The Nazi Madagascar Plan in Hitler’s Agenda

2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II and the 80th anniversary of Nazi plans to deport 4 million European Jews to the island of Madagascar. Despite the relevance of the Holocaust history, this page of it has been little studied: perhaps because these plans have remained on paper; the literature on the Madagascar Project (both Polish and German) is very scarce. Object of this study is the history of the plan of deportation of European Jews to Madagascar. The subject of research is a document, previously unpublished in Russia: “Madagascar Plan” of the Third Reich (1940). The purpose of the publication is to present this source to the Russian scientific community, the archival community, and students. The objectives of the publication are to introduce this new German-language source into Russian historiography on the Holocaust by translating it into Russian; to show its historical significance in the escalation of the Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question.” The study concludes that the failure of the Madagascar Project opened a gate for the “final solution of the Jewish question” by physical destruction of 6 million European Jews. The country that saved the European Jews from total annihilation was the Soviet Union with its Red Army, which liberated the world from the Nazism.