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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