detailed framework for the practical elements of deportation of European Jewry to Madagascar. His memorandum envisioned France ceding Madagascar to Germany as part of a peace treaty, placing the island under SS administration and resettling the island with Europe’s Jews.

Rademacher’s memorandum, chillingly matter-of-fact in tone, reflected the depth of Nazi depravity. He described the “obligation to solve the Jewish question in Europe,” proposing that the conditions on Madagascar be designed to make survival impossible for the resettled Jews. Though the plan retained the veneer of a “resettlement project,” its ultimate goal was clear: the annihilation of European Jewry, not through immediate mass murder but through prolonged suffering in a “tropical inferno.”

Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, as well as Hitler himself, mentioned the possibility of creating a Jewish reservation in Madagascar in a meeting with Mussolini on June 18, 1940, when discussing how to potentially divide the French Empire.

Senior SS officer Reinhard Heydrich insisted that any solution to the “Jewish question” fell under the jurisdiction of the SS and not the Foreign Ministry. His deputy Adolf Eichmann drew up a memorandum in August 1940 entitled “Madagaskar Projekt,” spelling out a logistical framework for deporting four million Jews under Nazi occupation (this was nearly a year prior to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union) to Madagascar over the ensuing four years, a million a year. Eichmann cynically observed in his report that the world would view this plan very favorably; the Nazis would be seen as graciously granting autonomy to the Jews in this proposed super-ghetto.

News of the Madagascar Plan spread like wildfire through the Nazi regime. When Hans Frank, governor general in Nazi-occupied Poland, was informed of the plan, he halted construction of ghettos in Warsaw, Krakow, and other cities, in light of the pending deportation of all of European Jewry to Madagascar. On July 1, 1940, SS officer Gerhard Mende informed Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish council, that “the war would be over in a month and that [the Jews] would all leave for Madagascar.”

The realities of war ultimately intruded on these schemes. Hitler’s failure to achieve a swift victory over Britain had become obvious by September 1940. The Royal Navy remained undefeated in the Mediterranean, and kept the British merchant marine fleet out of Nazi clutches. When it became clear that Germany could not quickly seize the Suez Canal, the Madagascar Plan began to look unrealistic.

Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 finally rendered the plan null and void. As SS troops moved into occupied Soviet territory behind advancing Wehrmacht forces, mass murder of the Jewish population began to emerge as a Nazi strategy. Hitler’s patience ran out by October and November 1941. He ordered the implementation of the “Final Solution” — the systematic extermination of Jews across all of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Although the Madagascar Plan was a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, it was an important psychological step on the road to the Final Solution. As the eminent Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning notes:

It is also clear that had the Nazis carried out the plan as they intended, it would have been a murderous operation. Whatever the illusions of the naive and dilettantish Rademacher, the Nazi demographic engineers in east Europe had already demonstrated that “decimation” of the uprooted was not only no deterrence but even an added attraction to their population policies. This was not yet the Final Solution — a compulsive and comprehensive program to murder every last Jew that the Nazis could lay their hands on — but was nonetheless genocidal in its implications. As such, it was an important psychological step toward the Final Solution that emerged a year later.…

The alacrity with which the Madagascar Plan was seized upon as a panacea for the Nazis’ inability to solve the Jewish question is a measure of the frustration level that had been reached. Once again, the alluring vision of a quick and total solution to the Jewish question cast its magic spell, only once again to disappoint. The desire, indeed the “obligation,” to solve the Jewish question still weighed heavily upon them, and the greater the frustration, the lower the threshold to systematic mass murder.

Echoes of Madagascar

The rhetoric surrounding the Madagascar Plan lingered even after the Final Solution was in full swing. On July 24, 1942, Hitler stated, “After the end of the war, we will rigorously comb out the Jews from their dwelling places and make them wander out to Madagascar or any other national state.”

Hitler’s remarks also reflected his warped perception of Jewish resilience. He once claimed that Jews were der klimatfesteste mensch — “the most climate-resistant of peoples” — and suggested that Siberia would only make them stronger. Madagascar, with its tropical climate, was envisioned as a place where “the vitality of every man” would be sapped, ensuring eventual extinction.

Madagascar Propaganda 

Julius Streicher, the infamous editor of Der Stürmer and a key Nazi propagandist, began advocating for the mass deportation of Jews to Madagascar in 1938. Alfred Rosenberg, one of the architects of Nazi racial ideology, spoke in early 1939 about relocating 15 million Jews to the island, expecting that Jewish wealth — particularly from “millionaires and billionaires” — would fund the plan.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047)