TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter VI: National-Socialist Policy of Jewish Emigration 183
emigration or evacuation of all Jews in the German sphere of influence, to
Madagascar. In his letter we read: 523
“Supplementary to the task already delegated to you with the order of
Jan. 14, ’39, of bringing the Jewish problem to the most favorable solution
consistent with the circumstances and in the form of the emigration or
evacuation, I hereby charge you to effect all necessary organizational,
practical, and material preparations for a total solution of the Jewish
question within the German sphere of influence in Europe. Insofar as the
responsibilities of other central authorities are involved in this, they are to
participate.
I further charge you to present me shortly with a comprehensive plan
for the organizational, practical, and material prerequisites for the execution
of our goal, the final solution of the Jewish question.”
This document is in full conformity with the Madagascar Plan. The instructions
from Göring issued as “[s]upplementary” to those already given to Heydrich
in the order of January 14, 1939, in fact consisted exclusively in the accomplishment
of the solution of the Jewish problem “in the form of emigration
or evacuation” 524 of the Jews from the Reich, while at the same time a
territorial ‘final solution’ for all Jews in the German-occupied European nations,
by means of forced resettlement to Madagascar, was the aim. Precisely
because it included all Jews of the occupied European nations, this solution
was designated as the “Gesamtlösung” (complete solution).
By virtue of the fact that Heydrich wrote on November 6, 1941, that he had
already been charged for years with the preparation for the ‘final solution’ in
Europe, 525 he himself was clearly referring to the task assigned to him by the
order of January 14, 1939, and identified the ‘final solution’ with the “solution
in form of an emigration or evacuation,” which Göring had specified as the
goal in the letter of July 31, 1941. In the same context belongs an order, which
was transmitted to the Foreign Office by Adolf Eichmann on August 28, 1941,
and which prohibited “an emigration of Jews out of the territories occupied by
us, in consideration of the final solution of the issue of European Jews, which
is in preparation and is approaching.” 526
3. From Madagascar Plan to Deportation to the East
In the following months, after the start of the Russian campaign, the prospect
of large territorial gains became realistic so that new perspectives devel-
523
The legal emigration into other states or the deportation to the east (Poland: October 1939 to
March 1940) or to the West (unoccupied France: October 1940).
524
PS-1624.
525
PA, Inland II A/B, AZ 83-85 Sdh. 4, Bd. 59/3.
526
CDJC, V-15.