Madagascar plan: could work,if....

lounge60

lounge60

Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the German recommended on 3 June 1940 that Madagascar should be made available as a destination for the Jews of Europe.
The Madagascar island is more large than United Kingdom and more large than France,so theoretically the plan could work ?
Madagascar could become a new homeland for the population of European jews,if the plan had been adequately funded and supported and the transfer had happened in a reasonable time frame?

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wcv215

wcv215

lounge60 said:
Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the German recommended on 3 June 1940 that Madagascar should be made available as a destination for the Jews of Europe.
The Madagascar island is more large than United Kingdom and more large than France,so theoretically the plan could work ?
Madagascar could become a new homeland for the population of European jews,if the plan had been adequately funded and supported and the transfer had happened in a reasonable time frame?
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This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Madagascar plan. There was never any intention of setting up some kind of a safe or supported homeland for the Jews. The actual plan was basically for a massive ghetto, overseen and controlled by the Nazis. Disease and other issues would lead to wide-spread deaths, and the survivors would be used as hostages against the Jews in the United States (remember, the people who came up with this plan are evil nuts).
 

Arkenfolm

It possibly might involve genocide against not only the Jews but the Malagasy too, or otherwise roping elements of the Malagasy in as collaborators in the mass murder of Jews.
 

Roches

I've read an article from Der Stürmer about the Madagaskar plan. I forget the issue entirely, although I suspect it was circa 1938. Streicher's paper seemed to present the plan honestly, as if it were a viable solution. Probably, the underlying idea is that the Jews themselves, and not the harsh conditions of an undeveloped island, would be to blame for death and starvation. A similar thing was done later with the ghettos; ghetto conditions were presented to the German public as if the Jews wanted to live in filth and hunger, as if that was their natural state, rather than something forced upon them.

If the prelude to war had been longer -- say, if war broke out in 1942 or later -- then it's possible to imagine that a prolonged stage of persecution could have led to Madagascar being opened up as an alternative to Palestine. That is, the first stage of the Holocaust, where people were persecuted and made to want to emigrate, would be longer (provided the Nazis didn't progress to outright ghettoization in peacetime), and, with few other destinations to choose from, a minority of emigrants might have fled to Madagascar. Transporting the Jews of Germany, let alone Europe, to Africa is something that would, of course, never work. No more than a few tens of thousands of people could have successfully lived there.

Add: Is the comparison with the UK and France a Nazi-era one? It certainly seems like a comparison they would have made. Much was made of the fact that Germany had X people in Y space and needed more; it's the foundation of the need for Lebensraum.
 

Wimble Toot

Banned
The Madagascar Plan was intended to leave the European Jews on that island, to die of starvation and tropical diseases.

It was to be a graveyard, not a homeland!

It's a mass death scenario, even if ASBs made it workable.
 

Roches

Here's a Stürmer article about Madagascar: http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/ds9.htm

The conclusion states "Whatever happens there, the new Germany is on the way to salvation ... Salvation from the Eternal Jew!" So perhaps it was understood that the plan would not be anything like successful for the people being deported. Still, I think the idea was to "teach the Jews to work", and to blame them for their own deaths when it proved, as it inevitably would, that famine (as a result of Madagascar being inappropriate for European mass agriculture) and disease killed many of the 'emigrants'.
 
Tomislav Addai

Tomislav Addai

I could imagine Germany setting up a Jewish province in Brest-Litovsk oblast..Moving out Belarusians and sending all Jews from Europe to those areas between the Bug and the Pripyat marshes
 

Deleted member 94680

Alex1guy said:
How are the French supposed to take this considering they owned Madagascar?
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They would be defeated/occupied. They would have no say in it.

Tomislav Addai said:
I could imagine Germany setting up a Jewish province in Brest-Litovsk oblast..Moving out Belarusians and sending all Jews from Europe to those areas between the Bug and the Pripyat marshes
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Why? The Nazis would defeat the USSR and then fill all that hard won lebensraum with Jews? From their point of view that makes no sense. The area you refer to would be prime agricultural land for all the Volksdeutsch settlers...

von Mises said:
Uganda seems more sensible. At least they wouldn't be reliant on an actively malicious power.
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Who should that be?
 
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Polish Eagle

The Polish government studied the plan in 1937 and concluded that no more than 7,000 families (perhaps as few as 500) could actually be accommodated on the island before starvation and disease set in (the total Madagascar population was 3.7 million at the time). So that’s about 30,000-50,000 Jews max that could actually be deported before it goes from deportation to murder.

That’s barely enough to deport the Jews from one city in Poland, and only half the number of those who immigrated to Israel in 1948 alone. It’s about an order of magnitude less than the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine.

Even if the plan were fully funded, Madagascar would not even remotely match Palestine as a Jewish homeland, and most deported Jews would probably seek to go to Palestine later.
 

Alex1guy

Stenz said:
They would be defeated/occupied. They would have no say in it
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And what of Britain, are they presumed gone also? I am genuinely asking because I've heard of the plan, but it sounds like it was based on a nazi victory of some description. I doubt Britain would be letting boatloads of jews through suez or around the cape. I mean they conquered madagascar in otl. There seems to be a lot of holes which make the plan more difficult than gas chambers :/
 
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Deleted member 94680

Alex1guy said:
And what of Britain, are they presumed gone also? I am genuinely asking because I've heard of the plan, but it sounds like it was based on a nazi victory of some description. I doubt Britain would be letting boatloads of jews through suez or around the cape. I mean they conquered madagascar in otl. There seems to be a lot of holes which make the plan more difficult than gas chambers :/
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The Madagascar Plan entirely depended on a Nazi victory. ASB as it was, it would be impossible without a Nazi victory. It required the use of Madagascar - therefore the French must be defeated. It needed a merchant marine far larger than Germany possessed - therefore the British must be defeated. It broke all norms of civilised conduct by a Great Power - therefore all other nations who could possibly oppose Germany must be defeated.

The plan was fucking nuts, pure and simple.

There’s a reason gas chambers were selected as a “Final Solution”.
 
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