The Madagascar Plan was the Nazis’ last effort to solve the “Jewish Problem” before the Final Solution. Imagine the leader of a global superpower announcing a plan for removing an entire ethnic group from a territory they’ve long inhabited. Neighboring states would have to make land available to that superpower to resettle the displaced peoples. The refugees would “have their own administration in this territory” but they would “not acquire … citizenship” since any “sense of responsibility towards the world” would forbid making “the gift of a sovereign state” to a people “which has had no independent state for thousands of years.” No, the plan described in brief here is not President Donald Trump’s Gaza plan, proposing a United States takeover of Gaza and mass relocation of its Palestinian population. It is the so-called “Madagascar Plan,” devised by the Third Reich in 1940 to “resettle” European Jews. That plan was the Third Reich’s final major proposal for removing the Jews from the Greater Germanic Reich Adolf Hitler envisioned in Mein Kampf prior to the “Final Solution”— the indiscriminate shootings of Jewish men, women, and children on the Eastern Front, leading to mass killings in death camps and gas chambers in late 1941. In that history lies a warning: Plans for the mass relocation of a population seen as troublesome or dangerous can rapidly devolve into the loss of sovereignty, of human and civil rights, and, eventually, ethnic cleansing. The idea of creating a “colony for Jews” in Madagascar, first proposed by the antisemite Paul de Lagarde in the 1880s, had long featured prominently in plans for a territorial solution to the “Jewish Question,” namely the question of whether Jews could assimilate into society at large and, if not, what ought to be done with them.
via forward: Why does Trump’s Gaza plan sound so familiar? Because the Nazis tried it first
