Black Earth(33)

In summer 1938, G?ring was once again trying to tempt the Poles with the fertile soil of Ukraine. Matters came to a head that October, when Hitler presented the Poles with a “comprehensive solution” to all of the problems in German-Polish relations. Such a grand stroke was very much Hitler’s style, and he could believe that he was offering Poland a more than reasonable arrangement. The claims he made on Poland’s territory were mild by comparison with the German mainstream: that Danzig, a free city on the Baltic coast, be allowed to return to Germany; and that German authorities be allowed to build an extraterritorial autobahn across Polish territory between the main body of German territory and its noncontiguous Prussian districts. These two issues were negotiable, and indeed were negotiated. The real problem was what Poland would get “in return.” As German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop explained to Ambassador Lipski, the Germans envisioned for the near future “joint action in colonial matters, the emigration of Jews from Poland, and a joint policy to Russia on the basis of the Anti-Comintern Pact.”

Ribbentrop made much of the gains of Ukrainian territory that Poland would supposedly win in the conquered Soviet Union. This fell on deaf ears. The decision against intervening in the Soviet Union had been made in Warsaw in 1933. Polish leaders had ceased to believe that Ukraine could be transformed easily by outside actors. They calculated that the Germans might take Moscow with Polish help, but did not see how a political victory could follow. They were keenly aware that a joint German-Polish invasion of the USSR would involve massive German troop movements around or through Poland, and anticipated that any such war would leave Poland a German satellite.

The side talk between German and Polish leaders during the critical weeks of late 1938 was about the Jewish question. Hitler had explained to Lipski in September that he anticipated a common anti-Jewish action by Germany, Poland, and Romania. In November, Hitler praised Polish authorities for undertaking the vital struggle against the Jews. At the time of his proposal of a “comprehensive solution” and in subsequent discussions with Polish diplomats, Hitler stressed the positive connection between an anti-Soviet alliance and the removal of the Jews from Europe, in the first instance from Poland and Romania. In his mind, the destruction of the Soviet Union was part of a larger campaign against the planetary Jewish threat. His Polish interlocutors did not follow this chain of reasoning.

In these negotiations the Germans and Poles seemed to be discussing the same desired outcome: an emigration of millions of European Jews to Madagascar. Although the two sides were apparently referring to the same island and the same action, something very different was meant. The Germans were perfectly correct that the Polish leadership feared the Soviet Union and wanted to be rid of most Polish Jews. The Poles saw these as distinct problems, where the attempt to solve one might create problems for the other. They were opposed to a war of aggression against the Soviet Union in any case. And they simply could not understand how the Germans meant to invade the Soviet Union while deporting the Jews of Europe. Any such mass deportation would have required the cooperation of the colonial powers, the British and the French, which would obviously not be proffered to countries that were trying to alter the world order by force. In simple logistical terms the idea also seemed to make no sense. How could Poland arrange a deportation of millions of Jews while the country was mobilized for war? Should the tens of thousands of Jewish officers and soldiers be pulled from the ranks of the Polish army? Insofar as the Poles understood German intentions, they were wary.

Most important was what the Poles did not understand. They could not grasp a special feature of Nazi thought: the aim to do something difficult or even impossible, in the secret knowledge that failure would prepare the way to something still more radical. The geopolitical vision of the Poles failed them here. They could not see that for the Nazis “Madagascar” was not simply a place, but a label, a bookmark in a burning book. It was synonymous with a Final Solution; or, in Himmler’s words, with “the complete extirpation of the concept of Jews.” For the Poles, Madagascar was an actual island in the actual Indian Ocean, an actual possession of the actual French empire, an actual site of an actual exploratory mission, a subject of actual political discussions, one of two places (along with Palestine) that were seriously considered as destination points for a mass migration of Polish Jewry. Polish leaders did not grasp that for the Nazis the issue was not the feasibility of one deportation plan, but the creation of general conditions under which Jews could be destroyed one way or another. Given their own obsession with the idea of statehood, Poles could not see that a bloody whirlwind of improvisation was coming, where German aggression would destroy polities, opening pathways toward the unthinkable. German leaders would later continue to speak of “Madagascar” even after their men had killed the Jews who were supposed to emigrate there.