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Jews and Madagascar

The Madagascar Plan was a proposal by Nazis to relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. The scheme was perhaps no so perposterous as normally assumed. In the 18th and 19th century some writers argued that the Malagasy were of Jewish origin. Could the Ten Tribes be traced, "we should find a key to much that is hidden in the history of the world and in the Bible, our understanding would be enlarged, and our faith confirmed.... the learned have discovered Israelitish influence in every land, from China to Peru." A paper by Mr. Hanson, a native preacher, read before the British Association of Science, at Swansea, 1848, left no doubt that the Gha and other African tribes have numerous well-marked Jewish characters in their religious observances.

They who were of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel had altogether separated themselves from the Jews as a body by apostacy and relentless warfare against the house of David. If the times of the Gentiles are nearly completed [as all the signs of the times distinctly indicated], then it was believed the prophecy fulfilled with the recovery of the lost tribes.

Indeed, Beta Israel, known as Ethiopian Jews and until recently by the derogatory name Falasha (meaning stranger or exile in Ge'ez), perceived themselves to be Jewish, living a traditional form of life evolving from at least the fourteenth century, although some suggest that their origins are more ancient. At their peak in the seventeenth century there were over 1 million Beta Israel. Before mass migration to Israel in the 1980s they numbered approximately 30,000 and lived in Gondar province and the Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia.

Long regarded as the best and most authentic account first given of Madagascar was published in 1729 by Kobert Drury ["Journal, during fifteen years captivity on Madagascar" published in 1729]. Drury, being shipwrecked on the south coast of that island when a boy in the Degrave, East Indiaman, lived there as a slave fifteen years. Missionaries of all sects adopted as gospel truth and Uteral matter of fact Drury's statements as to the manners and customs of the Sakalava tribes, and pinned their faith, as to the testimony from an eye-witness, of the incidents and adventures narrated in the extremely curious and interesting story of the unsophisticated voyager. Not a single work on Madagascar had been published since which did not quote, one way or another, largely from Dury's observations.

That the Malagasy included decendants of the Lost Tribes was affirmed in the preface to the book, written by a Captain William Mackett, noted that " the most notable reason of all is, that the owley, which these Madagascar people make use of for their divinations, and procure their unusual or extraordinary dreams with, is manifestly the ephod and teraphim, made use of by the Levite who lodged in Micah's house, as we read Judges xvii. and from which the Israelites could never be wholly brought off, though directly repugnant to the law of Moses..." Millions of readers know Daniel Defoe [1660-1731] as the name on the title-page of one of the world's most successful books - Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719. The career of Defoe is too complicated for even a general summary. Defoe is noted for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel. Approaching sixty, and looking for a new source of income. He was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. He turned, among other things, to the composition of faked confessions and autobiographies, in which category must be placed Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Some confusion existed as to whether Robert Drury was fictitious or not. Defoe was proposed as the author of Robert Drury's Journal by Victorian-era critics. Emile Blanchard in 1872 and Captain Pasfield Oliver in 1890 both argued that Drury’s "Journal" was largely written by Defoe. They pointed to numerous stylistic similarities between the Journal and Defoe’s writing, while also detailing various inconsistencies in the Journal (such as the fact that Drury, who had no education at all, appeared to be an extremely learned linguist). But in 1961 the historian Arthur Secord reported in 1961 that public records in England demonstrated that a man named Robert Drury had existed. Secord also verified many of the claims made by Drury in his journal. Defoe probably "improved" the real Drury's story.

Samuel Copland in 1822 [A History of the Island of Madagascar] wrote that "The origin of the Madegasses, is, by the generality of writers, ascribed to the Jews: this idea is founded on the universal practice of circumcision amongst them, and from the title of “Descendants of Abraham” having been assumed by the inhabitants of St. Mary's Isle, and the coast opposite. ... the ark was in existence in Ham's time, and for many ages after, and consequently his children had a model to work by. It is certain, that the children of Japheth peopled the islands in the Mediterranean, as early as Abraham's time; and the children of Ham also were dispersed abroad, round the coasts of Africa; from whence, supposing them to possess the art of ship-building, they might easily transport themselves to Madagascar.... The thunders of Sinai have never awed their minds into obedience; nor has the persuasive voice of the Redeemer of mankind ever melted their hearts with divine love; yet, in the midst of an accumulating mass of error and superstition, we find them adhering, with inflexible constancy, to the grand principle on which all true religion is founded—the acknowledgment of one God, to the exclusion of idols... "

In 1875 James Cameron brought together numerous noteworthy Malagasy customs which he argued resembled many of the ceremonies and religious observances of the Jews. ["ON THE EARLY INHABITANTS OF MADAGASCAR", Antananarivo Annual / MADAGASCAR MAGAZINE NO. III.-CHRISTMAS, 1877]. Cameron argued that the Phoenicians were said to have certainly explored the north-east coast of Africa from the Red Sea southwards, if not to have sailed round the entire continent from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. He felt they would probably have visited the Comoro Islands in the Mozambique Channel, and at least the west coast of Madagascar. "The joint fleet of Hiram and Solomon undoubtedly passed the island of Socotra, at the entrance of the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean. The voyage from thence to the east coast of Africa, to the Comoro Islands, or even to the west coast of Madagascar... "

The Madagascar Plan

The idea of sending European Jewry to Madagascar was not new. The plan was first proposed in 1885 by the German scholar Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), whose writings were a major influence on Hitler. Lagarde driven by religious and political apocalypticism as well as by a fanatical dedication to positivist scholarship. Recognized in his own time and also today as a leading scholar of the origins and development of the Septuagint and its sources, Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) was a vituperative German nationalist and an antisemite whose writings inspired the National Socialist (Nazi) ideology. By the anti-Semitic Orientalist Paul de Lagarde’s “Jewification” (Verjudung­) hypothesis, according to which the flowering of liberalism in German culture was really a “Jewish phenomenon” — that liberalism itself was Jewish.

Most notably, Lagarde was known for his notorious remark about Jewish capitalists (“trichinae and bacilli” who must be “exterminated as quickly and thoroughly as possible”). Lagarde used such poisonous language to describe just about every group or personality in Germany: Prussians, Protestants, left-wingers, other academics, and the antisemites of his day. About Jews in general (not just Jewish businessmen) he once wrote: “We will only overcome this very annoying, very talented nation-within-a-nation through helpfulness and love, not by rejecting their best and brightest.” An influential and controversial public thinker, he invoked an authentic Germanness that encompassed religion and a national ethos to counter the threat posed by the Jews and liberalism.

British, Dutch, and Polish antisemites had been suggesting a similar plan since the Great War. It was later touted by a wide range of politicians and anti-Semitic figures across Europe, some of whom subscribed to the belief that the Jews were the ancestors of the island’s Malagasy natives.

In 1926 and 1927, Poland and Japan each investigated the possibility of using Madagascar for solving their over-population problems. They were not motivated by a desire to cause the physical destruction of the settlers. Rather, they thought of Madagascar as a place where their own people could live better than back in their overcrowded homelands, rather than as a place where the harsh conditions and tropical diseases would kill them off quickly.

In 1937, Poland sent a commission to Madagascar to determine the feasibility of forcing Jews to emigrate there. Members of the commission had very different conclusions. The leader of the commission, Major Mieczyslaw Lepecki, believed that it would be possible to settle 40,000 to 60,000 people in Madagascar. Two Jewish members of the commission didn't agree with this assessment. Leon Alter, the director of the Jewish Emigration Association (JEAS) in Warsaw, believed only 2,000 people could be settled there. Shlomo Dyk, an agricultural engineer from Tel Aviv, estimated even fewer.

In his book, “In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel,” Adam Rovner discusses the Freeland League, an offshoot of the Zionist movement that in the 1930s attempted to advance Madagascar as one of several options outside of Palestine for Jewish settlement, especially as the atmosphere in Europe became increasingly hostile to Jews.

On 05 March 1938 Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of th Jewish question, was commissioned to assemble material for Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police (SIPO), with "a foreign policy solution as it had been negotiated between Poland and France," i.e., the Madagascar Plan. On November 12, 1938, Hermann Göring told the German cabinet that Hitler was going to suggest to the West the emigration of Jews to Madagascar. Hjalmar Schacht, Reichsbank president, during discussions in London, tried to procure and international loan to send the Jews to Madagascar (Germany would make a profit since the Jews would only be allowed to take their money out in German goods). In December 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, even included the emigration of Jews to Madagascar as part of a peace proposal to the pope.

In January 1939 Hitler had threatened the Jews with annihilation, but he made this threat within the context of a potential war, and then as part of the struggle against the “Bolshevikization [sic] of the earth.” In whatever terms or context it was stated, though, the destruction of Europe’s Jews was a prime Nazi goal during the war. In early 1939, Alfred Rosenberg, Germany’s race expert, announced to the world Germany’s determination to rid Europe of its Jews, declaring that Germany would not consider herself responsible for the fate of the Jews whom other countries would not accept.

When the war erupted, neither the British nor their American allies were eager to accept the potential flood of Jewish refugees or make any deals with Hitler -- not due to any lack of charity, but because of a fear that it might blur their defined war objectives. Given the strong thread of international anti-Semitism at the time, Allied military and political leaders needed to keep their public consensus that they fought the Nazis in a war against dictatorial evil -- not a war to save the Jews. Hitler's propaganda machine took every opportunity to paint their Allied opponents as fighting a "Jewish war," and some took the bait. Prior to Pearl Harbor, for example, the U.S. Senate launched an investigation of pro-war motion pictures and how a "Jewish-dominated" film industry might be dragging America into the war.

In the spring of 1940 it became obvious that the nisko and lublin plan - which called for the Deportation of all the Jews in the annexed parts of Poland to the Generalgouverment - was not going to work. The early policy of enforced expulsion was useless; there was nowhere to send them, even to the colonies of the nations they had conquered.

Thus came the scheme to create a Jewish reservation on the French-held island of Madagascar off the Southeast African coast. When Reynhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Head Office, learned of the plan, he demanded that oversight for it be transferred to his office, which is how Adolf Eichmann became involved. In a May 1940 letter to Hitler, SS chief Heinrich Himmler expressed his desire “…that the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony.” Himmler stated: "However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible."

In late May 1940, while France, which controlled Madagascar was being taken, Hitler approved the idea of sending Jews to an African colony. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the German government, developed the details of idea in plan dated 03 June 1940, shortly before the Fall of France. The proposal called for the handing over of control of Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the French surrender terms. Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, however, warned that, given autonomy there, “the Jews would only use it as a world center in which to carry on machinations.” read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/this-day-in-jewish-history/.premium-1.736845

With Adolf Hitler's approval, Adolf Eichmann finalized a memorandum [some date this to 03 July 1940, others to 15 August 1940 calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years. The plan stated that under "the Peace Treaty France must make the island of Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question... The island will be transferred to Germany under a mandate.... suitable areas of the country will be excluded from the Jewish territory (Judenterritorium)... under the administration of the Reichsfuehrer SS.... the Jews will have their own administration in this territory: their own mayors, police, postal and railroad administration, etc.... This arrangement would prevent the possible establishment in Palestine by the Jews of a Vatican State of their own, and the opportunity for them to exploit for their own purposes the symbolic importance which Jerusalem has for the Christian and Mohammedan parts of the world. Moreover, the Jews will remain in German hands as a pledge for the future good behavior of the members of their race in America."

Another document by Rademacher, dated 02 July 1940, contained further information about his intentions. "From a German perspective, the Madagascar solution means the creation of a huge ghetto. Only the security police have the necessary experience in this field; they have the means to prevent a break-out from the island. In addition, they have experience of carrying out in an appropriate manner such punishment measures as become necessary as a result of hostile actions against Germany by Jews in the USA."

Jewish leaders were informed of the plan in a secret meeting in early July. The plan leaked, and was published in Italy in July 1940.

In July 1940, at the initiative of President Roosevelt, the representatives of 26 nations and self-governing dominions sent their representatives to Evian-les-Bains, on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, to discuss means of absorbing the Jews of Germany, and Austria. Delegates after delegates rose to express his country’s sympathy for the Jews, cite what it had already done for them, and explain why, for sociological, economic and demographic reasons, it could do no more. The conference decided to set up a permanent inter-governmental committee to consider the question.

On August 15, 1940, Adolf Eichmann published a memorandum in which he outlined a plan for deporting the Jews of Europe to Madagascar. Was it an earnest plan to expel the Jews from Europe, alive, and ship them to some reservation where, it was hoped, difficult conditions and their own “bestial" habits” would destroy them? Was Germany merely baiting the world to act upon its professions of horror and sympathy, and mocking the Jews with the fact that no one in Judeo-Chris-tian civilization really wanted them? And what finally, so drove the Jewish Affairs Section of the SS that the logistical problem of the German Army, especially at the East Front, often took secondplace to the problem of securing the means of transporting millions of Jews to the death camps, a task which, moreover, required considerable manpower which could better have been employed in the war effort —- not to mention the fact that a considerable proportion of these Jews could have been put to good use in the war effort?

The Madagascar Plan became technically unfeasible later when the Germans lost the Battle of Britain in October 1940. The Germans had planned to use captured British shipping to transport the European Jews to Madagascar.

The American Jewish Committee commissioned a special report, published in May 1941, that sought to demonstrate that Jews could not survive the conditions on the island. When exactly the mass murder of the Jews was ordered as policy is not absolutely certain. In late July 1941 Reich Marshall Herman Goering signed the order that Heydrich had drafted calling for a “final solution” (Endloesung) to the Jewish presence in German-occupied Europe. This order was signed after massacres of Jews and other groups in Russia had begun in the wake of the German invasion.

In August 1941 the Vichy government was reported as having agreed to permit Nazi Germany to send the first 5,000 Jews from Nazi-held Poland to the French island of Madagascar. The settlement of the deported Jews on Madagascar will be financed by the French administration there, which would utilize the deportees for forced labor to develop the island. It was reported that the Nazis had definitely made up their mind to accelerate the expulsion of Jews from Poland to Madagascar. “Registration of Jews in Poland for this purpose is now being conducted by the German occupational authorities there,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency report said. At the same time is was reported that the last 400 Jews in Danzig, formerly a Free City under the supervision of the League of Nations, have been placed on a boat by the Nazis and shipped to an unknown destination in Africa.

Hitler had possibly hoped to keep America out of the war by keeping the Jews hostage. Japan attacked the United States on December 7th 1941, and Hitler declared war on the United States a few days later. In late 1941 and into early 1942, the decisions and the first steps to exterminate all other European Jews were taken. In January 1942 Heydrich met with senior officials from the SS, the Police, the Foreign Office, the Nazi Party, and Reich Chancellery and Ministry of Justice in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to map out the campaign of mass murder. In 1942, the outbreak of the war with Russia had made it necessary for Germany to replace the Madagascar plan with “resettlement” in Eastern Europe. Eveven then, Hitler told his associates: “After the war, the Jews will emigrate to Madagascar or another Jewish national state.” But on 10 February 1942, only a few weeks after the Wannsee Conference, the Madagascar Plan was officially shelved.

Some have argued that if the initial attack on the Soviet Union had been successful, and victory had been achieved before the end of 1941, as originally envisaged by Germany, then the deportation of Jews into a Russian rump state in Western Siberia could have begun in 1942. From this perspective, it was not the failure to defeat Britian that led to mass-killing of Jews, but rather the failure to defeat the Soviet Union.

Franz Rademacher, the former associate of Adolf Eichmaim, was sentenced 03 May 1968 in Bamberg Germany to five years imprisonment for aiding the murder of thousands of Jews during World War II. The prosecution had demanded a 15-year prison term for Rademacher; accusing him of aiding the murder of at least 1300 Serbian Jews and the deportation of nearly 100,000 Jews from Nazi-occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Rademacher, former head of the Third Reich's Jewish Section, was author of the early Nazi plan to deport all European Jews to Madagascar. Rademacher had actively correspnded with Eichmann, who had supervised the extermination program chosen by Hitler over the Madagascar plan.