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Prelude to Genocide or Late-Stage “Territorialism”? The Nazi “Madagascar Plan” in Comparative and Colonial Context, 1936–1940

2023; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14623528.2023.2283947

1469-9494

Eric Kurlander,

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics

ABSTRACTMost scholars argue that the “Madagascar Plan” constituted the penultimate stage in the development of the Nazi “Final Solution,” representing a commitment to physical attrition presaging outright extermination. The idea of mass Jewish resettlement in Madagascar or another African colonial territory was no Nazi invention, however. It had been broached by various parties since the late nineteenth century, not least of which the Poles, French, British and even Jewish “territorialists” seeking an alternative to Zionism. Nor was the Nazi Madagascar Plan, for all its problematic assumptions about race, space, minority rights, and “permanent security,” inherently (proto-) genocidal. The goal of this article is to place the Nazi version of the Madagascar Plan back in this broader historical lineage of late-stage European colonialism and more specifically “territorialism,” avoiding the teleological assumption that such a solution represented an attritionist prelude to genocide. After a brief summary of its pre-history, this article draws on extensive primary source research to reconstruct the Polish, French, and British discussions of such plans between 1936 and 1938. It then turns to similar investigations conducted by Nazi officials between Summer 1937 and Summer 1940, based largely on primary sources, comparing the two projects and their implications for understanding the (Nazi) “Jewish Question.” The article concludes that the Madagascar Plan constituted the Third Reich’s last, most ambitious effort to “solve” the “Jewish Question” within the colonial framework that had defined most “territorialist solutions” to Jewish and other refugee and minority “questions” since the late nineteenth century. Such continuities between German and European colonialism and Nazi “solutions” to the “Jewish Question,” while racist and disdainful of Jews and indigenous populations, had less to do with Windhoek, much less Auschwitz, and more to do with pre-1940 plans to settle “surplus” European minority and refugee populations in colonial spaces.KEYWORDS: GenocideJewish questionHolocaustcolonialismMadagascar Plan Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 “Text of the Madagascar Proposal” in Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-madagascar-plan-2; see original, “Memorandum by an official of the Department for German Internal Affairs,” 3 July 1940, in Yad Vashem (YV): O 65/23.2 Ibid.3 Ibid.4 “Text of the Madagascar Proposal.”5 Ibid.6 Hans Mommsen, “Hitler's Reichstag Speech of 30 January 1939.” History and Memory, 9, nos. 1/2 (Fall 1997): 158.7 Philip Friedman, “The Lublin Reservation and the Madagascar Plan: Two Aspects of Nazi Jewish Policy During the Second World War,” in The Nazi Holocaust. Vol. 2, ed. Michael Marrus (Berlin and Boston: K. G. Saur, 1989), 703–29.8 Leni Yahil. “Madagascar—Phantom of a Solution for the Jewish Question,” ibid., 683.9 Beate Meyer, A Fatal Balancing Act: The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany,1939–1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 65.10 Dieter Pohl, Holocaust. Massale moord op de Europese joden (Laren NH: Verbum, 2005), 52.11 Magnus Brechkten, Madagaskar für die Juden: Antisemitische Idee und Politische Praxis 1885–1945 (Oldenbourg: Wissenschaftsverlag, 1998), 3, 6.12 See Michelle Gordon and Rachel O’Sullivan, eds. Colonial Paradigms of Violence. Comparative Analysis of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Killing (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022); Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis zwischen Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2009): 196–221; Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities,” Journal of Genocide Research. Volume 15, no. 3 (2013): 339–62; Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past.” Central European History 41 (2008): 477–503; Dan Stone, “Britannia Waives the Rules: British Imperialism and Holocaust Memory.” In Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2006), 174–95.13 Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197–219; Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008); Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007); Alex J. Kay, Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).14 Michelle Gordon, “Colonial Violence and Holocaust Studies,” Holocaust Studies 21, no. 4 (2015): 281.15 Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz.” Central European History 42 (2009): 293; also see Rachel O’Sullivan, “Integration and Division: Nazi Germany and the ‘Colonial Other’ in Annexed Poland,” in Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 4 (2020): 437–58.16 See again Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust”; Michael Wildt, “Was Heisst: Singularität des Holocaust?,” Zeithistorische Forschungen. Heft 1/2022; also see Hans Jansen, Der Madagaskar-Plan: die beabsichtigte Deportation der europäischen Juden nach Madagaskar (München: Herbig, 1997); Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 59–60.17 Gerlach, Extermination, 61–62.18 Brechtken, Madagascar, 5; Gerlach, Extermination, 59–61; Zofia Trębacz. Nie tylko Palestyna: Polskie plany emigracyjne wobec Żydów 1935–1939 (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2018); Hans Jansen, Der Madagaskar-Plan: die beabsichtigte Deportation der europäischen Juden nach Madagaskar (München: Herbig,1997)19 On the potentially genocidal nature of even liberal conceptions of empire see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis and Many Other Questions Over the Course of the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).20 See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1 (New York: Orion, 1998); Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. New Haven (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014); Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Dirk Rupnow, Judenforschung im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft zwischen Politik, Propaganda und Ideologie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011); Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven and London, 2018); Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the "Jewish Question" in Nazi Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2017).21 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New York: Routledge, 2009). Also see Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe. The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020); Simon Levis Sullam, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Vladimir Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, (Princeton: Princeton, 2001); Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Robert Weinberg, “Le Birobidjan, 1929–1996: Purge and Politics in the Periphery: Birobidzhan in 1937,” Slavic Review, 52, no. 1 (Spring, 1993): 13–27; David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000).22 Meyer, Act, 64.; David Cymet, “Polish state antisemitism as a major factor leading to the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 2 (1999): 185–6; John Weiss, “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: An Historian's View,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 2 (1999): 270.23 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 31–4.24 Ibid., 34–8.25 Ibid., 43–64; Yahil, “Phantom,” 688–9.26 Eugene Hevesi, Hitler's Plan for Madagascar (New York: Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems of the American Jewish Committee, 1941), 381; Yahil, “Phantom,” 688.27 Letter from 13 April 1938. British National Archives (BNA): FO 371/135342, Community of Jews at Birobidjan in Soviet Union, Date: 1958; Yahil, “Phantom,” 684.28 Ibid.29 Adam Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Yaniv Feller, The Jewish Imperial Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).30 See again Rovner, Zion: Laura Almagor, Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement. The "Jewish Chronicle" and Anglo-Jewry: 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Olivier De Marliave, Les Terres promises avant Israël: du Suriname à l'Alaska, du Kenya à la Mandchourie (Paris: Imago, 2018); Natalie Eppelsheimer, Roads Less Traveled: German-Jewish Exile Experiences in Kenya, 1933–1947 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019); Lucia J. Linares, German Politics and the »Jewish Question,” 1914–1919 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2021).31 Eric T. Jennings, “Writing Madagascar Back into the Madagascar Plan.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 207.32 Jennings, “Madagascar,” 191–2.33 Ibid., 201.34 Georg Glockemeier, Zur Wiener Judenfrage (Leipzig: Johannes Günther, 1936), 122–3.35 Glockemeier, Judenfrage, 123.36 David Karten, Die moderne Lösung der Judenfrage (Mysłoẉice, Poland: Selbstverlag, 1937), 46.37 Brechtken, Madagaskar, p. 78; YV: M 27/37, Report on Polish Foreign Minister, 06 October 1937; reports in AAN: MSZ 2183, Sprawy kolonialize;] glownie Polska wobec zagadizien kolonii I mandatow powierniczych.38 See reports in AAN: MSZ 9904.39 “Memorandum sur la Question Juive de la Federation des Associations polonaises pour le S.d.N.” AAN: MSZ 10004, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagraniczynch. Departament Konsularny Wydzial Polityki Emigracyjnej [Problem Emigracji Zydowskiej. Uchwaly Rady Naczelnej ONZ, Notatku z Konferenzji u Min Beck].40 Ibid. Also see reports in AAN: MSZ 9902, Dr. Wagner Spraw, AAN: MSZ 9904; AAN: MSZ 2183, Reports from 19 June 1936 and 28 June 1936; AAN: MSZ 9909, Sprawy kolonialize.41 Leni Yahil, “Madagascar. Phantom of a Solution for the Jewish Question” in Marrus, ed. Holocaust, 686; Reports in AAN: MSZ 10004; Trębacz, Palestyna, 63–4.42 See articles and reports in AAN: MSZ 2183, including Times of London article on “The ‘Hungry’ Powers. Poland and League collaboration,” 21 June 1936, 19 June 1936, “sprawy emigracyjne-kolonizacyjne na Miedzynardowej Konferencji Pracy,” 28 June 1936.43 See articles in AAN: MSZ 2183, including 25 May 1936 Charge d’Affairs Sokolowski in Washington to MSZ regarding article in Central European Observer (v. IV, No. 9, 1 May 1936) called “The Social Background of the Polish Disturbances.”44 YV: M 27/36, “Documentation regarding emigration from Poland.” January–February 1937.45 Yahil, “Phantom,” 684–5.46 YV: M 27/36, 25 February 1937.47 Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (London, Routledge, 2000), 41–9, 131–142.48 YV: M 27/36, 15 February 1937 letter from Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office; Howard in Warsaw reports to Eden, 23 March 1937; Documents regarding “Possibilities for Polish emigration to British colonies.49 YV: M 27/36, British embassy in Warsaw writes Eden 27 January 1937.50 Ibid, report from Howard to Eden, 28 December 1937; Trebacz, Palestyna, 111–2; Yahil, Phantom, 685.51 See reports AAN: MSZ 9847, “J. Zielinski. … Ligi Morskiej I kolonieniej.”52 Jennings, “Madagascar,” 188.53 YV: M 27/28, Report and correspondence regarding the emigration of Polish Jews to Madagascar, 1938; BNA: FO 371/135342 Community of Jews at Birobidjan in Soviet Union Date; Yahil, “Phantom,” 690–1.54 Jennings, “Madagascar”: 189.55 YV: M 27/36; Yahil, “Phantom,” 686–7.56 Ibid.57 Yahil, “Phantom,” 686; See notes and articles from 22 July 1937, 15 July 1937, in YV: M 27/36; Cymet, “Polish state antisemitism”: 185–6.58 See letters from YV: M 27/37, 6 October 1937; Reports in AAN: MSZ 10004, “Sprawa Zydowska w Roku 1938.”59 YV: M 27/27, 5 April 1938 letter, 6 April 1938 report.60 YV: M 27/30, Documentation regarding relation of France to the Mufti of Jerusalem and settlement of Jews in Madagascar, April-May 1938; also see 5 May letter from DC to Halifax.61 See reports in AAN: MSZ 9902.62 See reports in AAN: MSZ 10004 “B. Warunki rozwiaszania kwestii zydowskiej”; AAN: MSZ 2314, Referat Spraw Mniejszoci, P. I 1934–1936]; AAN: MSZ 2313, Referat Spraw Mniejszoci, “Das Minderheitproblem in Polen”, Plan Wykladow. Seminarium Narodowosciowego przy Instytucie Badan Spraw Narodwosciowych w Warszawie Rok Szk 1936/37; AAN: MSZ 9888, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagraniczynch. Jan Zieminski. Problem Emigracji Zydowskiej. Warszawa 1937.63 AAN: MSZ 10004, “Chief Resolutions of the National Camp from 19–21 May 1938; Tadeusz Katelbach- “O pozytywny program w kwestii zydowski.”64 Ibid.65 Katelbach in AAN: MSZ 10004, 16–7.66 See reports in AAN: MSZ 3895, Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Berlin, “Mniejszosci w Polsce I sprawy z nimi zwigzane pora Polskg. Zydzi. Trebacz, Palestyna, 18–9.67 AAN: MSZ 9902 Dr. Wagner, Sejm Budget report for 1938 (grudzien 1937), Problem Surowcowy, Report 18 January 1938; “Notatka dla Pana Mistra do przemowicnia w Sejmie”; “Emigracja Osadnicza” in AAN: MSZ 9902 Dr. Wagner.68 William W. Hagen, “No Way out: The Politics of Polish Jewry 1935–1939 by Emanuel Melzer,” Central European History 33, no. 1 (2000), 154–7.69 AAN: MSZ 3895, Dorothy Thompson, “Refugees. Anarchy or Organization. The Polish Problem.”; “Plan for Jewish emigration in Poland”; “Brief Outline of the Jewish Problem in Poland.”/70 See reports in AAN: MSZ 9767, Madagaskar/rozne … . 1938–1939.71 Trebacz, Palestyna, 88–9; reports in AAN: MSZ 9826, Osadnictwo polskie na Madagaskar … 1938–1939, “Memoire sur le Problème de l’Emigration Juive.”72 Jacques Maritain, A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question.A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question (New York: Toronto: Longmans & Co, 1939), 77–8.73 Maritain, Question, 78–9.74 Dr. Johann von Leers, “Das Ende der jüdischen Wanderung,” 229–31. https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/gercke.htm; Deborah Hertz, “The Genealogy Bureaucracy in the Third Reich.” Jewish History, Fall, 1997, 11, no. 2 (Fall, 1997), 53–78.75 Leers, “Das Ende der jüdischen Wanderung.”76 Ibid.77 Leers, “Das Ende der jüdischen Wanderung.”78 Ibid.79 Leers, “Das Ende der jüdischen Wanderung.”80 Ibid.81 Leers, “Das Ende der jüdischen Wanderung.”82 Ibid.83 Leers, "Das Ende der jüdische Wanderung."84 Wilhelm Ziegler, Die Judenfrage in der modernen Welt. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt 1937. The Wiener Holocaust Library (WHL): Basement (SP) 16878 X2b 045, 14.85 Ziegler, Judenfrage, 14.86 IfZ: MA 554, article regarding Ulrich Fleischauer and the Pan-Aryan movement in Die Stimme’ Nr. 573. Wien, Dienstag, 18. August 1936, in SD/SS on “Jewish Question”; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 63–4; Yahil, “Phantom,” 686–7; IfZ: G 01/35 Eichmann-Prozess, Document 1508, Umlauf [Sicherheitsdiensthauptamt], (o.D., gezeichnet Hagen): Bitte um Materialsammlung für Denkschrift über außenpolitische Lösung der Judenfrage (Madagaskar-Projekt) in; BAK: AP 6/120, Wisliceny Testimony, taken on 14 November 1945 by Lt. Col. Brockhart, 8–9.87 IfZ: G 01/35 Eichmann-Prozess, Document 1508, Umlauf [Sicherheitsdiensthauptamt], (o.D., gezeichnet Hagen): Bitte um Materialsammlung für Denkschrift über außenpolitische Lösung der Judenfrage (Madagaskar-Projekt).88 NL Eichmann, BAK: 1497/80; IfZ: G 01/34 Eichmann-Prozess, Document 1491.89 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 78–9; YV: M 27/30, Discussion of 6 December 1938 report, 25 February 1942, “Dr. Weizmann and the Zionist Party, Palestine”; Ralph Weingarten Die Hilfeleistung der westlichen Welt bei der Endloesung der deutschen Judenfrage: Das "Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees" IGC 1938–1939 (Berlin: Lang, 1983), 76–92.; Yahil, “Phantom,” 690–1; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 199.90 YV: M 27/30, Official documentation regarding the relation of France to the Mufti of Jerusalem and report concerning discussions between the British and French regarding the settlement of Jews in Madagascar, April-May 1938; "Declaration of Friendship" on 6 December 1938; Yahil, “Phantom,” 690–1.91 YV: M 27/30, 25 February 1942 mention of “The plan which Dr. Rublee obtained from the German Government” regarding Madagascar and the Philippines, discussed on 13 February; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 89; Weingarten, Die Hilfeleistung, 86–94.92 YV: M 27/30, April 15th, 1942; 25 February 1942 mention Dr. Rublee and possibility of Madagascar or the Philippines; Weingarten, Hilfeleistung, 163–72, 208–16; YV: M7/1570, “Survey regarding possibilities for Jewish settlement,” 1–33.93 YV: 5648/63, “Berlin, Germany, 7/2/1939, Albert Rosenberg reporting on the Madagascar plan”; IfZ: MA 802, “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete, including speech titled “Juden auf Madagaskar,” 29 October 1940; Yahil, “Phantom,” 691.94 YV: TR.3/1054, “Auszug au seiner rede Rosenbergs vom 7. February 1939: Vorschlag zur Loesung der Judenfrage durch Schaffung eines Juedischen Reservats auf Madagaskar oder in Guyana.” Völkischer Beobachter, 8 February 1939; Rosenberg speech in IfZ: MA 802.95 Ibid.96 Ibid.97 Yahil, “Phantom,” 692; On Epp’s continued efforts to reinvigorate Germany’s colonial engagement in Africa between 1939 and 1942, see IfZ: MA 423/1.98 Seev Goshen, “Eichmann und die Nisko-Aktion im Oktober 1939. Eine Fallstudie zue NS-Judenpolitik in der letzten Etappe vor der, Endlosung.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Jahrgang 29 (1981), Heft 1: 75.99 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 214–5, 220–2, 228–9.100 Ibid.101 Ibid, 225–6; Jansen, Madagaskar-Plan, 317.102 Yahil, Madagascar, 693; Browning, Foreign Office, 35; YV: O51/115, “Documentation regarding the solution to the Jewish Problem including questions that arose following the Wannsee Conference and the Madagascar Plan”; also see 3 June 1940, “Kurzer Überlick über die neu aufzunehmenden, vordringlichen Aufgaben des Ref. DIII”; Browning, Foreign Office, 36–7; Jansen, Madagaskar-Plan, 324.103 Browning, Foreign Office, 36104 Ibid.105 Jansen, Madagaskar-Plan, 324.106 Browning, Foreign Office, 37.107 Ibid, 38.108 Brechtken, Madagascar, 229; Yahil, “Phantom,” 692; Browning, Foreign Office, 38.109 YV: TR3/29, “Testimony of Dieter Wisliceny at the International Military Tribunal- Nuremberg Trials regarding Eichmann’s activities and position, 03 January 1946, and here is English version translated: Document UK-81 (https://phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/Wisliceny.htm); Brechtken, Madagaskar, 233; Browning, Foreign Office, 38.110 YV: O51/28, Nazi documentation regarding foreign office, including letter from Heydrich to Ribbentrop, 24 June 1940; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 233.111 Browning, Foreign Office, 38; Yahil, “Phantom,” 693.112 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 226–7: YV O51/115, “Documentation regarding the solution to the Jewish Problem”,” “Kurzer Überlick” “Plan zur Lösung der Judenfrage.”113 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-madagascar-plan-2; YV: O 65/23, 1939–1941, Selection of German Foreign Ministry Documents 1939–1941 “Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945,” “Memorandum by an official of the Department for German Internal Affairs, 3 July 1940.114 Ibid; also see Bernhard Lösener’s account in IfZ: MS 238, v. 1, 68–69.115 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-madagascar-plan-2; YV: O 65/23, “Memorandum by an official of the Department for German Internal Affairs,” 3 July 1940, with all details from Referat D III.116 Browning, Foreign Office, 39.117 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 235; Meyer, Act, 65.118 Löwenstein and company initially rejected the idea of Madagascar or Guiana due to the tropical climate and continued to favor Palestine or “‘underpopulated areas’ in Alaska, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, and Rhodesia.” Meyer, Act, 65.119 See report, NL Eichmann BAK: N 1497/80. IV-1; IfZ: G 01/34, Eichmann-Prozess, Document 1491, regarding Eichmann’s notes from 30 May to 29 December 1960.120 Browning, Foreign Office, 39; Yahil, “Phantom,” 695; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 241.121 Ibid, 241–2.122 Ibid. Browning, Foreign Office, 40.123 Ibid.124 Ibid. Brechtken, Madagaskar, 243; YV: O 51/115, “Gedanken über die Gründung einer intereuropäischen Bank für die Verwertung des Judenvermögens in Europa”; “Bisherige Entwicklung des Madagaskar-Plans des Referats D III,” 30 August 1940.125 Browning, Foreign Office, 40.126 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 243; YV: O 51/115, “Gedanken.”127 Browning, Foreign Office, 41.128 Jansen, Madagaskar, 335.129 Browning, Foreign Office, 40; Dannecker to Rademacher, 15 August 1940, K4b The Wiener Holocaust Library WHL: Basement (MF) 88024 165/K197; also see, “Madagascar Projekt,” Dannecker to Rademacher, YV: TR.3/172, “Details regarding Madagascar Plan. 15/08/1940”; Yahil, “Phantom,” 694; Jansen, Madagaskar-Plan, 340–345; YV: O2/8 “The General Situation in Germany 1940”; See testimony in NL Eichmann BAK: N 1497/80.130 YV: O 2/8, “General Situation.”131 See Testimony in NL Eichmann, BAK: N 1497/80.132 Ibid.133 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 249; See Bernhard Lösener account in IfZ: MS 238, v. 1, p. 69.134 See statement by Eichmann in NL Eichmann BAK: N 1497/80; also see Norman J. W. Goda, Tomorrow the World. Hitler, Northwest Africa, and the Path toward America. (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1998). Christopher J. Fettweis “War as catalyst: Moving World War II to the Center of Holocaust scholarship,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 2 (2003): 227; Gerhard Wolf, “The Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the National Socialist living space dystopia,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 2 (2015): 162.135 Statement in NL Eichmann, BAK: N 1497/80; also see Document 1491, regarding Eichmann’s notes from 30 May to 29 December 1960, including Madagascar Plan, in IfZ: G 01/34, Eichmann-Prozess.136 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 247.137 Tobias Jersak, “Blitzkrieg Revisited: A New Look at Nazi War and Extermination Planning,” The Historical Journal 43, no. 2 (June 2000): 580–1.138 . On 15 August 1940, Yahil, Madagascar, 694: Browning, Foreign Office, 41; YV: O 65/23, 1939–1941, “Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945”; YV: O 65/23, 1939–1941, “Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945”; Browning. Foreign Office, 41.139 Browning, Foreign Office, 42–3; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 275; Jennings, “Madagascar,” 188–9.140 YV: P 52/146, Long report by Wisliceny, 27 October 1946; Meyer, Act, 64.141 Yahil, “Phantom,” 694.142 Mosche Zimmermann https://perspectivia.net/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/ploneimport_derivate_00001116/zimmermann_juden.pdf; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 81.143 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 90.144 Ibid., 259.145 Browning, Office, 42–43; also see Martin Broszat, “Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung’.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Jahrgang 25 (1977), Heft 4: 748–9.146 Shlomo Aronson, Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 2004, 27.147 See Eichmann statement. NL Eichmann BAK: N 1497/80.148 See Eichmann’s statement in NL Eichmann BAK: N 1497/77; IfZ: G 01/34, Eichmann-Prozess, Document 1491, regarding Eichmann’s notes from 30 May to 29 December 1960, including Madagascar Plan; IfZ: G 01/33, Eichmann-Prozess, Document 172, “Madagaskar-Projekt des Reichssicherheitshauptamt.”149 Meyer, Act, 64.150 See again Lösener’s account in IfZ: MS 238, v. 1, 68–9.151 Yahil, “Phantom,” 696–8.152 Yahil, “Phantom,” 696153 Brechtken, Madagaskar, 283.154 Cymet, “Polish State Antisemitism,” 186.155 Hevesi, Madagascar, 381.156 Hagen, “No Way out,” 155–7.157 Meyer, Act, 66–7.158 YV: O 1/256, Testimony of Adolf Leschnitzer; also see Meyer, Act, 67.159 YV: O 1/232, “Begleitbericht von Dr. Ball-Kaduri zu ‘Deutschland und die Juden in Deutschland, insb. In ersten Kriegsjahre,” Aufzeichnungen von Rabbiner Dr. Max Nussbaum aus Berlin, sämtlich geschrieben unmittelbar nach seiner Auswanderung im Laufe des Jahres 1940.” “Jewish Life in War-Germany,” 70–84; Meyer, Act, 68.160 See Testimony in NL Eichmann, BAK: N 1497/80; Brechtken, Madagaskar, 262.161 BAK: AP 6/120, Eichmann Prozess, Wisliceny Testimony before Nuremberg, taken on 14 November 1945 by Lt. Col. Brockhart, 8–9; Browning, Foreign Office, 35.162 YV: O 51/28, Nazi documentation regarding foreign office, Understate Secretary; also see transcript in NL Eichmann BAK: N 1497/86.163 YV: O 65/23, “Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945. Series D., Vol. III. The War Years. 4 September 1939–18 March 1940.” Documents on German Foreign Policy, some copied; IfZ: MA 802, 29.10.40, Speech titled “Juden auf Madagaskar”; YV: O 65/23, 1939–1941, “Documents on German Foreign Policy”; YV: TR 3/762, Letters from Franz Rademacher to Ernst Harald Bielfeld regarding the cancellation of the Madagascar plan, 10 February 1942; YV: TR 3/764, Rademacher to Martin Luther, 24 February 1942, s; also see JHI: 233/15; Zespol 233, 10 February 1942 letter from Rademacher to Ambassador Bielfeld.164 YV: O51/28, 21 August 1942 Report on the history of the Jewish Question, 3–4.165 Martin Braach-Maksvytis, “Germany, Palestine, Israel, and the (Post)Colonial Imagination.” In German Colonialism: Race, The Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 296.166 Ibid.167 See the forthcoming book by Laura Robson, Human Capital. Global Labor and the Origins of Modern Refugee Policy (New York: Verso, 2023).168 Mark Levene, “No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 4 (2011): 519–22.169 Tobias Jersak, “A Matter of Foreign Policy: ‘Final Solution’ and ‘Final Victory’ in Nazi Germany.” German History 21, no. 3 (2003): 377–8; Brendan Simms, “The Return of the Primacy of Foreign Policy,” German History 21, no. 3 (2003): 289; Broszat, “Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung,” 749.170 Amos Goldberg, “The ‘Jewish narrative’ in the Yad Vashem Global Holocaust Museum,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012):187–213; also see Jennings, “Madagascar,” 189.171 Vahakn N. Dadrian, “Patterns of twentieth century genocides: the Armenian, Jewish, and Rwandan cases,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 4 (2004): 492–493.172 See Jürgen Mattähus, “Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June–December 1941.” In The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942, eds. Christopher Browning with Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 244–93.173 Gordon, “Colonial Violence,” 281.174 See again Case, Questions; Kurlander, “Before the ‘Final Solution’.”175 Helmut Walser Smith, “The Vanishing Point of German History,” History & Memory 17, no. 1/2 (2005): 269–95.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Stetson University, the Humboldt Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation.Notes on contributorsEric KurlanderEric Kurlander (MA/PhD Harvard University) is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University (Deland, FL, USA), where he has taught since 2001. His books include Modern Germany: A Global History, co-authored with Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Douglas McGetchin (Oxford University Press, 2023); Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2017; paperback 2018); Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale, 2009); The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 (Berghahn, 2006); and two co-edited volumes, Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies, with Monica Black (Camden House, 2015), and Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries, with Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas McGetchin (Routledge, 2014). Kurlander’s current book project is titled Before the “Final Solution”: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question,” 1919–1941, (https://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/eric-kurlander.php).