The Madagascar Plan
Who's idea was it?
Like almost all Nazi ideas, someone else came up with the idea first. As early as 1885, Paul de Lagarde suggested deporting Eastern European Jews to Madagascar. In 1926 and 1927, Poland and Japan each investigated the possibility of using Madagascar for solving their over-population problems.
It wasn't until 1931 that a German publicist wrote: "the entire Jewish nation sooner or later must be confined to an island. This would afford the possibility of control and minimize the danger of infection."1 Yet the idea of sending Jews to Madagascar was still not a Nazi plan.
Poland was the next to seriously consider the idea; they even sent a commission to Madagascar to investigate.
The Commission
In 1937, Poland sent a commission to Madagascar to determine the feasibility of forcing Jews to emigrate there. Members of the commission had very different conclusions. The leader of the commission, Major Mieczyslaw Lepecki, believed that it would be possible to settle 40,000 to 60,000 people in Madagascar. Two Jewish members of the commission didn't agree with this assessment. Leon Alter, the director of the Jewish Emigration Association (JEAS) in Warsaw, believed only 2,000 people could be settled there. Shlomo Dyk, an agricultural engineer from Tel Aviv, estimated even fewer.
Even though the Polish government thought Lepecki's estimate was too high and even though the local population of Madagascar demonstrated against an influx of immigrants, Poland continued its discussions with France (Madagascar was a French colony) over this issue.
It wasn't until 1938, a year after the Polish commission, that the Nazis began to suggest the Madagascar Plan.
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