Madagascar

Discussions on the Holocaust and 20th Century War Crimes. Note that Holocaust denial is not allowed. Hosted by David Thompson.
little grey rabbit
Member
Posts: 745
Joined: 12 Mar 2010, 05:26

Re: Madagascar

#16

Post by little grey rabbit » 19 Nov 2015, 06:24

wm wrote:The problem was there were millions of natives there already. And they were mainly peasants themselves. Because of this there weren't any larger areas of land available in Madagascar.
The small rectangle above was the only lightly populated place there suitable for colonisation.
And it was said and written that generally the Europeans were incapable of doing heavy work in Madagascar - because of the climate.
In 1940 Madagascar had a population of no more than 3.5 million, it's population density was at least an order of magnitude less dense than Palestine. Palestine had also been noted for its malaria, although by 1940 it was well on the way to eradication.
Malaria risks are inherently manageable as they were in other areas in Africa with successful European colonization.

It should also be added that in his first memo on Madagascar, Rademacher's most pressing request that his office could do with a typist. The point is that where ever resettlement was seriously being planned, it wasn't at Referat D III in the Auswaertiges Amt.

Pre June 1941 it was with Albert Goering. After the June 1941 the implementation side was handed over to Heydrich, although while there was a genuine resettlement plan it looks like Alfred Rosenberg was responsible for economic and construction side.
To attempt to draw conclusions on the nature of any resettlement program in the absence of the archives of the bureaucracy actually responsible for its implementation is a little surreal.

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Madagascar

#17

Post by michael mills » 19 Nov 2015, 10:15

The problem was there were millions of natives there already. And they were mainly peasants themselves. Because of this there weren't any larger areas of land available in Madagascar.
How many millions?

According to this site http://www.populstat.info/Africa/malegasc.htm , the population of Madagascar in 1940 was close to four million. Today it is about 22 million, mainly concentrated in the temperate highlands. The growth in population, most of which is agricultural, suggests that there was plenty of spare land for cultivation back in 1940, and thus plenty of room for Jewish settlers.

Since 1940, Madagascar has undergone a five-fold increase in population, all from natural increase. The increase in population of the former Palestine has been even more spectacular, from about 700,000 in 1940 to about eight million today, a more than 10-fold increase, largely from mass immigration.
And it was said and written that generally the Europeans were incapable of doing heavy work in Madagascar - because of the climate.
What was wrong with the climate?

These are the average daily mean temperatures (celsius) for each month in Antananarivo, situated in the temperate highlands where the bulk of the population lives:

January..................................20.5
February.................................20.7
March.....................................20.1
April......................................19.2
May.......................................16.8
June......................................14.6
July.......................................14.1
August....................................14.5
September...............................16.3
October...................................18.5
November................................19.7
December................................20.2

Thus, the climate varies from the equivalent of summer in the north of Scotland to the equivalent of summer in Germany, hardly one in which Europeans cannot do heavy work.

In fact, the climate is nowhere near as hot in summer as that of Israel. The highest temperature recorded in Antananarivo was 35 degrees in October 1995, considerably less than the highest temperatures experienced in a typical summer in Tel Aviv, not to speak of the Jordan Valley. If Jews can survive the climate of Israel without too much problems, they could have survived the climate of the temperate highlands of Madagascar, where they would have settled.


michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Madagascar

#18

Post by michael mills » 19 Nov 2015, 11:04

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.

User avatar
wm
Member
Posts: 8753
Joined: 29 Dec 2006, 21:11
Location: Poland

Re: Madagascar

#19

Post by wm » 19 Nov 2015, 11:27

The bulk of the population lives in Antananarivo because the locals being reasonable people chose the best location available in Madagascar.
It's located 1,280 m above the sea level in the center of the island. In the UK there are just a few mountain peaks reaching as high.
In fact most of the island is highlands (called mountains in the UK) and true mountains:
Image
One might say there is lots of lowlands there, but actually those are the areas where the hell is and no major towns.
Of course people live there but it was multigenerational effort that made the place livable.

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Madagascar

#20

Post by michael mills » 19 Nov 2015, 12:23

In fact most of the island is highlands (called mountains in the UK) and true mountains:
Exactly the point I was making! Plenty of land with a temperate climate where Jews could live and work, albeit at a fairly low standard of living.

But most of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe were living in poverty anyway.

The Labour Zionists believed that the Jewish character was deformed and could only be improved through manual labour, particularly on the land. There is no reason why that improvement through manual labour could not have been achieved in Madagascar.

User avatar
Gorque
Member
Posts: 1662
Joined: 11 Feb 2009, 19:20
Location: Clocktown

Re: Madagascar

#21

Post by Gorque » 19 Nov 2015, 19:42

Paul Lantos wrote:Anyway, I've said my piece. I've put forth analyses by two of the world's leading academic historians of the Holocaust -- who both agree that the Madagascar plan was intended to be murderous. Go back to my quotes from the two of them.

If you disagree with Peter Longerich or Christopher Browning, please share what it is that you know that they don't.
I have great respect for Prof. Browning and have read two of his work's, Ordinary Men and The Origins of the Final Solution and, have quoted him often. I haven't had a chance to read any of Prof. Longerich's publications. You seem impressed with his findings and so I will take a gander as what he has written once I slog through my current backlog of reading material on Germany. There's also the fourth book on the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo that occupies my time when I need a break. :)

Getting back to the topic at hand, Madagascar, while I may not be viewing the Madagascar Plan as ominously as Professor's Browning and Longerich, my stated view, "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.", when considering that over ten percent of the German expellees perished en-route and that I surmised that the Madagascar Plan would be "just harsher", would still result in a higher loss of life of life (percentage-wise) than what had occurred during the German expulsions from Central and Eastern Europe in the post-war period. I believe we are communicating to each other about an astoundingly high number of mortalities and are only disagreeing about a matter of degrees.

BTW: I was doing some research over the week-end that would support my contention the the Third Reich was seeking to avoid conflict with the United States in 1940 and found this pdf: http://www.histdoc.net/pdf/Series%20D,vol9,List.pdf Its a list along with a short synopsis of the various German Foreign Office documents from the period March 18 to June 22, 1940. Please check-out the snippets on documents 13, 195, 289,299,362 & 411 beginning on page 62. I tried locating a copy of volume IX in order to be able to present the entire document(s), but it appears to be the rarest of the DGFP volumes available with the only one found being offered for sale at over four-hundred dollars!! :o Many of the others in the series, however, can be found at archive.org! :thumbsup:

Paul Lantos
Member
Posts: 304
Joined: 19 May 2013, 16:25

Re: Madagascar

#22

Post by Paul Lantos » 19 Nov 2015, 23:51

michael mills wrote:
In fact most of the island is highlands (called mountains in the UK) and true mountains
Exactly the point I was making! Plenty of land with a temperate climate where Jews could live and work, albeit at a fairly low standard of living.

But most of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe were living in poverty anyway.
How would you say their poverty before the war compared with their poverty while in SS-guarded ghettos -- which again, I would remind you, was what was specifically planned for the Jews in Madagascar.

Secondly, what was the greatest epidemic to afflict ghettoized Jews during the war? Typhus. Louse-born epidemic typhus caused by Rickettsia prowazekii. This infection is highly transmissible, highly lethal, and is particularly important in cooler climates. Epidemics of typhus have occurred in other highland countries in Africa, including Ethiopia (which is all highland), Rwanda, and Burundi. What other important epidemics occurred in the ghettos? Tuberculosis -- which latently infects 1/3 to 1/2 the world's population but seldom becomes clinically active except in malnourished or otherwise compromised people. Dysentery, which results from poor sanitation and hygiene. Routine bacterial infections like pneumonia, also common among the malnourished. There is every reason to believe these diseases, which continue to be rampant throughout Africa, would affect an overcrowded impoverished ghetto in Madagascar.

Finally, regarding malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in Madagascar: The French undertook a massive malaria control program in the postwar period between the late 1940s and 1960s, particularly using DDT and mass administration of chloroquine (which was not used clinically until after WW2 had ended). During the epoch we're talking about these interventions had not yet been deployed -- and you can guess how likely it is that Eichmann and friends would have gone out of their way to help.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... Madagascar

Furthermore, even in 2015 the ENTIRETY of Madagascar apart from the mountain peaks remains endemic for Plasmodium falciparum malaria, and epidemic / unstable malaria transmission killed tens of thousands of people in the highlands alone in the 1980s.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9410249
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11280055
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12135262
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12471743
http://www.pmi.gov/docs/default-source/ ... ?sfvrsn=14

Yes, you're absolutely right that there was malaria in Palestine. And there certainly was in Italy during WW2. But what's your point? It was a far less lethal species of the protozoan, transmitted by mosquitoes with a lower vectorial capacity, with more seasonal transmission due to the aridity, and besides this presupposes all else being equal which it's not. Jews living their lives in freedom in Warsaw or Madagascar or Palestine is not comparable to living in an SS ghetto in any of these places.

So please, give me a break with the pleasant climate in the highlands of Madagascar. I've spent many pleasant months working in malaria-endemic regions in Africa, but I'm not about to open a golf course and retirement community there.
Last edited by Paul Lantos on 20 Nov 2015, 03:11, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
wm
Member
Posts: 8753
Joined: 29 Dec 2006, 21:11
Location: Poland

Re: Madagascar

#23

Post by wm » 20 Nov 2015, 00:27

As to malaria - the commission recommended the settlers were kept on quinine all the time.
They say in some cases this can lead to erectile dysfunction.
michael mills wrote:Exactly the point I was making! Plenty of land with a temperate climate where Jews could live and work, albeit at a fairly low standard of living.
I wouldn't be too enthusiastic about highlands (especially such high highlands) and mountains, it's hard to grow crops on hilly/mountainous terrain. They say only 5% of the island is arable land.
The central highlands:
Central Highlands, Madagascar.jpg
madagascar1.jpg
madagascar1.jpg (108.34 KiB) Viewed 854 times
michael mills wrote:But most of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe were living in poverty anyway.
The cost of moving a family to Madagascar from Poland was estimated at 16000 of today's dollars. A little too pricey for a poverty stricken Polish Jew.
michael mills wrote:The Labour Zionists believed that the Jewish character was deformed and could only be improved through manual labour, particularly on the land. There is no reason why that improvement through manual labour could not have been achieved in Madagascar.
Well, it was reasonable to be deformed like that at that time. The life of the peasant/farmer was really hard.

Paul Lantos
Member
Posts: 304
Joined: 19 May 2013, 16:25

Re: Madagascar

#24

Post by Paul Lantos » 20 Nov 2015, 03:09

wm wrote:As to malaria - the commission recommended the settlers were kept on quinine all the time.
They say in some cases this can lead to erectile dysfunction.
Quinine has lots of side effects, including "cinchonism", which is tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and neuropathy / encephalopathy / GI symptoms, etc. To a lesser degree there's a risk of arrhythmias with it (more important when in combination with other drugs, though). Quinine can be nasty -- yet we still treat malaria (and babesiosis) with it. Much quinine use during the colonial era (which includes up to the mid 20th century) was just quinine tonic water. Tasty, but completely underdosed for any effective prophylaxis.

little grey rabbit
Member
Posts: 745
Joined: 12 Mar 2010, 05:26

Re: Madagascar

#25

Post by little grey rabbit » 20 Nov 2015, 07:09

Paul Lantos wrote:
wm wrote:As to malaria - the commission recommended the settlers were kept on quinine all the time.
They say in some cases this can lead to erectile dysfunction.
Quinine has lots of side effects, including "cinchonism", which is tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and neuropathy / encephalopathy / GI symptoms, etc. To a lesser degree there's a risk of arrhythmias with it (more important when in combination with other drugs, though). Quinine can be nasty -- yet we still treat malaria (and babesiosis) with it. Much quinine use during the colonial era (which includes up to the mid 20th century) was just quinine tonic water. Tasty, but completely underdosed for any effective prophylaxis.
Presumably malaria risks would have been largely managed - as they were in Palestine which was also malarial in the early 20th C - by mosquito control.

BTW besides having the highest life expectancy (or close to) of Sub Saharan Africa, Madagascar also has the 3rd or 4th largest population of "White Africans". If Madagascar is the very 9th circle of African hell, someone forgot to tell them.

Such things are subjective. But economic opportunities being equal if I had to choose between a tiny patch of desert fought over by Arabs and Madagascar, I would choose Madagascar.

User avatar
wm
Member
Posts: 8753
Joined: 29 Dec 2006, 21:11
Location: Poland

Re: Madagascar

#26

Post by wm » 20 Nov 2015, 10:41

Although the natives there weren't Arabs. They were more like the Ethiopians and their kingdom, and they were conquered like the Ethiopians in a series of wars at the very end of the nineteenth century.
They had their underground movement, political parties, uprisings - tens of thousands of them died in the Malagasy Uprising of 1947.
This was one of the reasons the Polish commission chose a tiny piece of land in a remote, lightly populated location.

Paul Lantos
Member
Posts: 304
Joined: 19 May 2013, 16:25

Re: Madagascar

#27

Post by Paul Lantos » 21 Nov 2015, 18:17

little grey rabbit wrote:Presumably malaria risks would have been largely managed
What data do you have to make such a presumption? I've seen nothing in Rademacher's plans to suggest there was a public health plan. Just a few months later in 1940 Jews in Warsaw, Lodz, Bialystok, Radom, etc were dying by the thousands of typhus and hunger. Typhus is FAR easier to prevent than malaria. All you need is access to clean clothes. Yet the Nazis response to the epidemic of death and disease in the ghettos was NOT public health -- it was death camps. These were explicitly related events and it's an easily supportable relationship.

So please, show me how they would "largely manage" the malaria risk in Madagascar when at the same time the Nazis demonstrated their willingness to ignore all public health precautions in their stewardship of Poland's ghettos.
little grey rabbit wrote:BTW besides having the highest life expectancy (or close to) of Sub Saharan Africa, Madagascar also has the 3rd or 4th largest population of "White Africans". If Madagascar is the very 9th circle of African hell, someone forgot to tell them.
You've missed my entire point. They could have picked ANYWHERE, it doesn't matter, and I've NEVER trumpeted the argument that <gasp> Madagascar itself is the critical issue. If you take a place, overpopulate it, guard it in a way that prevents movement in or out or to have an economy, and do not provision it with food and health resources, you WILL have mass death. Poland's climate is not phenomenally different now than it was 70 years ago -- so why was there so much mass death in Polish ghettos in the 1940s? Because of SS ghetto policy. Exactly what was planned for Madagascar -- an SS-guarded ghetto, without permission to enter or leave, and with violent reprisals against Jewish internees. All that is in writing from the Madagascar planning.
little grey rabbit wrote:But economic opportunities being equal if I had to choose between a tiny patch of desert fought over by Arabs and Madagascar, I would choose Madagascar.
And again what evidence do you have that there were any economic opportunities being planned?

David Thompson
Forum Staff
Posts: 23722
Joined: 20 Jul 2002, 20:52
Location: USA

Re: Madagascar

#28

Post by David Thompson » 21 Nov 2015, 18:40

Nazi planning for the Madagascar deportation is the critical issue not being discussed here. If the Nazi plan was simply to rob and then maroon a group of newly-destitute Europeans on some part of the island, a malicious and reckless indifference (at best) to their survival is the obvious inference. If there was little or no planning, a reasonable person would conclude that the plan was a pipe dream or a cover story for something more sinister.

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Madagascar

#29

Post by michael mills » 22 Nov 2015, 11:24

I have now retrieved the Jensen book on the Madagascar Plan, which contains the full texts of the Rademacher and Eichmann planning documents, and I will post summaries and translations of the most relevant parts, ie those parts that deal with settlement infrastructure.

As a starter, I can tell you that the German Government certainly planned to exploit the Jewish colonists economically. It was proposed to create a single central agency that would purchase all the agricultural produce of the colonists and sell them the goods they needed. The purpose of having a single buying and selling agency was to prevent the Jewish colonists having any trading relationships with the outside world.

At the very least, the existence of such a monopolistic/monopsonistic agency would allow the colonists to be exploited and kept at a low standard of living. Theoretically it could also be used to gradually starve them by withholding supplies, but there is nothing in the documents that suggests any such intention.

It needs to be borne in mind that the essential aim of the Hitler regime was to remove all Jews from the living space of the German people, and from the whole sphere under German control or influence. If that removal could be accomplished by simply sending the Jews to some destination far away from Germany, that was the German Government's\ preferred option, as clearly shown by its cooperation with the Zionist Organisation in supporting Jewish emigration to Palestine.

The crucial factor that caused the shift to mass killing was the failure to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941, which raised the prospect that Germany would eventually be defeated and prevented from expelling the millions of Jews living in Europe. In the minds of the National Socialist leadership, driven by their anti-Jewish ideology, that would leave the German people vulnerable to a Jewish revenge, which could only be prevented by destroying the Jews first; that way of thinking is quite clear from the various speeches made by Himmler to selected audiences in 1943 and 1944.

However, as I have constantly stressed, the Madagascar Plan could only have been implemented in a situation where the war in the West had come to an end with Germany not being defeated. In that situation, there would have been no imperative to kill the Jews, since they could simply be removed from Europe, with the logistical assistance of the defeated Western Allies.

Paul Lantos
Member
Posts: 304
Joined: 19 May 2013, 16:25

Re: Madagascar

#30

Post by Paul Lantos » 23 Nov 2015, 06:27

While I agree with much you've written, you are still missing the critical distinction I've made between a discrete plan for extermination (i.e. policy in 1942) and a plan that was predictably to result in death on a massive scale. It was a far more brutal plan than the emigration policy in the late 1930s, and it should rightly be seen as an intermediate step in the regime's radicalization.

Post Reply

Return to “Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes”