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

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most 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.