Who would pay for the provisioning of 4-6 million people who by virtue of being guarded in an SS ghetto (as documented by Rademacher) could not have a meaningful economy?
The conceptual plan developed by Eichmann in 1940 did provide for a real Jewish economy in Madagascar. For example, he proposed that the first wave of Jewish settlers should consists of professionals, including agronomists, who would create the basis for an agricultural economy.
And I have already asked the question about who paid for the provisioning of the Jews who settled in Palestine, before they became self-sustaining. The answer of course is the Jews of wealthy countries such as the United States, who in the 1930s were already supporting the livelihoods of one-third of the Jews of Poland, about one million people. There is no reason why the Jews who funded Jewish settlement in Palestine could not have funded Jewish settlement in Madagascar.
This article in an American Jewish socialist newspaper gives some idea of the amount of money that flows to Israel from the Jewish community in the United States today:
http://forward.com/news/israel/194978/2 ... stry-unco/
I see no reason why that money could not have flowed to Jews living in Madagascar.
Many tens of thousands of Jews died from starvation and disease (which was largely a result of starvation itself) in Lodz and Warsaw before Dec 1941 when the US entered the war. Those two ghettos accounted for at maximum 600,000 people between them. How do you think the world would provision 10 times that many in a far more remote place?
That mortality occurred under wartime conditions, when German-controlled Europe was suffering from a food-deficit resulting from the British naval blockade.
As I wrote, the Madagascar Plan could only have been implemented after the war with Britain had come to an end. Accordingly, Jewish settlement on Madagascar would have taken place under peacetime conditions, with no British blockade, and hence no barriers to the flow of food to the Jewish settlers to support them while they were building their own self-sufficient agricultural base.
Or mechanical farming equipment or training in large scale agriculture.
The Zionist Organisation was quite able to train Eastern European Jews to become agricultural workers, through a network of agricultural schools called Hachsharot. Ben Gurion, for example, was not an agricultural worker in Poland, but he was able to become one in Palestine.
There were hachsharot operating in Germany, and the National Socialist Government allowed them to continue, since their aim of training Jews to become farmers in Palestine was consistent with the National Socialists' aim of getting Jews out of Germany. There is no inherent reason why the agricultural training provided by the hachsharot could not have been applied in Madagascar.
two high level administrators of one mass murder program were involved in the Madagascar planning,
The conceptual error being made here is to assume that once a particular person had been involved in the administration in a program of mass killing, he could not subsequently be used in the administration of non-homicidal activities.
The historical fact is that a considerable number of German bureaucrats moved from non-homicidal activities to homicidal ones, and back again. An example is provided by Otto Ohlendorf, a high-level economic administrator who was sent to lead Einsatzgruppe D in the invasion of the Soviet Union, in which capacity he oversaw the killing of some 90,000 people, mostly Jews. After fulfilling that function, he returned to his former post as an economic administrator in Berlin for the rest of the war, in which function he did not kill anybody.
The German Government believed in multi-skilling.