Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

by Timothy Snyder

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.