Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?

[michael mills]

And that's exactly why the Madagascar plan needs to be seen as exterminatory in the sense that massive death by attrition, neglect, and abuse was inseparable from the plan. Even if the Nazis didn't articulate it to themselves as an extermination plan it was only because they were so delusional and callous about it.

The mistake you are making is the common one of reading history backwards, ie you are looking at early German actions through the prism of the Judeocide that did occur in historical reality, and concluding that since the actually implemented Judeocide had an exterminatory purpose, then all prior actions or alternative actions must have had a similar exterminatory purpose.

That conclusion ignores the fact that the Judeocide was resorted to in a specific context, that of a long total war that Germany had started to lose. It cannot be assumed that in a quite different context, eg an end to the war with Britain in 1940 and a negotiated peace with that country and France, any exterminatory action against the Jews would have been implemented.

An example is provided by the Nisko Plan , to which reference has been made. A discovery made in the former Soviet archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union has necessitated a fundamental reinterpretation of that action.

That discovery consisted of correspondence between Eichmann's office and the Soviet authorities responsible for immigration, in which Eichmann asked the Soviet office to permit the transfer to Soviet territory of all the Jews living in the German Zone of Occupation of Poland, under the agreement on population exchanges that had been part of the Borders and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939.

The Soviet authorities refused the German request, on the basis that the population exchange agreement applied only to ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians living in the German Zone and ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Zone, not to Jews.

The discovered correspondence provides an explanation for the German plan to concentrate the Jews of its part of occupied Poland, and perhaps also the remaining Jews of the Greater Reich (Germany, Austria, Czechia) in the Lublin District, immediately adjacent to the border with the Soviet Zone. It was not so much to keep them there permanently as to concentrate them for the purpose of transferring them into Soviet territory.

It follows logically that the German intention in asking the Soviet Union to accept up to two million Jews cannot have been exterminatory, since if the Soviet authorities had accepted the German proposal, then those Jews would no longer have been under German control, and their fate would have been in Stalin's hands, not Hitler's.

If the German aim in relation to the Nisko Plan had been to decimate the Jews concentrated in the Lublin District by starvation and other means, Germany would have kept them firmly under its control rather than hand them over to another power that had no record of persecuting Jews, but rather tended to favour them.

Furthermore, the German aim of transferring the Jews of the regions under German control to Soviet territory explains why Nisko was selected as the location for a transit camp for Jews. Nisko is located on the San River, which under the original partition plan incorporated in the Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, was to be the border between the German and Soviet Zones of Occupation; accordingly, it was in a perfect position to hold Jews prior to their being transferred across the border into Soviet territory.

As is well known, the original partition plan was modified on Stalin's initiative in the Borders and Friendship treaty of 28 September, with the Zonal border being moved eastwards to the Bug River, transferring the Lublin District to the German Zone. However, in the four weeks between the beginning of the German invasion of Poland and 28 September, the German authorities acted on the assumption that the San River would be the border, which is why Heydrich's orders to concentrate the Jewish population envisaged their being concentrated to the east of Krakow, and Sipo Einsatzgruppen were very active along the San, rounding up the local Jews and pushing them across the river into the area that was to come under Soviet control.

Even after the line of demarcation was moved to the Bug, German units continued to push Jews across that river throughout October, November and early December, until the Soviet occupation authorities began to object and push the Jews back. It was probably the Soviet resistance to the unilateral German action of expelling Jews into the Soviet Zone that prompted Eichmann's office to write the two letters of early 1940 referred to above.

Once the border was moved from the San to the Bug, Nisko was no longer geographically suitable for a transit camp, but possibly policy inertia was at play here, with Eichmann hanging on to the location that he knew had been originally chosen, in his eagerness to begin the deportations from Vienna and Bohemia-Moravia on his own initiative. The shifting of the border may also have been the reason why Nisko was so quickly abandoned and the deported Jews held there returned to their homes in Vienna and Morava-Ostrava.

The bottom line is that if the German purpose in concentrating Jews in the Lublin District in late 1939 and early 1940 was to transfer them to Soviet control, then that purpose cannot possibly have had an exterminatory motivation. The retention of the concentrated Jews in the Lublin District, and everything that flowed from that, was obviously not the original German plan, but was a result of the failure to obtain Soviet agreement to allow their immigration to the Soviet Union.

[michael mills]

Have you read the RSHA draft plan for the settlement of Jews on Madagascar, prepared by Eichmann's office?

You can find the entire text in this book:

"Der Madagaskar-Plan : die beabsichtigte Deportation der europäischen Juden nach Madagaskar", by Hans Jansen, published München : Herbig, c1997.

According to that plan, the settlement was to take place in stages. The first settlers would be construction workers who would build the settlements for the Jews, as well as agronomists, who would create the basis for agriculture, and also medical staff. No doubt Eichmann had in mind the Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine which he had learned about through his extensive contacts with Zionist officials.

Thus, Eichmann's plan was clearly for agricultural settlements, not for a prison camp. The conditions in the ghettos in Poland cannot be taken as a model for the conditions in Jewish settlements in Madagascar, since the former were a result of wartime constraints, eg a constant food shortage, whereas the latter would have been a post-war creation formed under peacetime conditions.

As for the number of Jews who would have been settled in Madagascar if the plan had ever been implemented, it is impossible to know for certain what it would have been. The figures given in Eichmann's draft plan were purely conjectural, based on estimates of the size of the Jewish population of German-controlled Europe. No plan is ever fully implemented exactly as conceived, and there are always modifications in response to changing situations. An end to the war in the West would have opened up all sorts of possibilities for making Europe "Jew-free" through emigration to various extra-European destinations, not only Madagascar.

With regard to the effect of diseases, it was possible for substantial numbers of Europeans to settle in parts of tropical Africa, eg Rhodesia, Kenya, Angola, German Southwest Africa, without being wiped out by disease, so such settlement should surely have been also possible in the highland regions of Madagascar, where most of the present population lives.

[Paul Lantos]

The mistake you are making is the common one of reading history backwards, ie you are looking at early German actions through the prism of the Judeocide that did occur in historical reality

That's absurd and untrue. At the same time as Madagascar was being discussed the Germans had already 1) undertaken a mass murder campaign against the Polish intelligentsia by the SS, 2) a mass murder campaign against the mentally ill by the Chancellery, 3) had already created mass death among Jews in Poland via ghettoization, 4) attempted a poorly conceived deportation plan into a 'reservation' in Lublin that also left many dead, and 5) had engaged in massive scale human movements within Poland without much concern for provisioning.

So the Nazis' recent past was enough to justify their willingness to produce mass death on a huge scale in the interest of ethnically reordering the world.

That conclusion ignores the fact that the Judeocide was resorted to in a specific context, that of a long total war that Germany had started to lose.

Really? Most historians argue that October 1941 was more or less when the Germans had decided upon total extermination. Germany had not started to lose yet then. Before the Germans had lost at Moscow there were more than half a million dead Jews, Chelmno had become operational, and Belzec was under construction.

Thus, Eichmann's plan was clearly for agricultural settlements, not for a prison camp.

And that is contradicted by Rademacher who was largely responsible for the plan, and the hegemony over it by the RHSA had not been decided by the time the plan was abandoned. I still don't see a provisioning plan in your quote.

As for the number of Jews who would have been settled in Madagascar if the plan had ever been implemented

True. We only know that a whole lot of them would have died.

With regard to the effect of diseases, it was possible for substantial numbers of Europeans to settle in parts of tropical Africa, eg Rhodesia, Kenya, Angola, German Southwest Africa, without being wiped out by disease, so such settlement should surely have been also possible in the highland regions of Madagascar, where most of the present population lives.

Jeez, I wasn't the one who brought up diseases so why are you arguing so much about it? That was never my argument.

[michael mills]

I found an earlier post of mine on the subject of the Nisko Plan, dating from 2012. It has a bit more detail, so I am reposting it here, for information:




At the beginning of the attack on Poland, a Sipo unit called the "Einsatzgruppe zur besonderen Verwendung" under the command of Udo von Woyrsch was sent into Upper Silesia, where it began a campaign of terror against the local Jewish population. After the war, von Woyrsch testified that he had been given a secret assignment by Himmler, namely that of terrorising the Jews into fleeing eastward out of the part of Poland assigned to Germany under the appendix to the Moltov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Later in the campaign, other Sipo Einsatzgruppen operated in the area close to the San River, the demarcation line between the German and Soviet spheres under the afore-mentioned pact, with the object of forcing Jews in the area to cross over into the Soviet sphere.

For details on the anti-Jewish operations of the unit commanded by von Woyrsch and the other Sipo units, I recommend consulting the book by Rossino, "Hitler Strikes Poland".

In the period between 1 and 28 September, orders issued by Heydrich indicate a Sipo aim of concentrating all the Jews of western and Central Poland, the part assigned to Germany, in the area east of Krakow. At that time, the eastern boundary of the German zone was constituted by the Vistula and San rivers, and some historians have concluded that the German aim in concentrating the Jews of their zone close to that boundary was to push them en masse across it, as a form of "ethnic cleansing".

After 28 September, the German-Soviet demarcation line was moved eastward to the Bug River, under the terms of the Borders and Friendship Treaty of that day, thereby placing the Lublin district under German rather than Soviet control. From then on, the Lublin district rather than the area east of Krakow became the German Government's designated area for the concentration of the Jewish population.

In October 1939, the German Government openly proclaimed its intention of creating a Jewish "reservation" in the Lublin District, between the Vistula and Bug Rivers. Under its policy of "Volkliche Flurbereinigung" (redistribution of territory according to ethnicity), the German Zone of Occupation in Poland was to be divided into three strips, a western strip, which was to be populated by Germans, a central strip, in which the ethnic Polish population was to be concentrated, and an eastern strip, reserved for the Jews.

According to the openly proclaimed intention of the German Government, all the Jews of the territories then under direct German control (Germany, Austria, Czechia, western and central Poland), an estimated total of two million, was to be concentrated in "Lublin land". The concept of a Jewish reservation was widely discussed in the media at that time, and anti-German propagandists loudly proclaimed that this was a form of covert physical extermination.

However, the underlying German Government purpose was eventually to transfer the Jews concentrated in "Lublin land" into Soviet territory. That is shown by the fact that in the period until the end of 1939, individual German units were pushing groups of Jews across the demarcation line wherever they could. It is also shown at a higher, more official level by the two written requests made by Eichmann's office of Jewish emigration in January 1940 to Chekmenev, the Soviet official in charge of immigration, that the Jewish population of areas under German control be evacuated to Soviet territory under the German-Soviet agreement on population exchanges.

The German Government aim could not be achieved due to the Soviet refusal to accept the proposed transfer of Jews onto its territory.

The whole thrust of German Government policy towards the Jewish population in the parts of Poland that had come under its control indicates that its aim was "ethnic cleansing" through the expulsion of that population from German territory, rather than holding on to it for the purpose of physical extermination at a later time.

The policy of "ethnic cleansing" was entirely consistent with the policy of the German Government from 1933 onward, which was one of encouraging, and where necessary compelling, Jewish emigration from all territory under its control, first from the "Old Reich", then from Austria, finally from Czechia. Heydrich was in control of the program of emigration, ably assisted by Eichmann, and to that end both of them worked in close collaboration with the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Once the policy moved on to "ethnic cleansing" by expulsion in Poland, Heydrich remained in control of that also.

However, Jewish emigration remained a policy option right up until October 1941, although opportunities for it were greatly limited due to the war situation. Small groups of Jews were permitted to emigrate, for example by travelling across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok, from whence they continued to various destinations.

The indications are that between August 1939 and July 1940, the German Government considered that the co-operative relationship established with the Soviet Union would be long-lasting, and that therefore a transfer of the Jewish population of the German-controlled territories, some two million persons, into Soviet territory would provide a long-term solution, since they would no longer be in contact with the German people and would be under the control of a friendly government.

The concept of a transfer of the entire Jewish population of Germany, Austria, Czechia and western and central Poland into the Soviet Union may sound bizarre to us today, given the post-war anti-Soviet attitude of the Jewish Establishment in the West, but in the inter-war period the Jewish Establishment was quite sympathetic to the idea.

In 1919, the Anglo-Jewish leader Lucien Wolf had proposed the mass emigration of the Jewish populations of the newly independent states of Eastern Europe, Poland, Hungary, Romania, into Bolshevik Russia, once the civil war there had ended, on the basis that the Bolshevik regime would be far more Jew-friendly than the East European states. (Wolf also predicted that if the Bolshevik regime in Russia were ever overthrown, there would be a massacre of the Jews on a vaster scale than had ever occurred before, a prediction that came true in 1941-42).

In the mid-1930s, elements in the Soviet Government declared their willingness to take in Jewish immigrants from outside the Soviet Union, especially from Poland, and resettle them in Crimea and/or in the new Jewish "national home" in Birobidjan. Negotiations were held with Agro-Joint, the branch of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee engaed in facilitating Jewish agricultural settlement in the Soviet Union, for the purpose of organising and funding that immigration, but eventually it came to nothing, partly because of the problem of financing the proposed resettlement, and partly because religious Jewish leaders were afraid that the immigrants would become atheists and assimilate, as so many of the Soviet Jews already had.

Given the above background, the German Government concept of a mass movement of the Jews of its territory into Soviet territory does not seem so hare-brained.

After the defeat of France in June 1940, the prospect opened of a movement of Jews into French colonial territories, as an alternative to the concept of a movement into Soviet territory, which had come to nothing because of the Soviet Government's opposition.

One small interim move was made in that direction late in 1940, when Eichmann organised a deportation of a small group of Jews from western German and Alsace-Lorraine into the Unoccupied Zone of France. That movement had not been approved by the French Government, which had not even been informed in advance, and was immediately opposed, with the result that no further such movements took place.

The actions undertaken by the German Government in 1939 and 1940 indicate that its Jewish policy at the time was one of "ethnic cleansing", not preparation for physical extermination. It took a number of tentative interim steps in the direction of pushing Jews out of its territory, but they did not continue because of resistance by the Soviet and French Governments respectively. The full implementation of an organised mass movment of Jews out of German-controlled territory therefore had to be postponed until after a successful conclusion to the war with Britain.

[michael mills]

That's absurd and untrue. At the same time as Madagascar was being discussed the Germans had already 1) undertaken a mass murder campaign against the Polish intelligentsia by the SS, 2) a mass murder campaign against the mentally ill by the Chancellery, 3) had already created mass death among Jews in Poland via ghettoization, 4) attempted a poorly conceived deportation plan into a 'reservation' in Lublin that also left many dead, and 5) had engaged in massive scale human movements within Poland without much concern for provisioning.

In the above passage, you have placed the ghettoization of the Jews of German-occupied Poland a bit too far forward in time. Mass death from starvation only occurred after the ghettos were sealed off from the outside, meaning that the flow of food was totally under German control.

The Lodz Ghetto was the first to be sealed off, in May 1940. The Warsaw Ghetto was sealed in November of that year. The Krakow Ghetto was not established until March 1941; prior to that the German aim had been to drive Jews out of Krakow into the surrounding rural areas.

Thus, when the Madagaskar Plan began to be seriously discussed after the armistice with France, ghettoization had only been underway for a short time, not long enough for food shortages to have started causing a high death rate.

As for the Lublin reservation, as I have shown it was an element in a plan to transfer the Jews of German-occupied Poland to the Soviet Union. It was not part of the German plan to keep the Jews penned up in the Lublin District for any length of time. The German aim was transfer of the Jews to Soviet control, not their mass death.

The active killing campaigns undertaken from late 1939 were not directed against Jews. The killing campaign directed against Polish leaders was designed to eliminate sworn enemies of Germany who would lead resistance. The killing campaign against the mentally ill was designed to reduce the number of such patients in long-term institutional care by 25%, and the total number requiring some sort of mental health care by 10%; its purpose was to reduce the consumption of resources by the health care sector.

Thus, at the time the Madagascar Plan came up for discussion, there had been no programs of deliberate active mass killing directed against Jews, nor had there been any planned indirect killing. Specific anti-Jewish measures such as ghettoization or concentration in the Lublin District were stop-gap measures, resulting from the failure to achieve the planned transfer of Jews out of the German-controlled area.

I would like to ask you, Paul Lantos, why you think Eichmann's office asked the Soviet immigration authorities to allow the immigration into Soviet territory of all the Jews under German control, if the Germans harboured exterminatory intentions.

[Paul Lantos]

Thus, at the time the Madagascar Plan came up for discussion, there had been no programs of deliberate active mass killing directed against Jews

You've entirely missed the point. The point was not that Jews were being mass-murdered. The point was that the Germans had shown themselves quite capable of instituting radical policies resulting in mass death and created a fantastical plan that as outlined would inevitably have done the same. The euthanasia program had been a milestone in the regime's radicalization and not only did it predated the Madagascar plan but (at least) two leading figures in the euthanasia program were involved in planning the Madagascar program.

I would like to ask you, Paul Lantos, why you think Eichmann's office asked the Soviet immigration authorities to allow the immigration into Soviet territory of all the Jews under German control, if the Germans harboured exterminatory intentions.

You've again, glossed over what I've written just to argue against something. I'll tell you yet again that the plans were exterminatory in the utterly predictable mass death that would have inevitably happened had the plans gone into effect. I've said a couple times in this thread that that's not synonymous with an active extermination plan -- yet it was still a radical program that would have resulted in mass death.

And you can look at Eichmann's activities in one of two ways. The way that is probably too innocent is that he was just doing his job trying to find an emigration plan. The more likely, more defensible, and more cynical explanation is that Hitler wanted to prove to the world that no one would take the Jews.

The conclusions of Browning and Longerich are a lot more scholarly and informed than mine, and they've influenced my opinion. Rather than this sort of fruitless interchange you might go back to my quotes from these two. Let their conclusions speak for the point of view that Madagascar was a genocidal or at least proto-genocidal plan.

[David Thompson]

Let's get back to the subject of this thread -- the anticipated fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won.

[michael mills]

Perhaps transfer the exchange of messages between myself and Paul Lantos to a different thread?

[Gorque]

And that's exactly why the Madagascar plan needs to be seen as exterminatory in the sense that massive death by attrition, neglect, and abuse was inseparable from the plan. Even if the Nazis didn't articulate it to themselves as an extermination plan it was only because they were so delusional and callous about it.

In 1940? I wouldn't characterize it as such as the Nazi's were still trying to maintain a semblance of a respectable image vis-a-vis the other nations of the world. I'd opine it was planned to be somewhat similar to the expulsions that were occurring in 1945, just harsher in that the Madagascar Plan was to occur in an undeveloped area.

[Paul Lantos]

In 1940? I wouldn't characterize it as such as the Nazi's were still trying to maintain a semblance of a respectable image vis-a-vis the other nations of the world.

Which other nations? Britain? They were bombing them. France? They occupied them. The USA? There was already a quasi war in the Atlantic. I am not clear on whom the Nazis might have been trying to impress in 1940 other than the USSR in order to delay hostilities before Barbarossa. The brutalities in Poland under the Nazis were already known outside of Europe in 1940.

Anyway, I have to keep reiterating the point that this is not primarily my argument. It's the argument of leading academic historians in the field, two of whom I've quoted in this thread. If you don't agree then your disagreement is with Christopher Browning and Peter Longerich, not with me.

[Gorque]

In 1940? I wouldn't characterize it as such as the Nazi's were still trying to maintain a semblance of a respectable image vis-a-vis the other nations of the world.

Which other nations? Britain? They were bombing them. France? They occupied them. The USA? There was already a quasi war in the Atlantic. I am not clear on whom the Nazis might have been trying to impress in 1940 other than the USSR in order to delay hostilities before Barbarossa. The brutalities in Poland under the Nazis were already known outside of Europe in 1940.

Yes, the U.S.A. A May 29th opinion poll found

"only 7.7 percent of the people favored immediate American entry into the war. Only 19 percent believed that the country should intervene if the defeat of the Allies appeared certain. Forty percent opposed U.S. participation under any circumstances."

(p.92 Powaski, Toward an entangling Alliance: American Isolationism, Internationalism, and Europe, 1901-1950)

I think you are forgetting that Roosevelt was up for re-election in November 1940 and therefore had to tread carefully.

[Gorque]

I'd opine it was planned to be somewhat similar to the expulsions that were occurring in 1945, just harsher in that the Madagascar Plan was to occur in an undeveloped area.

Anyway, I have to keep reiterating the point that this is not primarily my argument. It's the argument of leading academic historians in the field, two of whom I've quoted in this thread. If you don't agree then your disagreement is with Christopher Browning and Peter Longerich, not with me.

The '45 expulsions weren't exactly a Sunday stroll. Large numbers (approximately 1.4 million out of an estimated 12 to 14 million) of civilians, mainly women, children and the elderly perished.

[Paul Lantos]

Yes, the U.S.A. A May 29th opinion poll found

"only 7.7 percent of the people favored immediate American entry into the war. Only 19 percent believed that the country should intervene if the defeat of the Allies appeared certain. Forty percent opposed U.S. participation under any circumstances."

I think you are forgetting that Roosevelt was up for re-election in November 1940 and therefore had to tread carefully.

What is your evidence that these somehow tamed Hitler's Jewish policy? Do you need a list of quotes and speeches he made about Jews in 1939 and 1940, including his infamous 1939 "prophecy" speech before the Reichstag? Hitler's public persona and rhetoric were stridently antisemitic over this time. So do you mean to argue that Hitler was PUBLICALLY virulently antisemitic, but in the secrecy of the Madagascar planning he was PRIVATELY humane for the sake of the American electorate?

Hitler hoped to keep America out of the war by keeping the Jews hostage. That is expressed in almost direct terms in Rademacher's Madagascar correspondence -- see my quote from Longerich's book. America's Jews were to be controlled through violent reprisals against the Jews in Maagascar. He doesn't say to keep America out of the war, but he says to control the behavior of America's Jews. And because the NS regime blamed international Jews for both WWI and the impending WWII, it is safe to consider this synonymous. Hitler had NO problem publicly threatening European Jews because he felt that threat was his specific leverage against American Jews.

The '45 expulsions weren't exactly a Sunday stroll. Large numbers (approximately 1.4 million out of an estimated 12 to 14 million) of civilians, mainly women, children and the elderly perished.

I haven't once in this thread mentioned anything about events of 1945 -- I don't quite follow what that has to do with 1940 judenpolitik. Yes, people died en masse from all sorts of inhumanity, including mass expulsions and mass human movement. That has nothing to do with the specifics of Madagascar, which I'd argue was conceived as a plan for mass attrition and not benevolent resettlement.

[David Thompson]

If this discussion doesn't get back to the fate of the Slavs and Poles if Hitler won, there's no point in keeping it open.

[Paul Lantos]

Why not just change the initial question?

You could argue that the initial question is fairly pointless as it calls for blind speculation. The ensuing conversation has been valuable.