Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

and the resettlement of ethnic Germans, the Warthegau, it proved impossible to match the numbers initially charted for deportation, or the speed at which their removal had been foreseen. Even so, 128,011 Poles and Jews were forcibly deported under horrifying conditions by spring 1940.²¹⁰ Sadistic SS men would arrive at night, clear entire tenement blocks, and load up the inhabitants — subjected to every form of bestial humilation — on to open lorries, despite the intense cold, to be taken to holding camps, from where they were herded into unheated and massively overcrowded cattle-trucks and sent south, without possessions and often without food or water. Deaths were frequent on the journeys. Those who survived often suffered from frostbite or other legacies of their terrible ordeal.²¹¹ The deportees were sent to the General Government, seen in the annexed territories as a type of dumping-ground for undesirables. But the Governor General, Hans Frank, was no keener on having Jews in his area than were the Gauleiter of the incorporated regions. He envisaged them rotting in a reservation, but outside his own territory. In November 1939 Frank had plainly laid down the intentions for his own province. It was a pleasure, he stated, finally to be able physically to tackle the Jewish race: ‘The more who die, the better… The Jews should see that we have arrived. We want to have a half to three-quarters of all Jews put east of the Vistula. We’ll suppress these Jews everywhere we can. The whole business is at stake here. The Jews out of the Reich, Vienna, from everywhere. We’ve no use for Jews in the Reich.’²¹² Around the same time that Frank was voicing such sentiments, the Reich Governor of the Wartheland, Arthur Greiser, speaking of encountering in Lodz ‘figures who can scarcely be credited with the designation “person” (Gestalten… denen man kaum noch den Namen “Mensch” zubilligen kann)’, was letting it be known that the ‘Jewish Question’ was as good as solved.²¹³ However, by early 1940, his hopes (and those of Wilhelm Koppe, police chief of the Warthegau) of the quick expulsion of the Jews into the General Government were already proving vain ones, Hans Frank and his subordinates were starting to raise objections at the numbers of Jews they were being forced to take in, without any clear planning for what was to become of them, and with their own hopes of sending them on further to a reservation — an idea meanwhile abandoned — now vanished.²¹⁴ Frank was able to win the support of Goring, whose own interest was in preventing the loss of manpower useful for the war effort. Goring’s strong criticism of the ‘wild resettlement’ at a meeting on 12 February ran counter to Himmler’s demands for room for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, already moved from their original homes. The very next day, Jews from Stettin were deported to the Lublin area to make way for Baltic Germans ‘with sea-faring jobs’.²¹⁵ The police chief of the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, suggested that if the Jews coming to the General Government could not feed themselves, or be fed by other Jews, they should be left to starve.²¹⁶ On 24 March, at Frank’s bidding, Goring felt compelled to ban all ‘evacuation’ into the General Government ‘until further notice’.²¹⁷ Greiser was told that his request to deport the Warthegau’s Jews would have to be deferred until August.²¹⁸ From 1 May 1940 the huge ghetto at Lodz, containing 163,177 persons, initially established only as a temporary measure until the War- thegau’s Jews could be pushed over the border into the General Government, was sealed off from the rest of the city.²¹⁹ Mortalities from disease and starvation started to rocket during the summer.²²⁰ At a meeting in Cracow on 31 July, Greiser was told by Frank in no uncertain terms of Himmler’s assurance, under instructions by Hitler, that no more Jews were to be deported to the General Government.²²¹ And on 6 November 1940 Frank informed Greiser by telegram that there were to be no further deportations into the General Government before the end of the war. Himmler was aware of this. Any transports would be turned back.²²² The solution which to Greiser had seemed so close to hand a year earlier was indefinitely blocked.

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 antisemite 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, Goring, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, and even Hjalmar Schacht had referred to this eventuality.²²⁶ Streicher had aired the idea on occasion in the Sturmer. 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 Goring 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 Reichsfuhrer-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

Sensing what was in the wind, the newly appointed, highly ambitious head of the Foreign Ministry’s ‘Jewish Desk’ (Judenreferat), Franz Rademacher, prepared a lengthy internal memorandum on 3 June putting forward, as a war aim, three options: removing all Jews from Europe; deporting western European Jews, for example, to Madagascar while leaving eastern Jews in the Lublin district as hostages to keep America paralysed in its fight against Germany (presuming the influence of American Jewry would in these circumstances deter the USA from entering the war); or establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine — a solution he did not favour.²³³ This was the first time that Madagascar had been explicitly mentioned in a policy document as a possible ‘solution to the Jewish Question’.²³⁴ It was a product of Rademacher’s initiative, rather than a result of instructions from above.²³⁵ With the backing of Ribbentrop (who had probably himself gained the approval of Hitler and Himmler), Rademacher set to work to put detail on his proposal to resettle all Europe’s Jews on the island of Madagascar, seeing them as under German mandate but Jewish administration.²³⁶ Heydrich, presumably alerted by Himmler at the first opportunity, was, however, not prepared to concede control over such a vital issue to the Foreign Ministry. On 24 June he made plain to Ribbentrop that responsibility for handling the ‘Jewish Question’ was his, under the commission given to him by Goring in January 1939. Emigration was no longer the answer. ‘A territorial final solution (territoriale Endlosung) will therefore be necessary.’ He sought inclusion in all discussions ‘which concern themselves with the final solution (Endlosung) of the Jewish question’ — the first time, it seems, the precise words ‘final solution’ were used, and at this point plainly in the context of territorial resettlement.²³⁷ By mid-August Eichmann and his right- hand man Theo Dannecker had devised in some detail — their memorandum was fourteen pages long — plans to put 4 million Jews on Madagascar. The SD’s plan envisaged no semblance of Jewish autonomous administration. The Jews would exist under strict SS control.²³⁸

Soon after Rademacher had submitted his original proposal, in early June, the Madagascar idea had evidently been taken to Hitler, presumably by Ribbentrop. According to Paul Schmidt, Hitler had said to Mussolini during the meeting in Munich just following the French announcement of their readiness for an armistice that ‘an Israelite