Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

As one door closed, another opened — or, for a brief moment, appeared to open. At the meeting in Cracow at the end of July, Greiser mentioned a new possibility that had emerged. He had heard personally from Himmler, he reported, ‘that the intention now exists to shove the Jews overseas into specific areas’. He wanted early clarification.²²³

Already in 1937, as we noted in an earlier chapter, the SD had toyed with the idea of resettling Jews in an inhospitable part of the world. The barren stretches of Ecuador were one of the possibilities mentioned.²²⁴ In the years 1938–40 the island of Madagascar, a French colony off the African coast, came to be talked of as a likely venue — an idea apparently first mooted by the orientalist scholar and antisémite Paul de Lagarde in 1885 and popularized in racist circles in the 1920s by Henry Hamilton Beamish, son of a British rear-admiral of Irish descent and founder in 1919 of an antisemitic organization entitled ‘The Britons’.²²⁵ Streicher, Göring, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and even Hjalmar Schacht had referred to this eventuality.²²⁶ Streicher had aired the idea on occasion in the Stürmer. He was able to pick up on known pre-war discussions of the Polish authorities with the British and French about the possible transportation of large numbers of Jews to Madagascar.²²⁷ Hitler himself had approved of the idea of a Jewish reservation in Madagascar in conversation with Göring in November 1938.²²⁸ With the prospect looming larger in the spring of 1940 of regaining colonial territories in the near future (and acquiring some which had not previously belonged to Germany), Madagascar now began to be evoked as a distinct policy option rather than a distant vision.²²⁹

It seems to have been Himmler, perhaps testing the waters, who at this point first broached in the highest circles the idea of deporting the Jews to an African colony, though he did not refer specifically to Madagascar. In the middle of May, after a visit to Poland, the Reichsführer-SS produced a six-page memorandum entitled ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’, detailing brutal plans for racial selection in Poland, involving the removal of children of good racial stock to Germany and the suppression of ethnic identity among the rest through deprivation of all but the most elementary training in reading and writing to educate them to serve the German ruling class. ‘As horrible and tragic as every individual case might be,’ Himmler wrote, ‘if the Bolshevik method of the physical eradication (Ausrottung) of a people is rejected from inner conviction as un-German and impossible, this is still the mildest and best method.’²³⁰ The ‘Polish’ not ‘Jewish Question’ was the subject of the memorandum (which Hitler read and explicitly approved on 25 May, during the lull in the western campaign while the tanks were halted just outside Dunkirk, with instructions that it be circulated only to key individuals).²³¹ Only in one brief passage did Himmler mention what he envisaged would happen to the Jews. ‘The term “Jew”,’ he wrote, ‘I hope to see completely extinguished through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony.’²³²