April 9, 2016
Hungarian women and children arriving at Auschwitz, May/June 1944
A work camp. Really?
According to Jewish historian David Cesarani, Hitler's progress
towards Jewish mass extermination was never pre-planned
or preordained. The Nazis were sensitive to world opinion and didn't get
started in ernest until after it became clear they were losing the war.
by Sarah Helm
(Abridged by henrymakow.com)
Early in what he calls his "reappraisal" of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution, David Cesarani details the absurdity of an earlier "solution" to the "Jewish question". In May 1940, nine months into the war, Hitler still had no concerted plan for ridding Europe of its Jews, particularly the two million Polish Jews who had come under his rule since the invasion of Poland in 1939. When the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, produced "some thoughts", including "the large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or some colony", the idea was seized on.
The imminent defeat of France meant French colonies would soon become available, including the island of Madagascar, which was to be turned into "an open-air prison... like a parody of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine". The transfer could start within a month, with millions of Jews sent by ship. Such was the Germans' confidence that the building of ghettos in Poland was halted, and the SS started learning Swahili.
But Madagascar, like so many other improvised "solutions", was a non-starter, not least because 25,000 French still lived there and no Axis ships could reach it through the British-controlled sea lanes. Once France collapsed, Hitler believed, Britain would sue for peace. But Hitler's "ham-fisted" offers didn't even warrant a response from Winston Churchill and, Cesarani writes, the Germans were left "to continue to fumble their way towards a solution according to their racial-biological precepts, but under circumstances they could not entirely control".
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