Sailors of No Voyage
The Madagascar Plan and the Road to Genocide

In 1940, after the fall of France, Nazi administrators began planning for the forced deportation of the millions of Jews under their rule. The destination was to be Madagascar, a far-away island of which few Europeans knew anything. Until now a French possession, the island was now open to the Nazis to do as they saw fit. But within a year, these plans had been abandoned and the final, deadly solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ was put into action. Where did the Madagascar Plan come from, why was it pursued, and why did it fail?

In the beginning, the Nazis only had to contend with the Jews of Germany, a territory referred to as the Altreich. A largely assimilated, middle-class community, they numbered about 505,000, or 1% of the total population. By the outbreak of war, about half had already fled their homes to seek refuge from the constant government-sponsored assaults on their existence. To most Nazis, this was a desirable outcome. The success of Adolf Eichmann’s scheme to ‘encourage’ Jews to leave Vienna after the Anschluss with Austria led many Nazis to believe that the Jewish question could be solved with voluntary emigration. Even at this early stage, however, those higher up in the party were starting to question whether such an approach was feasible. Very few countries were now willing to take the growing number of desperate and, increasingly, impoverished Jews. In 1938 the Évian Conference was called to try to encourage the nations of the world to accept the refugees. “It is a test of civilization,” wrote the journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick at the time, evoking the “desperate human beings... [who were] waiting in suspense” to see the outcome. After nine days, the conference ended with no agreement. Hitler was delighted. After their years of handwringing over the German treatment of Jews, he had given the international community a chance to “convert this sympathy into practical aid”. They had failed.

It was the invasion of Poland in 1939 that finally ruled out voluntary emigration. Poland contained an extra 3,474,000 Jews, amounting to almost 10% of the population. They were generally poorer, unassimilated, and many unable to afford any sort of travel out of the country. As Germany turned to the west, Jews they had already expelled fell once again under their control. This problem was not something the Nazis believed they could simply ignore; treating the Jews as civilians was not viable and inaction was perceived to have disastrous potential. In Hitler’s imagination, defeating Bolshevism whilst ignoring Jewry would be folly, the equivalent of fighting a two-front war on only one front. The infamous and completely fictional Dolchstoß (stab- in-the-back) narrative that German Jews during the First World War had caused the German Empire’s collapse, was accepted by most figures in the state and military apparatus even if they did not have a concrete idea of how to prevent it happening again.

As it turned out, the collapse of France dropped an opportunity in their lap; they could simply dump the Jews on the colonial island of Madagascar. This was far preferable to the Nisko Plan, which would create a Jewish settlement in Poland, but was resisted by the German governor Hans Frank.

Proposals to send the Jews of Europe (voluntarily or otherwise) to settlements overseas were not new. Sites in Uganda, Cyprus, Siberia, Guiana, Argentina, New Caledonia, and Alaska had all been proposed by various governments and individuals. Both antisemites wanting to rid their country of Jews as well as Zionists hoping to create a safe homeland participated, although rarely in collaboration. If there was a habitable place on Earth, someone had probably debated sending the Jews there at some point. Why, then, did the Nazis settle on Madagascar? Firstly, it was an idea that was deeply-embedded in 19th and 20th century European antisemitic thinking. A plan to send the Jews of Europe to the island had first been set out by the German orientalist Paul de Lagarde in 1878. Lagarde was influenced by the revival of the 17th century theory that the Malagasy were descended from Jews. In 1658, the proclaimed colonial governor of the island, Etienne de Flacourt, had made dubious claims about the Israelite origins of the Malagasy, before the idea was revived by British academics such as a James Cameron, who had given the theory his assured approval the year before Lagarde’s book was published.

This no doubt appealed to the more mystically-minded members of the Nazis, like Himmler, but there were more concrete reasons to adopt the plan. Just a few years earlier in 1937, the French government had collaborated with the Polish to investigate the possibility of sending unwanted Jews to the island. An expedition in 1937, known as the Lepecky Commission, estimated that between 5,000-7,000 families could be initially settled on the island. The more realistic estimate brought by one of the Jewish members of the commission was closer to 500. So close was the plan to realisation that shipping companies had started competing for contracts to transport the Jews, but the plans were scrapped owing in part to the resistance from colonial governor Léon Cayla. Nonetheless, the framework was already in place.

Lastly, there was the physical location of Madagascar. Despite its size, Madagascar is easy to miss. In antiquity, several expeditions passed through the Mozambique Straight on the west of the island without sighting it at all; the straight is about 250 miles wide at its thinnest point. To the east, there is only the vast Indian Ocean. It is astonishing that the island, one of the last major landmasses in the world to be permanently settled by humans, was made home at all by Austronesian people some 1,800 years ago. “Today’s equivalent [to the Madagascar Plan] would be to say we’ll send somebody to the moon,” noted historian Christopher Browning. “After all, it was the furthest imaginable place that you could have [sent them].”

It was estimated that it would take about thirty days to transport people there. Once they had been forced off the boat, it would be impossible to escape; it would be a sort of massive concentration camp, where Jews would be left to fend for themselves. In the Nazi imagination, the opportunities of Jewry to attempt to carry out any subversive activities in Europe were nil, and the population could also be used as a hostage to ensure the good behaviour of American Jews. Both of these beliefs were delusional; in particular, Hitler was proven wrong in believing he could use European Jewry as hostages, although this realisation would come after the plans were scrapped.

It is difficult to imagine what would have happened if the Nazis had actually gone ahead with the plan, although it is not inconceivable that they could have tried. Had certain elements within the British cabinet won out in their attempts to sue for peace after the Dunkirk evacuation, the Nazis might well have been free to carry out their deportation plans. Reading about the Reich Main Security Office’s plans to carry Jews in boats of 1,500 people each, it is difficult not to be reminded of the cattle trucks that transported Jews to the concentration camps, often overloaded in which many would perish during the journey. It would be a modern Middle Passage. Upon arrival, Jews would be forced to work the land in an environment that differs wildly to the pastures of central Europe, or the fertile black earth of the east. Madagascar is also rife with malaria – it decimated French soldiers who landed on the island in the 1890s, and continued to worry the French who moved there. It is perfectly fitting that most historians describe the plan as amounting to an indirect genocide. In the end, it seems likely that the Nazi government may have decided that massacring the Jews at home was more convenient than sending them on a costly voyage where they would die anyway.

In writing about the Madagascar Plan, it is also worth considering the Malagasy. Numbering somewhere approaching four million at this time, the residents of Madagascar are too often ignored by historians. In some ways this is forgivable considering the dearth of easily accessible sources on this topic. We know that there was, predictably, hostility to the plan. In the 1930s, the Franco-Malagasy newspaper Le Petit Tananarivien was keen to point to the example of Palestine as what would happen if a large number of Jewish settlers suddenly arrived on the island. Antisemitism had also crept into Malagasy soldiers serving overseas, likely acquired from their interactions with French soldiers, amongst whom there was a strong far-right element. Charles Rakoto, serving in Syria, wrote a concerned letter to the governor of Madagascar to inform him that “our quiet island has never had any nefarious influence on it” and that “Jewish elements would sow trouble....” Aside from these glimpses from the pens of liter- ate Malagasy, we have little idea of what the majority of the population believed. It is not difficult to imagine that the warnings of the Petit Tananarivien might well have come true, in that conflict would be the inevitable outcome.

The Royal Navy ultimately scuppered the Madagascar Plan; their overwhelming control of the sea meant that such significant and prolonged naval transportations would simply be impossible. Knowing what came next, it is difficult to really say this was a good thing. Having cancelled many important plans for Polish Jews in anticipation of the deportations going ahead, local Nazi leaders were now increasingly frustrated. They had sunk time and political capital into ‘solving’ the Jewish question for what had turned out to be a dead end. As Browning writes, “the greater the frustration, the lower the threshold to systemic mass murder”. It is no surprise that the following summer, the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi death squads, would begin their deadly sweep of eastern Europe in the wake of Operation Barbarossa.

Thomas Bachrach has just completed a Masters in History at the University of Exeter.