The Madagascar Plan: The Nazi Scheme to Deport Europe's Jews

In the summer of 1940, as German armies swept through France, officials in Berlin circulated a proposal that today reads like a grim historical footnote but was, for a brief period, official Nazi policy. Under the plan, four million Jews were to be deported from Europe to Madagascar, a French colonial island off the southeast coast of Africa, at a rate of a million people a year. The island would be governed as a police state under the SS. The scheme was never carried out. But the Madagascar Plan is far more than a curiosity: historians see in it a revealing stage in the evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, a moment when the regime's ambitions shifted from forced emigration toward removal on a continental scale — with utter indifference to whether the deported survived.

A Colonial Fantasy Older Than the Nazis

The idea of sending Europe's Jews to Madagascar did not originate with the Nazi regime. The antisemitic Orientalist scholar Paul de Lagarde first proposed evacuating European Jews to the island in 1878. In the 1920s and 1930s the notion circulated among British antisemites such as Henry Hamilton Beamish and Arnold Leese, who treated the remote island as a convenient answer to their so-called "Jewish question."

More strikingly, the idea was seriously examined by democratic governments. In 1937, the Second Polish Republic, with French cooperation, sent a commission to Madagascar to assess whether Polish Jews could be settled there. The head of the commission, Mieczysław Lepecki, concluded that 5,000 to 7,000 families might be accommodated in the island's remote highlands. The Jewish members of the commission were far more pessimistic: given the climate, disease, and almost total absence of infrastructure, they estimated that perhaps 500 families — or fewer — could survive there. The scheme quietly collapsed. Its very existence, however, kept the "Madagascar idea" alive in the bureaucratic imagination of Europe.

June 1940: Rademacher's Memorandum

By 1939, Nazi policy had forced roughly 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews to emigrate through violence, dispossession, and terror. But with the outbreak of war, emigration routes closed while conquest brought millions more Jews under German control. It was against this backdrop that Franz Rademacher, newly appointed head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, sent a memorandum to his superior on 3 June 1940, days before the fall of France. "The desirable solution is: all Jews out of Europe," he wrote. Rademacher proposed that France be compelled to hand over Madagascar as a condition of surrender, and that the Jews of Europe be shipped there. The deported, he noted, could serve as hostages to guarantee the "good behaviour" of Jews in America.

The idea moved quickly up the hierarchy. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took it up; by 18 June, Hitler himself mentioned the plan to Mussolini as a possibility to be pursued after France's defeat. Heinrich Himmler, in a memorandum of his own, wrote of his hope that "the term 'Jew'" would be "completely eliminated through the massive immigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony."

The SS Takes Over

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, insisted that responsibility for the plan belonged to his office, which had overseen forced Jewish emigration since 1939. The task fell to Adolf Eichmann, head of the office's department for Jewish affairs. On 15 August 1940, Eichmann released a memorandum titled Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Madagaskar Projekt, calling for the deportation of a million Jews a year for four years. Where Rademacher had envisioned a nominally self-governing Jewish territory under German oversight, Eichmann's version left no ambiguity: the SS would control every aspect of life on the island, which would be run as a police state.

The planners were under no illusion about conditions on the island. They assumed — and accepted — that vast numbers of deportees would die from the harsh climate, disease, and the brutality of SS rule. The historian Ian Kershaw has characterised the plan as genocide by an alternative method. For a moment in the summer of 1940, the plan reshaped policy on the ground: deportations of Jews into occupied Poland were cancelled, and construction of the Warsaw ghetto was briefly halted because it seemed it would no longer be needed.

Why the Plan Collapsed

The Madagascar Plan depended entirely on Germany winning the war in the west. Its logistics assumed that Britain would be defeated and its merchant fleet commandeered to carry the deportees; in the meantime, the British naval blockade made mass transport across the seas impossible. When the Luftwaffe failed to win the Battle of Britain and the invasion of England was postponed in September 1940, the plan's foundations dissolved. Rademacher's requests to convene planning experts went unanswered. Eichmann's memorandum languished on Heydrich's desk, never approved. Ghetto construction in Poland resumed that August. The Foreign Office formally shelved the plan in February 1942; in November of that year, British forces took Madagascar from Vichy France.

From Deportation to Genocide

The failure of the Madagascar Plan did not soften Nazi policy — it radicalised it. With overseas removal impossible and the invasion of the Soviet Union looming, Hitler directed that a new plan be drafted for the "elimination" of Europe's Jews. Heydrich's planners first contemplated deportations into Soviet territory; when the war in the east stalled, they turned instead to murder in extermination camps built on occupied Polish soil. In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich coordinated the bureaucracy of what the regime called the Final Solution. By the war's end, between five and a half and six million Jews had been murdered.

The Madagascar Plan matters to the history of the Holocaust precisely because it was never carried out. It shows that the path to genocide was not a single, fixed blueprint but an escalating series of "solutions," each more radical than the last, pursued by a regime for which Jewish life carried no weight at all. A scheme that contemplated shipping millions of people to an island where they were expected to perish was not an alternative to the Holocaust. It was one of its rehearsals.