The Madagascar Plan on paper
, 33, a jurist and diplomat, has headed since April 1940 Referat D III, the 'Jewish affairs desk' of the Auswärtiges Amt, the Reich Foreign Ministry, in Berlin. A career civil servant who joined the Nazi Party, he is seeking to give his service a role in what the regime calls the Judenfrage, the 'Jewish question' — the future of the more than 5 million people considered Jewish now under German control.
In late May 1940, wrote to Hitler his distaste for the 'Bolshevik method of the physical extermination of a people', which he judged 'un-Germanic'. He spoke instead of a 'mass emigration' to Africa or a colony. Hitler approved. The defeat of France places its colony of Madagascar within reach, and a British surrender is awaited to secure the passage of ships.
The idea of 'resettling' Europe's Jews there has circulated since the nineteenth century; Warsaw even sent a commission there in 1937. Rademacher is tasked with drawing up a memorandum on it. On his desk: an island 'reservation', guarded by the German police, for some 4 million people. He must decide what to put on paper.
Franz Rademacher, Jewish desk of the German foreign ministry, 3 July 1940: what to do with the plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar?
Rademacher drafts the full memorandum. On 3 July 1940 he signs 'Die Judenfrage im Friedensvertrage': France cedes Madagascar, the island passes under German mandate and an SS police governor (air and naval bases excepted), the Jews are given a pseudo-administration but are barred from leaving and held as diplomatic hostages. Eichmann simultaneously drafts a logistical plan at the RSHA. Historians (Browning, Longerich) read it as a step toward the 'Final Solution': on an island of hostile climate and endemic plague, the project would have killed a large share of the deportees. For lack of a British surrender and of ships, it is abandoned at the end of 1940. Rademacher, tried in West Germany after the war, will die a fugitive in 1973 without having served his sentence.
POINT OF VIGILANCE — [Historiographical note: a project often presented as 'far-fetched'; insist on its genocidal character in intent and effect (Browning, Longerich) without trivialising it. Figure of ~4 million = the memorandum's order of magnitude.]
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