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