The Nazi Plan to Deport 4 Million Jews to Madagascar

Weeks after France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, Nazi officials had a colonial power’s worth of new territory to plan around, including France’s overseas empire. Adolf Eichmann, who ran the Reich Security Main Office’s Department IV B4, the unit handling Jewish affairs and deportation, used that opening to draft one of the regime’s last mass-deportation schemes before it turned to outright killing.

Eichmann’s memorandum, dated August 15, 1940, proposed shipping roughly a million European Jews a year to the French colony of Madagascar, an island off Africa’s southeast coast, for four years running, a total of close to 4 million people. Under the plan, Madagascar would not have functioned as a refuge. The island was to be placed under SS police administration, cut off from the outside world, with the expectation, never stated quite so bluntly in the surviving paperwork but clear from the conditions proposed, that a harsh climate and forced confinement would steadily reduce the population left there. The idea did not originate with Eichmann; versions of a Jewish resettlement scheme centered on Madagascar had circulated among Polish and French officials in the 1920s and 1930s. What changed in 1940 was that Germany suddenly controlled the French government making decisions about its colonies, and Hitler had given the concept his backing.

The plan’s fatal weakness was logistics. Moving millions of people across the Indian Ocean required control of merchant shipping on a scale Germany did not have, and planners had assumed that a quick victory over Britain would hand them the British merchant fleet to use for the crossings. That victory did not arrive. The Luftwaffe failed to break the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, and by mid-September 1940 Hitler had shelved the planned invasion of Britain indefinitely. Without command of the seas, there was no way to move a single deportee, let alone millions, and internal German discussion of Madagascar as a live option faded over the following months even as the file stayed formally open. The German Foreign Office did not close it until February 1942, by which point German forces in the occupied Soviet Union were already carrying out mass shootings of Jewish civilians.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s account of the “Final Solution” places Madagascar alongside an earlier, smaller scheme, a proposed Jewish reservation near Lublin in occupied Poland, as territorial plans German officials pursued and then abandoned before settling on the extermination camps that defined the Holocaust from 1942 onward. Christopher Browning’s history of this period, “The Origins of the Final Solution,” treats the Madagascar Plan’s failure as one of the pressures that pushed Nazi policy in that direction: a regime that had spent years trying to solve what it called the Jewish question through expulsion found itself, by early 1942, with nowhere left to expel anyone to.

Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and tried in Jerusalem the following year on charges that included his role in planning the deportations that followed the Madagascar scheme’s collapse. He was convicted in December 1961 and hanged the following June. The August 1940 memorandum survives as one of the clearest written records of how close the regime came to pursuing forced mass relocation, rather than mass murder, as its stated policy toward European Jews, and of how quickly that calculation changed once the option closed off.