Black Earth(50)

Jews, not seen as a race, were to be removed from the habitat entirely. The new German lawlessness took its most striking form in the expulsion of Jews from their homes to ghettos in the cities. For the Germans, the ghettos were holding tanks where Jews were concentrated before deportation to some exotic place where nature would take its course. In the overpopulated ghettos, deaths outnumbered births by a factor of ten. Most of the people who died in the first months were Jews who had been deported from the countryside or from other towns and had few or no possessions and connections. The big ghettos, such as Warsaw, took on a kind of colonial appearance, as rickshaws replaced automobiles (stolen by the Germans) and the streetcar service (restricted by the Germans). The luster of subjugation attracted German tourists, who often returned home with a pleasant sense of imperial mastery. The problem for those responsible in Berlin was that there was no actual overseas colony to which Jews could be deported.

The Nazi racial policy of 1939 and 1940, the purification of the conquered Polish territories, was a cruel shambles. Himmler was given broad powers as a kind of racial commissar on October 7, 1939. His best idea was to deport Jews and Poles from the Polish territories annexed to Germany to the General Government. Even if this had somehow succeeded, which it did not, it would merely have displaced the racial enemies a short distance to the east. The vast number of Poles in the annexed territories made the scheme dystopian. In the territories annexed to the Reich, Poles outnumbered Germans about twenty to one, and even Jews slightly outnumbered Germans. The city of ?ód?, incorporated into Nazi Germany, became, by population, its largest Jewish and its largest Polish city.

In practice, Himmler deported Poles first. They were regarded as the pertinent political enemy, and their farms could be given to Germans who were arriving from territories that the Soviet Union had invaded. Some 87,883 people were deported from the annexed territories in December 1939 and another 40,128 early the next year, most of them Poles. These numbers signify a vast amount of human suffering but hardly altered the demographic balance. The transport of Jews from the Reich to the General Government was pointless in conception and unachieved in practice. It was very exciting, however, to some Germans on the territory of the prewar Reich, who began to lobby for the deportation of Jews from their localities. Heydrich had to stop such local initiatives in December 1939. It was then, in January 1940, that Heydrich’s subordinate Eichmann made an approach to Stalin: Perhaps the Soviet Union would be willing to take two million Jews from German-occupied Poland? Stalin was not interested in admitting masses of unscreened people to the USSR; receiving Jews seems to have been one of the few Nazi requests he declined during the period of his alliance with Hitler.

The ghettos became a holding pen for a much more ambitious deportation plan: the evacuation of Jews to Madagascar. This was the black hole for Jews that had received the most attention in Germany and throughout Europe before the war. It was the solution that Hitler had suggested to Polish leaders in 1938, who could not understand how he meant to combine it with war. A victory over France, German leaders hoped, would open up Madagascar, which was a French colonial possession. Having defeated Poland, Hitler returned to his basic scenario for the war: remove the French threat from the west to avoid the strategic problem of encirclement, and then attack the Soviet Union to achieve the war’s aim, Lebensraum. After German troops entered Paris on June 14, 1940, Eichmann sent an envoy to look for the documentation of the 1936 Polish-French discussions about Madagascar. The new French government established in Vichy supported a Madagascar deportation. But shipping millions of people from Europe to the Indian Ocean was a project that would require the approval, and indeed the support, of the British Empire. When France fell, Britain remained in the war.

This was the latest surprise for Hitler, who was wrong about a number of strategic predictions. The western allies were supposed to defend Czechoslovakia but did not; Poland was not supposed to fight but it did; France was supposed to fight longer than it did; Britain was supposed to see the logic of peace if France fell but did not. Winston Churchill, who had succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister, was defiance itself. On July 10, 1940, Hitler began an air war with Britain, and expressed the conviction that the defeat of Britain would remove the final barrier to the Madagascar plan. But he was in no position to defeat the United Kingdom. The German air force was outfought by the British, who commissioned skilled Polish and Czech pilots. The German navy was too small to mount a serious amphibious assault on the British coast. Like so much else, the invasion had not really been thought through. An outline for a Madagascar deportation was already out of date when completed in August 1940, since by then Hitler had abandoned any intention to occupy Great Britain.