Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

state could be erected on Madagascar’.²³⁹ Ribbentrop had told Ciano at the same time ‘that it is the Fuhrer’s intention to create a free Jewish state in Madagascar to which he will compulsorily send the many millions of Jews who live on the territory of the old Reich as well as on the territories recently conquered’.²⁴⁰ Two days after his meeting with Mussolini, Hitler again mentioned Madagascar to Grand Admiral Raeder.²⁴¹ On 8 July he returned to the topic during discussions with Hans Frank about the situation in the General Government. Frank told his colleagues on 12 July of the important decision of the Fuhrer, supporting his own proposal, that no further Jewish transports should be sent to the General Government. ‘In general political terms I would like to add,’ remarked Frank, ‘that it is planned within the shortest time imaginable following the conclusion of peace to transport the entire Jewish tribe (Juden-sippschaft) in the German Reich, in the General Government, and in the Protectorate to an African or American colony. One is thinking of Madagascar…’ Since he had managed to have the General Government included in the plans, it would amount ‘here too to a colossal relief in the foreseeable future’.²⁴² At the beginning of August, Hitler mentioned to the German Ambassador Otto Abetz in Paris ‘that he intended to evacuate all the Jews from Europe after the war’, which, of course, he thought would soon be over.²⁴³ And in the middle of August, reporting on a conversation with Hitler, Goebbels noted: ‘We want later to transport the Jews to Madagascar.’²⁴⁴

Already by this time the Madagascar plan had had its brief heyday. Putting it into effect would have depended not only on forcing the French to hand over their colony — a relatively simple matter — but on attaining control over the seas through the defeat of the British navy. With the continuation of the war the plan fell by the end of the year into abeyance and was never resurrected. But through the summer, for three months or so, the idea was taken seriously by all the top Nazi leadership, including Hitler himself.

Hitler’s rapid endorsement of such an ill-thought-out and impracticable scheme reflected his superficial involvement in anti-Jewish policy during 1940. His main interests that year were plainly elsewhere, in the direction of war strategy. For the time being at least, the ‘Jewish Question’ was a secondary matter for him. His comments on the Jews usually followed promptings by others — such as Himmler, Frank, Ribbentrop, or Goebbels, all with direct interests in anti-Jewish policy. Similarly, his decisions, as with the blocking of the transport of Jews to the General Government, were largely reactive and, as in this case, giving the highest approval to a policy that had already been introduced. Hitler’s visceral detestation of the Jews was undiminished. His keen intervention in the shaping of Goebbels’s horrific ‘documentary’ The Eternal Jew was one indicator of this.²⁴⁵ His central belief that the war would bring the solution to the ‘problem’ was, of course, unaltered. Goebbels reported the menacing remark after a discussion with Hitler at the beginning of June that ‘we’ll quickly be finished with the Jews after the war’.²⁴⁶ But at the time there are no indications that Hitler had anything other than the vague Madagascar notion in mind.

However, the broad mandate to ‘solve the Jewish Question’ associated with Hitler’s ‘mission’, coupled with the blockages in doing so in occupied Poland, sufficed. Others were more active than Hitler himself. To Goebbels, Hitler gave merely the assurance that the Jews were earmarked to leave Berlin, without approving any immediate action.²⁴⁷ Some had more luck with their demands. As in the east, the Gauleiter given responsibilities in the newly occupied areas in the west were keen to exploit their position to get rid of the Jews from their Gaue. In July Robert Wagner, Gauleiter of Baden and now in charge of Alsace, and Josef Burckel, Gauleiter of the Saar-Palatinate and Chief of the Civil Administration in Lorraine, both pressed Hitler to allow the expulsion westwards into Vichy France of the Jews from their domains. Hitler gave his approval. Some 3,000 Jews were deported that month from Alsace into the unoccupied zone of France.²⁴⁸ In October, following a further meeting with the two Gauleiter, a total of 6,504 Jews were sent to France in nine trainloads, without any prior consultation with the French authorities. Bureaucrats gave meticulous detail to the police who were to round up the Jews, reminding them to turn off water and gas in the homes, hand over pets (against a receipt) to local government or Party officials, and label the keys to the apartments being vacated. Jews were allowed to take a suitcase of clothes, food for a few days, and 100 Reich Marks per person with them. Their property was confiscated. They had to be ready to leave within two hours. Some were forced out within quarter of an hour. A number committed suicide. Jews who were bedridden were loaded on to the trains on stretchers. The oldest Jew deported was a ninety-seven-year-old man from Karlsruhe. The police accompanied the transports, which were carried out in agreement with the Wehrmacht (even down to Wehrmacht vehicles being used to carry Jews from outlying districts to the ‘collecting places’). After a horrifying journey lasting several days, the Jews were herded into camps in southern France at the foot of the Pyrenees. Neither food nor provisions were minimally adequate for the largely elderly deportees. The French authorities, the report on the deportations concluded, appeared to have in mind their further deportation to Madagascar as soon as the sea- passage was secure.²⁴⁹

Above all, the running in radicalizing anti-Jewish policy was made by the SS and Security Police leadership. While Hitler at this time paid relatively little attention to the ‘Jewish Question’ when not faced with a particular issue that one of his underlings had raised, Himmler and Heydrich were heavily engaged in planning the ‘new order’, especially in eastern Europe. By the autumn the Madagascar Plan was a dead letter — even though Eichmann was still waiting for a decision from Heydrich as late as December.²⁵⁰ But by then Hitler’s decision, taken under the impact of the failure to end the war in the West, to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union opened up new prospects again in the East for a ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. Once more, policy in the General Government was reversed. Hans Frank, who had been expecting in the summer to have the Jews from his area shipped to Madagascar, was now told that they had to stay. Emigration from the General Government was banned.²⁵¹ The brutal forced-labour conditions and ghettoization were already highly attritional. Jews were in practice often being worked to death.²⁵² An overtly genocidal mentality was already evident. Heydrich suggested starting an epidemic in the newly sealed Warsaw ghetto in autumn 1940 in order to exterminate the Jews there through such means.²⁵¹ It was into an area in which this mentality prevailed that Frank, so Hitler told him in December, had to be prepared to take more Jews.²⁵⁴

With Hitler playing little active role, but providing blanket approval, conditions and mentalities had been created in the occupied territories of former Poland in which full-scale genocide was only one step away. Anti- Jewish policy had not followed a clear or straight line throughout 1940. But, particularly within the SS and Security Police leadership, the thinking and planning had moved in an implicitly genocidal direction. Hitler had responded to the vagaries of policy rather than providing clear direction. But his broad remit to ‘remove’ the Jews, and his ‘prophecy’ that the war would bring a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, were enough. Paradoxically, the turn to preparations for war in the East had not emanated directly out of Hitler’s twenty-year-old ideological obsession with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’, but from the strategic consideration of forcing Britain to yield to German demands. But once the preparations for invading the USSR began to take concrete shape, in the spring of 1941, the ideological essence of the coming showdown with ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ became central. By a circuitous route, rather than following a straight line, Hitler was returning to the core of his Weltanschauung — now no longer just verbiage, but taking the form of concrete policy steps that would take Germany into all-out genocide.

V

Before Hitler signed the directive in December 1940 to prepare what would rapidly be shaped into a ‘war of annihilation’ against the Soviet Union, there was a hiatus in which the immediate future direction of the war remained uncertain. Hitler was ready, during this phase that stretched from September to December 1940, to explore different possibilities of prising Britain out of the conflict before the Americans could enter it. Out of the failure of the ‘peripheral strategy’, a term hinted at by Jodl at the end of July,²⁵⁵ which at no stage gained Hitler’s full enthusiasm, the hardening of the intention to invade the Soviet Union, first mooted in July, emerged until, on 18 December, it was embodied in a war directive.

With the invasion of Russia in the autumn of 1940, as initially proposed by Hitler, excluded on practical grounds by Jodl, other ways of retaining the strategic initiative had to be sought. Hitler was open to a number of suggestions. Ribbentrop was able to resurrect the idea he had promoted before the war, of an anti-British bloc of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The new situation in the wake of the German victories in western Europe now also offered the prospect of extending the anti-British front through gaining the active cooperation of