The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places/germany//program.03


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: The Madagascar Plan
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: Madagascar,Bouhler

Archive/File: places/germanyr/ program.03
Last-Modified: 1994/06/02

"Scholars differ as to whether Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews
was latent from the beginning of his career or developed incrementally in
response to the failure of previous plans to eliminate them -- emigration,
the Lublin reservation, and the Madagascar plan. <71> The proposal by
German Foreign Office bureaucrats in 1940 to resettle the Jews in a ghetto
within a police-state on Madagascar was not entirely original; Poland had
proposed forced resettlement of its Jews there in 1937. <72> Christopher
Browning, reviewing the Foreign Office and SS correspondence in 1940,
concludes that Hitler selected extermination as the Final Solution sometime
between the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941 after it became evident the
war against Britain would be prolonged, forestalling naval access to
Madagascar. Contemplating the invasion of Russia, Hitler decided to
slaughter the Jews in Soviet territory systematically. <73>

Others view the Madagascar Plan as a blind or way-station; in retrospect it
appears both as a smokescreen and a strategic tactic to allow the German
bureaucracies concerned to adjust by stages to their roles as white-collar
executioners. Lucy Dawidowicz emphasizes that `the Final Solution had its
origin in Hitler's mind,' showing how his fantasy revealed in Mein Kampf
(written in 1924) of gassing the Jews was related to their subsequent
execution. <74> She infers that Goering and Himmler were told of Hitler's
plans around 1936, a plausible happending considering Hitler's habit of
freely verbalizing fantasies for extermination, but a disclosure that is
not possible to corroborate.<75> There is no question as to `the purpose of
a reservation that can be derived from the report -- surely a sick joke --
that Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, was slated
to become governor of the Madagascar reservation. Bouhler headed the
so-called Euthanasia Program, the first mass murder by gassing; an
experience that doubtless qualified him to run a reservation of Jews that
would become tryly their final destination.' <76> Gideon Hausner, the
Israeli prosecutor of Adolf Eichmann, also asserts that Reinhard Heydrich
(RSHA head) was aware that extermination was to be the Final Solution by
September 1939, based on his interpretation of Eichmann's pretrial police
interrogation.<77>

Hitler publicly signified his intent in a speech to the Reichstag on 30
January 1939, masked characteristically by projecting onto the Jews his own
aim of domination that would provoke war:

     And one thing I wish to say on this day which perhaps is memorable not
     only for us Germans: In my life I have often been a prophet, and most
     of the time I have been laughed at... Today I want to be a prophet
     once more: If international-finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe
     should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war,
     the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and
     thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of
     the Jewish race in Europe. <78>"

<71> Schleunes [see citation below] best makes a case for the evolutionary
     view and Dawidowicz [ditto] for the latent ideological view.
<72> Yahil, Leni. "Madagascar: Phantom of a Solution for the Jewish
     Question," "Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918-1945," eds
     Bela Vago and George L. Mosse (New York: Wiley, 1974), 316-317
<73> Browning, Christopher R., "The Final Solution and the German Foreign
     Office," (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), ch. 1.
<74> Dawidowicz, 150.
<75> Ibid., 160.
<76> Ibid., 118-119.
<77> Hausner, Gideon. "Justice in Jerusalem," (New York: Harper and Row,
     1966), 55-56. The memorandum in question (3363-PS) is cited on p. 122
     in Chapter 5.
<78> Hilberg, Raul. "The Destruction of the European Jews," (Holmes &
     Meier, 1985), p.257

Schleunes, Karl. A. "The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward
     German Jews, 1933-1939," (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois 
     Press, 1970)
Dawidowicz, Lucy S. "The War Against the Jews 1933-1945" (New York:
     Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975)

Excerpted from-------------------------------------------------------
"Accounting for Genocide: Victims - and Survivors - of the Holocaust"
(New York: Free Press, 1979)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

[Note the similarity between Hitler's words and the assertion by neo-Nazis
that the "Jews declared war on Germany."]


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