Another attempt at a Jewish state in Africa:
The Madagascar Plan was a proposal for Jewish settlement devised by the
Nazi regime in the late 1930's.
On December 9, 1938, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet informed German Foreign Minister
Joachim von Ribbentrop that in order to rid
France of 10,000 Jewish refugees it would be necessary to ship them elsewhere. At that time, the
Nazi regime considered mass emigration to be the
"Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem."
On March 5, 1938, the SS officer in charge of forced Jewish emigration,
Adolf Eichmann, was commissioned to assemble material to provide the chief of the Security Police (SIPO)
Reinhard Heydrich with "a foreign policy solution as it had been negotiated between
Poland and
France," i.e., the Madagascar Plan. Temporarily shelved in the wake of the war, the project was taken up again after the fall of
France in the summer of 1940.
Eichmann prepared a detailed official report on the island of
Madagascar and its "colonization" possibilities based on information gathered from the French Colonial Office. He added an evacuation plan calling for 4 million Jews to be shipped to
Madagascar over a period of four years and also advocated the creation of a "police reserve" as a giant ghetto. The plan was to be financed by a special bank managing confiscated Jewish property and by contributions exacted from world Jewry.
The plan leaked out and was published in
Italy in July 1940. In August 1940, the Third Reichofficially endorsed the Madagascar Plan. Alarmed by the plan, 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. By that time, however, the
Nazis were already well underway with a different
"Final Solution" - the extermination program.
On February 10, 1942, only a few weeks after the
Wannsee Conference, the Madagascar Plan was officially shelved and replaced in public policy statements with the lexicon of "evacuation to the East."
Sidenote: The Wannsee Conference had an amazing film made about it.