The Madagaskar Plan (67 page)
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Authors: Guy Saville
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THE MADAGASKAR PLAN. Copyright © 2015 by Guy Saville. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
Cover photograph: DIZ Muenchen GmbH, Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy
Author photograph by Ant Jones
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Saville, Guy, 1973–
The Madagaskar plan: a novel / Guy Saville.—First edition.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-0-8050-9595-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-8050-9596-8 (electronic copy)
1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 2. Madagascar—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6119.A953M33 2015
823'.92—dc23
2014041147
First U.S. Edition: August 2015
Published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CONTENTS
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Capital of the Reich, formerly Berlin.
*
Lord Halifax, prime minister after Churchill resigned; he had negotiated peace with Hitler.
*
The remnants of France’s army in Africa.
*
The common name for Deutsch Westafrika. Hochburg had administered the colony before taking up the governorship of Kongo. It was to the Sahara region of Muspel that the black population had been deported.
*
The 1917 Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Twenty years later, the Peel Commission suggested the partition of the territory between Arabs and Jews. Neither was implemented.
*
One of the native inhabitants of Madagascar.
*
Formerly Austria.
*
After the Casablanca Conference, and the redrawing of the continent, South Africa remained an independent, neutral state.
*
Council of New Europe.
*
Peter Witte, ed.,
Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers, 1941/42
(Hamburg: Christians, 1999).
*
For a detailed explanation of “why Madagascar?” see Eric T. Jennings’s essay “Writing Madagascar Back into the Madagascar Plan,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
21, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 187–217.
*
The plan has little to say about the 24,000 French colonists living on the island, other than they would be “resettled and compensated,” and nothing about the 3.6 million native Malagasy.
*
Hans Jensen’s
Der Madagaskar Plan
(Munich: Herbig, 1997) is a comprehensive, book-length study of the plan and was indispensable in the writing of this novel. Unfortunately, it is not available in English. Christopher R. Browning’s
The Origins of the Final Solution
(London: Heinemann, 2004) was another helpful text. Browning is especially interesting on how the Nazis evolved from a policy of expelling Jews to mass murder during the years 1939–42.
†
From a diary entry by Adam Czerniaków, head of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, 1 July 1940.
‡
See Mazower’s
Hitler’s Empire
(London: Allen Lane, 2008).
§
Eugene Hevesi, “Hitler’s Plan for Madagascar,”
Contemporary Jewish Record
4, no. 4 (August 1941).
*
The 10 percent that were permitted mostly filled gaps in the economy. There was an acute shortage of domestic staff during the period, and women willing to go into service were allowed entry—hence why Madeleine works as a maid.
†
As quoted from the diary of his private secretary Oliver Harvey, 25 April 1943.
*
Compare Goebbels’s diary entry for 18 August 1941, after he’d discussed Madagascar with Hitler: “Since the ’30s there have only been two possibilities for the Führer: in the case of victory, banishment for the Jews; if he fails in his goal and loses the war, sweeping revenge and their destruction.”
†
For a detailed account of the KdF, see
Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich,
by Shelley Baranowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).