The Nazi Racial State

Page 4 of 7

• 1. A racist Utopia
• 2. Legalised persecution
• 3. Pogroms and 'euthanasia'
• 4. The Madagascar Plan
• 5. 'The Final Solution'
• 6. Systematic murder
• 7. Find out more
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The Madagascar Plan

With the defeat of Poland, around 1.7 million Jews came under German rule. The Nazi leadership now planned to establish a 'Jewish reservation' for all Jews from Poland and other parts of the German 'Reich'. It was to be located in the Lublin district of Poland, in the newly established 'General Government'. This plan formed a part of an extensive resettlement project that Adolf Hitler had appointed Himmler, also chief of the SS, to lead.

'The Nazi leadership planned the death by starvation of 30 million people'

Hundreds of thousands were expelled from Poland in order to make room for 'ethnically German' settlers. Yet all these plans for an 'ethnic new order' in Poland were to fail, made impossible by the scale of their megalomania. Thus the 'Jewish Reservation' remained a phantom, despite the fact that by the spring of 1941 several thousand Jews had already been deported to the 'General Government'. After the conquest of France in June 1940 these plans were largely replaced by another project designed to provide a 'territorial solution' to the 'Jewish question'.

As part of the so-called 'Madagascar Plan', all Jews under German rule were to be deported to the French colony of Madagascar. However, this plan was rendered unworkable as long as Great Britain's Royal Navy retained control of the seas.In the winter of 1940 to 1941, Hitler commissioned a third variation of the 'territorial solution', in which the Jews would be deported to the Soviet Union after it had been conquered.

Whether in Poland, Madagascar or the Soviet Union, these plans show unambiguously that the deported Jews would have succumbed to a combination of malnutrition, disease, forced labour and general abuse. Thus even the 'territorial solutions' were effectively conceived to bring about the physical end of the Jews in Europe.

In June 1941, the invasion of the Soviet Union began. It was conceived from the first by the Germans both as a racist war of extermination and as a campaign intended to exploit the occupied territory economically. The Nazi leadership planned in advance the death by starvation of 30 million people in the territory they hoped to conquer, in order to create additional 'living space' (Lebensraum) for Germans.

Significantly, no preparation of any kind was made for a supply of food and other essentials to the large numbers of prisoners of war they expected to capture. Around 60% of the 5.7 million Soviet soldiers captured were to die in German custody.

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Published: 2004-12-12