Did the ss try to evacuate jews to palestine and madagasgar before building the concentratoin camps
Executive summary
The Nazi leadership—including SS officers such as Adolf Eichmann—did explore territorial “solutions” that envisaged expelling or concentrating Jews outside continental Europe, most notably the Madagascar Plan which was developed in 1940 and later abandoned; Palestine was a destination for prewar Jewish emigration but was effectively ruled out by Nazi planners for political reasons rather than because it was an SS resettlement project [1] [2] [3]. When evacuation schemes proved impractical in wartime, Nazi policy shifted toward confinement and systematic murder in extermination camps in occupied Poland rather than large-scale overseas resettlement [4] [5] [6].
1. The SS and the language of “evacuation”: early policies and emigration
Before mass murder became Nazi policy, the regime used legal pressure, violence and forced emigration to reduce Jewish presence in Germany and occupied territories, and hundreds of thousands emigrated abroad—some to the United States, Argentina and the British Mandate of Palestine—during the 1930s [2] [3]. The SS and its departments, especially under Reinhard Heydrich and with Eichmann in charge of Jewish affairs, operated institutions that handled emigration and “evacuation” plans, which should be read as administrative and coercive measures rather than benevolent relocation programs [3] [7].
2. The Madagascar Plan: an SS-linked deportation proposal, not a humanitarian evacuation
From mid-1940 Nazi officials, including Eichmann’s department and the Foreign Office, actively developed a scheme to deport Europe’s Jews to the French colony of Madagascar; the proposal appears in ministry memoranda and Eichmann’s later testimony, and has been called the Madagascar Plan in contemporary and scholarly accounts [2] [7] [1]. Sources emphasize that the plan was intended as a removal or segregation of Jews from Europe and, in some interpretations, as a device that would lead to massive attrition under harsh conditions rather than safe settlement [8] [9].
3. Why Madagascar failed and what followed
The Madagascar Plan was never implemented—logistical barriers including the British naval position after Britain remained unconquered, Allied control of sea lanes, and wartime exigencies made mass transport impossible—and Nazi officials shelved it by late 1940–1942 [1] [10] [2]. Historians and documentation show that once transoceanic deportation proved impractical and the war expanded eastward, Nazi planners turned to other territorial and then murderous solutions, culminating in the Final Solution and the construction or repurposing of extermination camps in occupied Poland [4] [5] [6].
4. Palestine: a destination for migrants, not an SS evacuation program
Palestine was a real destination for many Jewish emigrants before the war and was discussed by various actors, but Nazi officials generally rejected Palestine as an official destination because they opposed the creation of a strong Jewish polity there and because it was under British control; some Nazis briefly considered it but deemed it unsuitable [2] [3]. There is no documentary basis in the supplied reporting to say the SS ran a systematic program to “evacuate” Jews to Palestine in the sense of organizing mass SS-led transport as they did conceive for Madagascar; rather, Palestinian immigration in the 1930s was driven by Jewish agencies and limited legal routes rather than Nazi resettlement plans [2] [3].
5. Scholarly disagreement and the interpretive arc from deportation to extermination
Scholars treat the Madagascar proposal as part of a continuum: some view it as a late-stage territorial plan that presaged extermination by committing to physical attrition, while others stress that ideas of territorial solutions were common in interwar Europe and not uniformly genocidal in conception; the dominant interpretation in recent research and primary documents is that after Madagascar’s failure Nazi policy moved toward systematic murder [9] [4] [5]. Primary sources from the Eichmann trials and Holocaust documentation make clear the sequence: proposals for deportation—including Madagascar and other reservations—were discussed, then abandoned, and the machinery of deportation was repurposed to feed extermination camps [7] [11] [6].
6. Conclusion and limits of the sources
In short, the SS and Nazi bureaucracy did attempt and plan territorial “solutions” such as the Madagascar Plan—Eichmann and his office were centrally involved—and the regime had earlier encouraged emigration including to Palestine, but there was not an SS-run program to evacuate Europe’s Jews en masse to Palestine, and Madagascar remained an unimplemented, ultimately abandoned plan before the regime shifted to building and using extermination camps [3] [1] [4]. This account relies on the provided documentary and secondary-source extracts; it does not attempt to adjudicate every interpretive nuance in the scholarship beyond those sources.