Read The Madagaskar Plan Online
Authors: Guy Saville
It had been troubling him since he arrived. Cranley often shuttled between European cities and took Madeleine with him to spend long days alone. Bringing her to the heart of the Reich, however, was unnecessary. Her passport listed no ethnicity other than British, and with her dark looks she could have been from Rome or Madrid, but Burton was aware of her constant tension, her anxiety whenever someone shouted nearby or footsteps approached quickly from behind.
“He thought I should see the capital of the world.”
The streets thronged with uniforms and sightseers from every continent. The Reich Tourism Association offered subsidized flights to Americans, Japanese, citizens of the CONE, and white subjects of the British Empire so they could marvel at Germania, then return home to spread the word.
Maddie continued eating her ice cream. Then laid down the spoon, coming to a decision. “Do you want the real reason?”
Burton was embarrassed; he had probed unnecessarily. “It doesn’t matter.”
“He wants to remind me how lucky I am. How I owe him everything.” She had never been so critical of her husband. “Maybe he wants to scare me a little, so I don’t take any of it for granted.”
“I’d never do that to you,” he replied.
She tapped him with her spoon. “I know.” Her expression became serious. “I don’t want to live like that anymore.”
Burton felt emboldened, reckless. There had been a lack of permanence in his life; being with Madeleine had changed that. He wanted to build something. Here, now—in Germania, of all places!—seemed the right moment to begin. The words he’d been edging round the whole day were ready to spill out.
“I want you to leave him.”
The accordion player reached the end of his tune. There was a ripple of applause.
“I’ve never said this to any woman, but I want us to live together. To grow old together.”
Madeleine had simply replied yes, her face aglow as if she were holding a giant buttercup to it.
After they finished the ice cream, sharing dollops from the same spoon, they strolled to Burton’s hotel. Hand in hand. As he walked, a contentment radiated through him that he had not known before. He had kept it locked out since childhood, not through fear or because of how fleeting it could be, but because he had no interest in being content. Happiness was for other people.
Now its warmth engulfed him.
He glanced at Madeleine and knew her heart was beating the same way.
* * *
Burton remembered that moment as he dug her grave, a nugget of time that he wanted to last forever.
He had carried her body from the trees where she died to the next ridge: a lower, more secluded spot overlooking the river in one direction and rolling hills that eventually led to mangroves and the blue of the ocean in the other. He scraped off the top layers of earth with his hand, then used the helmet Hochburg had given him to dig, like he was bailing out water. The soil was soft and wet, easy to excavate.
The sun continued to dawn: the color of a ripe golden quince, the light diffuse. The wind was picking up.
He stripped to the waist and kept digging, deeper than was necessary, as if what had happened would become real only when he stopped. He tried to replay the rest of the afternoon in Germania—returning to the hotel, the fierceness of their lovemaking as though they were fighting over the bed, the breeze cooling them through the open window afterward—but the images kept deserting him. All he could muster were the first few paces away from the café, repeating over and again, with the Great Hall dominating the skyline.
Burton clambered out of the ground, removed Hochburg’s tunic from Madeleine’s body, and searched for a sharp piece of stone to cut the rope around her wrists. Once they were free he laid them across her chest, wondering how Cranley had managed to prevent her forearm from being tattooed. Then he licked his fingertips and used them to clean her face and smooth down her hair. He tidied her torn and filthy dress.
Finally, he lowered her into the hole.
It wasn’t long enough. He had to pull her knees to her chest to make her fit. It gave her the look of a sleeping child, like on the farm when they checked Alice before retiring to bed.
Not once did he shed any tears. He was a husk.
The hardest part was throwing the first handful of dirt on top of her. Burton had to keep his eyes closed. When he opened them again, most of her body was covered, only an elbow and heel poking out of the soil. He replaced the rest of the earth, found some rocks, and piled the grave with them. There was nothing to make a headstone with.
What did it matter? He would never return to this spot. Or to Madagaskar. He would head to Varavanga and Tünscher’s fishing boats.
By the time he had finished, the sun had risen fully and was beating on his back. He was immune to the light. Burton stood over the grave till the sweat dried on him, then slipped on his shirt. He heard the clatter of approaching rotor blades and watched a Bell helicopter follow the path of the river. On its tail fin was the American flag. It circled the valley twice; the man in the passenger seat was surveying the carnage through binoculars, taking photographs.
In the sunlight the river was a foaming millrace, orange-brown and bloated with bodies. Burton became aware of movement below. At first it was individuals, then groups of two or three, then tens and hundreds. Jews who had survived the flood were climbing the hills to higher ground and safety. Men, women, children; lone survivors and families. They raised their faces to the sun, basking in its rays.
The helicopter completed its second pass and headed back in the direction of Tana.
The next bank of rain clouds was gathering darkly to the west. Burton hurled the earth-smeared helmet over the side of the hill and knelt by the grave. He reached out, placing his single hand on the stones; the sun had begun to warm them. His throat was tight. He felt as though he had been knocked unconscious and was starting to come round, unable to piece together what had happened.
Burton went to say good-bye—but the words wouldn’t come. He was incapable of speech.
He turned and walked away, picking up Hochburg’s tunic; something solid knocked against him. In the left pocket he found a piece of sacking. He dumped the jacket and unwound the cloth: inside was the knife he had saved from his mother, the steel jagged from the years he’d spent whetting it. This was the weapon he had taken to Kongo to avenge himself against Hochburg. He tested its weight.
Find him. Kill him.
Who had Madeleine meant? Hochburg? Or Cranley?
Burton twisted the knife in his hand, the blade catching the morning light. It was sharp enough for both.
The Madagaskar Plan
is a work of fiction with a basis in historical fact. This history, and its interpretation, remains contentious and pivots on whether the Nazis were always determined to exterminate the Jews or if merely expelling them from Europe would have sufficed. It is beyond the scope of this note to examine all the controversies and contradictions raised by the “Madagaskar-Projekt.” Nevertheless, I want to show that it was discussed at the highest levels, that multiple branches of government took the possibility seriously, and that given certain deviations from history it could have come to pass.
Although the Nazis’ plans for the Jews were never benign, they may not always have been genocidal. In the early stages of the war, a policy of expulsion and ghettoization was pursued. The Lublin Reservation was established in October 1939 on the eastern fringes of the Reich, in conquered Poland. It was hoped that the entire Jewish population would eventually be deported there; transports began at once. Those who arrived found harsh conditions but no systematic killing. Lublin was run by an ambitious police chief and protégé of Himmler’s: Odilo Globocnik. However, a lack of planning combined with a typhus epidemic and squabbling between different elements of the SS caused the project to collapse. There were also fears that Lublin was not a remote enough location in which to “quarantine” the Jews.
On 25 May 1940, Himmler formally suggested a more ambitious scheme (as the first epigraph of this novel shows): to deport the Jews to an African colony. Given previous statements he had made, he can only have meant Madagascar. The date is also significant: the eve of Dunkirk and less than a month before the French surrendered. The defeat of France would put its colony of Madagascar at Germany’s disposal.
Hitler responded by stating that Himmler’s idea was “
sehr gut und richtig
”—very good and correct—and that he should put it into action at once.
*
The concept of exiling the Jews to Madagascar dates to the eighteenth century, though the first treatise on the subject wasn’t written until 1883 by Paul de Lagarde, professor of philology at Göttingen University. De Lagarde’s work was later taken up by the Britons, an organization dedicated to spreading anti-Semitic propaganda throughout Europe. It was headed by Henry Hamilton Beamish, who met Hitler in 1923 to discuss the Madagascar Plan (the first occasion we know for certain when Hitler became aware of it). As the notion of banishing the Jews to the Indian Ocean became more widely known, various governments—including the British and French—considered it as a panacea for their Jewish populations. The plan found its most enthusiastic reception in Poland, which twice debated it (in 1926 and 1938) and which on the second occasion sent a delegation to Madagascar to draw up a feasibility study. The Lepecki Commission (two members of which were Jewish) reported challenging living conditions for whites and endemic malaria and concluded that a maximum of seven thousand families could be sent there. SS officials used this material when they began drawing up their own plans.
Why Madagascar? Over the decades, other remote possibilities were suggested, from British Guiana (Prime Minister Chamberlain’s preference) to Ethiopia (President Roosevelt’s), as well as Brazil and Angola. It was to Madagascar, however, that anti-Semites’ imagination continually returned. The island’s insular location obviously appealed, but much was also made of biblically inspired theories that Madagascar had been settled by Jews centuries before and that its inhabitants, the Malagasy, were their descendants. Spurious evidence included the Malagasy people’s widespread circumcision and their observance of the Sabbath.
*
After Hitler approved Himmler’s plan, in May 1940, he discussed the subject with Mussolini, remarking that “an Israelite reserve could be created on Madagascar” (18 June), and he reviewed the logistical feasibility with the head of the German navy, Admiral Erich Raeder (20 June).
Feverish planning to create a
Grossgetto
(superghetto) in Madagascar gripped the Nazis in the summer of 1940. An initial proposal was completed on 3 July by Franz Rademacher of the Foreign Office, its purpose made explicit in the first paragraph: “all Jews out of Europe.” It should be noted that this was not the first time the plan appeared in official Nazi documents. The first-ever mention is as early as 24 May 1934, in a memorandum to Reinhard Heydrich. Six years later, Heydrich insisted that the SS play a leading role in Rademacher’s scheme and assigned Adolf Eichmann and Theo Dannecker to the task. All the discussion was of a “
territorial
final solution” (my italics). The finished text of the “Madagaskar-Projekt” was delivered on 15 August 1940 and circulated by Heydrich at the ministerial level. This is the most detailed account we have of how the Nazis intended to run the island, its stated aim
to relocate approximately 4,000,000 Jews to Madagascar. In order to avoid lasting contact between the Jews and other peoples, an overseas solution of an insular nature is to be preferred to any other alternative.
To transport this number of people, a fleet of 120 ships would have to be procured, each ship with a capacity of 1,500 “units,” two ships to leave daily. With a return journey time of sixty days, the document notes, “this would equate to a total of around one million Jews per year.” This exodus was expected to take four years. Jews were to be sent in waves, with the first transports consisting of “farmers, construction experts and craftsmen.” It would be financed by the compulsory acquisition and sale of all Jewish property and assets.
The island itself would be divided into sectors by country of origin. Jews would be put to work on a “large scale program to expand the transport network,” building new roads and railways; rivers would be redirected. The WVHA, the SS economic department, wanted to take over existing French businesses using Jewish labor, especially the cash crops of “coffee, tea, cloves, vanilla, perfume and medicinal plants.”
*
Madagascar was (and still is) the largest producer of vanilla in the world, something the SS expected to continue profiting from. The plan also mentions the establishment of a meat export industry.
A council of Jewish elders would help run the regional sectors, a system Heydrich had used in occupied Europe; the council would be subservient to the SS. Jews would also be allowed their own internal postal, health, and police services. As Madagascar would be a German mandate, and because Jews were barred from German citizenship, they would hold no nationality. Categorically, Madagascar would never be allowed to become a state. The island would be placed under the direct control of an SS police governor. Although it is not mentioned in the 15 August plan, documents elsewhere name Philipp Bouhler (head of the chancellery in Hitler’s personal office and an old comrade of the Führer’s) as the first candidate for the job.
Two further points are worth noting from Rademacher’s initial proposal: (1) “Diego Suarez,… which [is] strategically important, will become a German naval base”; (2) “the Jews will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good behavior of the members of their race in America.”
Was any of this credible? The issue divides historians. Some—Philip Friedman and Magnus Brechtken, for example—are dismissive of the plan, believing it to be a fantasy, a smoke screen to mask the true intentions of the Nazis. Others, such as Hans Jensen and Christopher Browning, insist that it must be taken seriously. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that many people at the time accepted the plan as a viable proposition.
*