Hitler's Hangman (45 page)

of the thirty-year-old Dr Helmut Knochen – Heydrich spoke of a ‘pitiful’

little group of fifteen men whom he managed to dispatch with Göring’s

blessing – was sent to Paris in order to monitor the activities of ‘Jews,

Communists, émigrés, lodges and Churches’. The group consisted of highly

ambitious young men, but until May 1942, when Heydrich’s former personal

adjutant Carl Albrecht Oberg was instal ed as higher SS and police leader in

Paris, their actions were restricted by the overal authority of the military

administration under the arch-conservative Prussian General Otto von

Stülpnagel.15

From Heydrich’s personal point of view, matters were further complicated

by the fact that Werner Best, who had left the RSHA after his fal ing-out

with Heydrich, was appointed head of the civil administration in occupied

France. Although Heydrich had no reason to doubt Best’s firm ideological

commitment to SS policies, he knew that, in implementing these policies,

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

177

Best would largely rely on his own apparatus rather than on Heydrich’s

agents. Given that Heydrich had no intention of reconciling with Best, it

would be difficult to exert any direct influence on German occupation

policies in France for the foreseeable future.16

Nazi Germany’s victorious campaigns in Western Europe thus consti-

tuted a setback for Heydrich. He had not been able to use the conquests

of the spring of 1940 – the occupation of Norway, Denmark, the

Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg – in the same way as the

campaign against Poland. But he was not ready to despair completely.

Distrustful of the military Abwehr, led by Canaris, and confident that

Germany would emerge victorious from the now imminent Battle of

Britain, he instructed his staff to compile arrest lists for the soon-to-be

conquered British Isles. Franz Six, head of Department II in Heydrich’s

RSHA, was put in charge of
Einsatzgruppen
operations in the United

Kingdom while Heydrich himself prepared for flight operations over the

Channel. His actual involvement in the Battle of Britain, however,

amounted to no more than a handful of patrol flights over the North Sea

island of Wangerooge – a perfect way of being involved in the battle

without running the risk of actually getting killed.17

Based on the interrogations of the abducted British MI6 agents Best

and Stevens and on his own preconceptions, Walter Schellenberg compiled

a handbook on Britain for Gestapo use after a successful invasion.

Schellenberg’s classified
Informationsheft GB
offers a glimpse of his and

Heydrich’s perception of Britain as a country supposedly run by

Freemasons, Jews and a small public-school-trained elite. ‘Democratic

freedom in Britain’ was described as a sham, while the Archbishop of

Canterbury and the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations

were held responsible for anti-German propaganda. At the end of the

document, the ‘Special Search List GB’ (‘Sonderfahndungsliste GB’)

listed 2,820 individuals for special Gestapo attention, of whom thirty were

to be arrested immediately after the invasion. Had the Nazis ever

conquered Britain, the Gestapo would have arrested not only Winston

Churchill and the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee, but also

pacifists like Norman Angell, writers such as H. G. Wells and German

émigrés such as the novelist Stefan Zweig.18

The ‘Special Search List GB’ quickly disappeared in the archives

of the RSHA. In the autumn of 1940, after a series of bombing raids

that left more than 20,000 civilians dead, the Luftwaffe abandoned the

Battle of Britain and the navy shelved its plan for Operation Sea Lion,

the invasion of England. Hitler instead decided to attack the Soviet

Union the following year as an indirect means of putting pressure on

Britain.19

178

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Madagascar

In the intoxicating summer of 1940, when Germany seemed to have won

the war and influential elements in the British government were at least

secretly considering the option of a negotiated peace, Heydrich’s thoughts

turned to the future. While the military conquest of Western Europe had

brought him more frustrations than successes, the fall of France promised

to open up new avenues for the solution of the Jewish question. The

euphoria of victory in June 1940 provided the perfect moment for a

renewed attempt to implement sweeping plans for the total removal of all

Jews and Poles from the now massively expanded Third Reich. Following

the French defeat, earlier plans to push the Jews into a reservation in

Poland were replaced with another project for the territorial solution of

the Jewish problem: the Madagascar plan.

The idea of creating a large Jewish reservation on Madagascar, a French

colonial island off the African coast, was hardly original. Since the late nine-

teenth century, it had been promoted in various anti-Semitic pamphlets

about the future of European Jewry, not only in Germany, but also in France,

Britain and the Netherlands. The Polish, French and British governments of

the late 1930s al toyed with the idea of resettling at least some of ‘their’ Jews

on Madagascar, although none of these plans ever materialized.20

Heydrich’s SD, too, had been contemplating the possibility of trans-

forming some inhospitable territory abroad into a future Jewish state ever

since the early 1930s, but practical planning was slow.21 By 1937 internal

discussions had proceeded only to the point where the SD’s Jewish experts

could present Heydrich with a memorandum that envisaged achieving the

‘de-Judification of Germany’ through the emigration of German Jews

into countries with a ‘low cultural level’, thus preventing the emergence

of ‘new world conspiracy centres’ in more advanced countries. Alongside

Madagascar, the territories of Ecuador, Colombia and Palestine were

advocated as possible areas for future Jewish settlement.22 In early March

of the following year, the director of the SD’s Jewish desk, Herbert Hagen,

ordered his subordinate, Adolf Eichmann, to prepare for Heydrich a

memorandum on the foreign-policy implications of the Jewish question.23

In the early summer of 1940 such previously abstract plans suddenly

seemed feasible and Heydrich quickly grasped their relevance as a poten-

tial sinecure to his numerically increasing Jewish problem. If the concen-

tration of East European Jews around Lublin was an idea that had proved

impossible to realize, the concept of shipping all European Jews to

Madagascar seemed like a panacea to Germany’s frustrated demographic

engineers. Inspired by the sudden availability of France’s colonial posses-

sions, Heydrich quickly informed Himmler of the new possibilities.

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

179

Himmler in turn presented Hitler with a memorandum on the ‘treatment

of alien populations in the East’. Within the broader context of ethnic

engineering in Eastern Europe, Himmler speculated on the future fate of

the Jews. He envisaged that through ‘large-scale emigration of all Jews to

Africa or to some other colony I hope to see the term Jew completely

extinguished’. Although Himmler, out of ‘inner conviction’, rejected ‘the

Bolshevik methods of physical annihilation of a people as unGerman and

impossible’, he advocated forced migration as a possible non-genocidal

solution. Implicit in his suggestions, however, was the subtext that any

colonial setting was likely to lack the basic conditions necessary for the

survival of all of the deported Jews. Hitler commented that the memo-

randum was ‘very good and correct’ and repeatedly referred to the

Madagascar project over the coming weeks.24

The earliest concrete plan for Jewish resettlement on Madagascar was

worked out not by the RSHA but by the Foreign Office’s newly appointed

Jewish expert, Franz Rademacher, a young career diplomat who had

recently returned from his first post in Montevideo. Rademacher

presented a first memorandum on the Madagascar project to his boss,

Under Secretary Martin Luther, on 3 June 1940, less than three weeks

before the official French surrender at Compiègne.25 Rademacher’s

proposed solution to the Jewish problem – ‘all Jews out of Europe’ –

envisaged that Madagascar would be ‘placed under the administration of a

German police governor who will be subordinated to the administration

of the Reich Leader SS. In this territory the Jews will be granted self-

administration.’ By adopting this strategy the Jews would remain ‘in

German hands’ to guarantee ‘the future good behaviour of their racial

comrades in America’. The Madagascar project (just like the Jewish reser-

vation project in Poland that preceded it) was thus intended as a form of

hostage taking.26

Heydrich quickly got wind of the Foreign Office’s plans. Although he,

too, believed that a unique opportunity had arrived to solve the Jewish

question, he was dismayed that the Foreign Office had dared to venture

into an area he perceived as his own jurisdiction. Convinced that only his

apparatus had the necessary expertise to deal with the Jewish problem, he

acted swiftly. On 24 June, only two days after France had signed the armi-

stice, he wrote a letter to Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, reminding

him that in January 1939 Göring had placed
him
in charge of co-

ordinating Jewish emigration and demanding to be included in all future

deliberations about the planned ‘territorial solution’. Heydrich also

reminded Ribbentrop that his forced emigration policies up until

September 1939 had been highly successful, indicating that he, not

the Foreign Office, was ideally placed to orchestrate the now necessary

180

HITLER’S HANGMAN

‘territorial final solution’. This ‘solution’ would tackle the ‘whole problem’

of some 3.25 million Jews ‘
presently
under German control’.27

Heydrich did not wait for Ribbentrop’s reply. Preparations for a

comprehensive deportation plan were begun by the RSHA immediately,

even though Heydrich intended to see the plan implemented only after

the anticipated end of the war in 1942. On Heydrich’s orders, Eichmann

and his team of Jewish experts began to collate climatic and geographic

information on Madagascar from the German Tropical Institute in

Hamburg and the French Colonial Ministry. Eichmann also consulted

with representatives of the two major German shipping lines, Hapag and

Norddeutsche Lloyd, for their views on how to solve transportation

issues.28 Fantastical as it may seem, the Madagascar project was taken very

seriously by Heydrich, both because it promised a major breakthrough

regarding the Jewish problem and because it offered a way out of the long-

standing conflict with the powerful ruler of the General Government,

Hans Frank. Frank, delighted to hear that the deportations from Germany

would no longer affect the General Government, took note of the

Madagascar plan with ‘colossal relief ’.29

In response to Heydrich’s letter of 24 June, Ribbentrop conceded

Heydrich’s jurisdiction in the administration of a potential Jewish ‘super-

ghetto’ on Madagascar and instructed Rademacher to proceed with his

preparations in ‘closest agreement’ with the RSHA. In his ‘Plan for the

Solution of the Jewish Question’ of 2 July 1940, Rademacher envisaged the

establishment of a ‘police state’ on Madagascar in which the 4 mil ion Jews

of Europe currently under German control would live under an autono-

mous (but SS-control ed) jurisdiction with its own police and postal

administration, a move, he believed, that would underline Germany’s

‘generosity’. The real power, however, would lie in the hands of Heydrich’s

Security Police, the only agency with ‘the necessary experience in this area:

it has the means to prevent escapes from the island, and it also has the

experience to take those suitable punitive measures which may become

necessary on account of hostile actions against Germany by Jews in the

United States’. The Jews would be held financial y liable for the entire

resettlement process to Madagascar and al their European assets would be

administered by a special European bank for that purpose.30

Despite the far-reaching responsibilities offered to the Security Police

by the Foreign Office, Heydrich was not impressed. Two weeks later, on

15 August, he transmitted the RSHA’s own extensive proposals for the