The Madagaskar Plan (66 page)

Authors: Guy Saville

Aside from the involvement of Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich, as well as Göring and other key figures not mentioned in this note, a huge amount of bureaucratic energy was expended on the plan in the summer of 1940. As early as July, Hans Frank, governor of the General Government (the Nazis’ name for occupied Poland), was informed about Madagascar. He was sufficiently convinced by the sincerity of the plan to halt the construction of the ghetto in Kraków, deeming it no longer necessary because the Jews were going to be sent to Africa. A similar decision was reached in Warsaw. The same month, the Polish Jews themselves were informed that shortly “they would all leave for Madagascar.”
^†In October, French Jews were readied for their journey below the equator. For those who question the sheer logistical difficulties of shipping four million people to Madagascar, it should be noted, as historian Mark Mazower does, that the years 1939–45 saw the largest experiment in socioethnic engineering in history, with millions of Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans moved around Europe like pieces on a chessboard.
^‡Given this massive upheaval and the fanaticism of the SS, it is not impossible to imagine something similar happening—but by boat rather than rail.

The American Jewish Committee also considered the plan in earnest, issuing a detailed report in August 1941 stating that it would be a catastrophe: “no pogrom in history would equal … the indiscriminate dumping of millions of helpless people into a primitive, hostile environment.”
^§This is perhaps the clinching piece of evidence for the plan’s credibility. Even though the Nazis were still pursuing an expulsion policy in the summer of 1940, they had no interest in the Jews’ long-term survival. The unfortunates arriving in Madagascar would be exposed to an unforgiving tropical wilderness, disease, and starvation. Many would perish—but through a passive process. This would have suited the Nazis, with their doublethink mentality: they could deny direct responsibility. Indeed, Rademacher went further, saying that “use can be made for propaganda purposes of the generosity shown by Germany in permitting [Madagascar] to the Jews.”

History, however, tells that the Madagascar Plan was never implemented. It relied on a turn of events that didn’t happen: a settlement with the British. To move such huge numbers of Jews, the Nazis would need the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean opened to German vessels. After the fall of France, it was assumed that either Britain would be defeated or peace with the island nation would be negotiated. This was a prerequisite for shipping the Jews from Europe to Africa.

I have written elsewhere of how an accommodation between the British Empire and the Third Reich could have come about. Assuming it did, what fate would have awaited the Jews of Britain? Eichmann identified 330,000 for transportation. We can never know what might have occurred, but anti-Semitism was widespread in all sections of society, and there were some ominous signs at the governmental level. The possibility of deporting the country’s Jews to Madagascar was raised in Parliament in April 1938. A month later, Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, addressed the issue with his French counterpart, who was at the time engaged with his own version of the plan. In November, Chamberlain and Hitler conferred on the subject through a South African intermediary. Elsewhere Britain’s record was unpromising. When Jews were fleeing persecution in Germany in the 1930s, Britain refused 90 percent of these refugees.
*
The other alternative—sending them to Palestine—had little support, for fear of stoking Arab nationalism and destabilizing the empire. Anthony Eden (Churchill’s foreign secretary from 1940 to 1945 and later prime minister) was described as being “immovable on the subject of Palestine—he loves Arabs and hates Jews.”
^†It should be remembered that both the Balfour Declaration and the Peel Commission came to nothing. The Vatican was also opposed to sending Jews to Palestine.

In Berlin, in the autumn of 1940, an SS unit consisting of “suitably qualified technical experts” was made ready to travel to Madagascar to ascertain, among other things, landing sites, the scope for camp construction, and the “total absorption capacity” of the island. It never left. When peace with the British didn’t come, the plan stalled. In the months after, minds in Berlin were diverted by the looming invasion of Russia.

This corresponds with the conclusion Hans Jensen draws in his study of the subject: If Hitler won the war, it would mean exile to Madagascar for the Jews. If he lost, extermination.
*
In the parlance of alternative history, this is a “point of divergence.” To state my own view, I suspect that if the Nazis had succeeded in conquering western Europe in 1940, including a settlement (of whatever kind) with Britain, a serious and determined attempt to ship the continent’s Jews en masse to the Indian Ocean would have been undertaken, even if the project was never fully realized.

Intermittent discussion of the Madagascar Plan continued through 1940 and 1941. It was officially abandoned on 10 February 1942, when Rademacher received the order ending the program from Hitler. Several weeks earlier, at the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich had put in motion a more murderous fate for the Jews.

* * *

Many other elements in this novel are also based on fact.

Hitler intended to rebuild Berlin on an imperial scale after the war and to name his capital “Germania.” The first phase of construction, including the Great Hall, was due for completion by January 1950.

The Nazis had extensive plans for Africa, wanting to reacquire the colonies they lost after the Versailles Treaty and to conquer a swath of new territory stretching from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. For a fuller discussion of this subject, see my “Author’s Note” in
The Afrika Reich
(Henry Holt, 2013).

Germany led the world in atomic research during the 1920s and ’30s. However, the purging of Jewish scientists from German universities, combined with Hitler’s suspicion of what he described as “Jewish physics,” curtailed the Nazi program to develop a weapon. The uranium for the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II came from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo that Hochburg visits.

Kraft durch Freude (KdF), the Nazis’ leisure organization, became the largest tour operator in the world.
^†By 1937 it was organizing vacations for 1.4 million people; its cruise liners took Germans to destinations as varied as the Norwegian fjords and the oases of Libya. In Prora, on Germany’s Baltic coast, the KdF built the biggest hotel in the world: a prototype for things to come. Its ruins are well worth a visit and are as gargantuan as this novel suggests; it takes a good hour to walk from one end to the other. After the war, the KdF intended to expand its network of hotels to the Crimea (“our Riviera,” as Hitler described it), Sweden, Argentina, and Africa.

If Germany had defeated the Soviet Union, it is likely that a protracted guerrilla conflict would have continued east of the Ural Mountains. Hitler was “delighted by the prospect,” believing that it would be the proving ground for a generation of Nazi youths. The discussion of the Madagascar Plan above refers only to the Jews of western Europe. The Nazis differentiated between them and the “
Ostjuden
”—eastern and Soviet Jews—whom they deemed inferior and more dangerous. The plan was to force the
Ostjuden
on death marches across Siberia, to exile in Birobidzhan, in the far east of Russia. Birobidzhan had been created by Stalin in the 1930s as a Jewish enclave; Hitler planned to make it his eastern dumping ground. It is difficult to imagine the extremes of Birobidzhan: monsoons in the summer, thirty degrees below zero in the winter. A community of four thousand Jews lives there today.

The Nazis’ repugnant medical experiments on Jews are documented elsewhere. Of relevance to this book is their obsession with twins. Between 1943 and 1944, for example, fifteen hundred pairs, including young children, were experimented on in Auschwitz, mostly with fatal results.

Globocnik was involved with building projects on a scale comparable to the ones I’ve imagined in Madagaskar. In 1940, he oversaw the construction of a “Jew ditch” at Belzec, Poland. Intended as a defense against Soviet attack, it was to be 54 yards wide and 325 miles long (though only 8 miles were ever completed). He wanted 2.5 million Jews to work on it, moving the earth by hand, though in a memo Heydrich limited him to “a couple of hundred thousand.”

In 1948, a team from Électricité de France went to Madagascar to survey the island’s waterways for hydroelectric development. One of the key rivers they identified was the Sofia near Mandritsara, though concerns were raised about silting. To date, no dam has been built.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was lucky to visit Madagascar during the research for this novel and would like to thank the many people I met and who shared a little of their lives with me, in particular:

Helen Cox of Reef and Rainforest for helping to organize the trip; in Antananarivo (Tana), Oliver at Soci-Mad; in Antsohihy (Antzu), everyone at Hôtel Anaïs for their hospitality; in Mandritsara, Dr. David Mann, Dr. Adrien Ralaimiarison, and Robert and Christine Blondeel; at Diego Suarez naval base, base captain Commander Randrianarisoa Marosoa Nonenana and his executive officer, Commander Vaohavy Andriambelonarivo Andasy. Most important, for their comradeship, insight, and humor over the many miles we traveled together, my driver Radimbiniaina Harison Zoé, and my guide and translator, Ramarolahy Tafita Mamy.
Misaotra betsaka!

For answering my questions on pregnancy and childbirth, I thank: Jo Cole, JD Smith, and Cally Taylor. For their help with research and translation: Sebastian Breit, Stella Deleuze, Jennifer Domingo, Elizabeth Ferretti, Oliver Gascoigne, John Smith of the French Foreign Legion, and Tim Vale. For the U.S. edition: everyone at Henry Holt, especially Molly Bloom, Meryl Levavi, Jason Liebman, Molly Lindley, Brooke Parsons, Richard Pracher, Courtney Reed, Stella Tan, and Bonnie Thompson.

Also: William Boyd, Richard Burnip, Linda Christmas, Andrew Dance, Carlie Lee, Laura Macdougall, Sarah-Jane Page, Rodney Paull, Lorrie and Robin Porter, and Aaron Schlechter. Special mention to Ana and Chris Biles for the generous use of their mountain house in Slovenia where an early draft of Part II was written.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to my UK agent, Jonathan Pegg, and my editor at Hodder, Nick Sayers; and in the U.S.: my agent, Farley Chase, for his advice and levelheadedness; and my editor, Michael Signorelli, for his enthusiasm, feedback on the manuscript, and for always finding me a little extra time as each new deadline loomed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G
UY
S
AVILLE
is the author of
The Afrika Reich
, an international bestseller. Born in 1973, Saville studied literature at London University. He has lived in South America and North Africa, and is currently based in the UK. You can sign up for email updates
here
.