Eichmann's eagerness to acquire some territory for “his” Jews is best understood in terms of his own career. The Nisko plan was “born” during the time of his rapid advancement, and it is more than likely that he saw himself as the future Governor General, like Hans Frank in Poland, or the future Protector, like Heydrich in Czechoslovakia, of a “Jewish State.” The utter fiasco of the whole enterprise, however, must have taught him a lesson about the possibilities and the desirability of “private” initiative. And since he and Stahlecker had acted within the framework of Heydrich's directives and with his explicit consent, this unique repatriation of Jews, clearly a temporary defeat for the police and the S.S., must also have taught him that the steadily increasing power of his own outfit did not amount to omnipotence, that the State Ministries and the other Party institutions were quite prepared to fight to maintain their own shrinking power.
Eichmann's second attempt at “putting firm ground under the feet of the Jews” was the Madagascar project. The plan to evacuate four million Jews from Europe to the French island off the southeast coast of Africa—an island with a native population of 4,370,000 and an area of 227,678 square miles of poor land—had originated in the Foreign Office and was then transmitted to the R.S.H.A. because, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther, who was in charge of Jewish affairs in the Wilhelmstrasse, only the police “possessed the experiences and the technical facilities to execute an evacuation of Jews en masse and to guarantee the supervision of the evacuees.” The “Jewish State” was to have a police governor under the jurisdiction of Himmler. The project itself had an odd history. Eichmann, confusing Madagascar with Uganda, always claimed to having dreamed “a dream once dreamed by the Jewish protagonist of the Jewish State idea, Theodor Herzl,” but it is true that his dream had been dreamed before-first by the Polish government, which in 1937 went to much trouble to look into the idea, only to find that it would be quite impossible to ship its own nearly three million Jews there without killing them, and, somewhat later, by the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, who had the more modest plan of shipping France's foreign Jews, numbering about two hundred thousand, to the French colony. He even consulted his German opposite number, Joachim von Ribbentrop, on the matter in 1938. Eichmann at any rate was told in the summer of 1940, when his emigration business had come to a complete standstill, to work out a detailed plan for the evacuation of four million Jews to Madagascar, and this project seems to have occupied most of his time until the invasion of Russia, a year later. (Four million is a strikingly low figure for making Europe judenrein. It obviously did not include three million Polish Jews who, as everybody knew, had been being massacred ever since the first days of the war.) That anybody except Eichmann and some other lesser luminaries ever took the whole thing seriously seems unlikely, for— apart from the fact that the territory was known to be unsuitable, not to mention the fact that it was, after all, a French possession —the plan would have required shipping space for four million in the midst of a war and at a moment when the British Navy was in control of the Atlantic. The Madagascar plan was always meant to serve as a cloak under which the preparations for the physical extermination of all the Jews of Western Europe could be carried forward (no such cloak was needed for the extermination of Polish Jews!), and its great advantage with respect to the army of trained anti-Semites, who, try as they might, always found themselves one step behind the Führer, was that it familiarized all concerned with the preliminary notion that nothing less than complete evacuation from Europe would do—no special legislation, no “dissimilation,” no ghettos would suffice. When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become “obsolete,” everybody was psychologically, or rather, logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could “evacuate,” the only “solution” was extermination.
Not that Eichmann, the truth-revealer for generations to come, ever suspected the existence of such sinister plans. What brought the Madagascar enterprise to naught was lack of time, and time was wasted through the never-ending interference from other offices. In Jerusalem, the police as well as the court tried to shake him out of his complacency. They confronted him with two documents concerning the meeting of September 21, 1939, mentioned above; one of them, a teletyped letter written by Heydrich and containing certain directives to the Einsatzgruppen, distinguished for the first time between a “final aim, requiring longer periods of time” and to be treated as “top secret,” and “the stages for achieving this final aim.” The phrase “final solution” did not yet appear, and the document is silent about the meaning of a “final aim.” Hence, Eichmann could have said, all right, the “final aim” was his Madagascar project, which at this time was being kicked around all the German offices; for a mass evacuation, the concentration of all Jews was a necessary preliminary “stage.” But Eichmann, after reading the document carefully, said immediately that he was convinced that “final aim” could only mean “physical extermination,” and concluded that “this basic idea was already rooted in the minds of the higher leaders, or the men at the very top.” This might indeed have been the truth, but then he would have had to admit that the Madagascar project could not have been more than a hoax. Well, he did not; he never changed his Madagascar story, and probably he just could not change it. It was as though this story ran along a different tape in his memory, and it was this taped memory that showed itself to be proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind.
His memory informed him that there had existed a lull in the activities against Western and Central European Jews between the outbreak of the war (Hitler, in his speech to the Reichstag of January 30, 1939, had “prophesied” that war would bring “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”) and the invasion of Russia. To be sure, even then the various offices in the Reich and in the occupied territories were doing their best to eliminate “the opponent, Jewry,” but there was no unified policy; it seemed as though every office had its own “solution” and might be permitted to apply it or to pit it against the solutions of its competitors. Eichmann's solution was a police state, and for that he needed a sizable territory. All his “efforts failed because of the lack of understanding of the minds concerned,” because of “rivalries,” quarrels, squabbling, because everybody “vied for supremacy.” And then it was too late; the war against Russia “struck suddenly, like a thunderclap.” That was the end of his dreams, as it marked the end of “the era of searching for a solution in the interest of both sides.” It was also, as he recognized in the memoirs he wrote in Argentina, “the end of an era in which there existed laws, ordinances, decrees for the treatment of individual Jews.” And, according to him, it was more than that, it was the end of his career, and though this sounded rather crazy in view of his present “fame,” it could not be denied that he had a point. For his outfit, which either in the actuality of “forced emigration” or in the “dream” of a Nazi-ruled Jewish State had been the final authority in all Jewish matters, now “receded into the second rank so far as the Final Solution of the Jewish question was concerned, for what was now initiated was transferred to different units, and negotiations were conducted by another Head Office, under the command of the former Reichsführer S.S. and Chief of the German Police.” The “different units” were the picked groups of killers, who operated in the rear of the Army in the East, and whose special duty consisted of massacring the native civilian population and especially the Jews; and the other Head Office was the W.V.H.A., under Oswald Pohl, to which Eichmann had to apply to find out the ultimate destination of each shipment of Jews. This was calculated according to the “absorptive capacity” of the various killing installations and also according to the requests for slave workers from the numerous industrial enterprises that had found it profitable to establish branches in the neighborhood of some of the death camps. (Apart from the not very important industrial enterprises of the S.S., such famous German firms as I.G. Farben, the Krupp Werke, and Siemens-Schuckert Werke had established plants in Auschwitz as well as near the Lublin death camps. Cooperation between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent; Höss of Auschwitz testified to very cordial social relations with the I.G. Farben representatives. As for working conditions, the idea was clearly to kill through labor; according to Hilberg, at least twenty-five thousand of the approximately thirty-five thousand Jews who worked for one of the I.G. Farben plants died.) As far as Eichmann was concerned, the point was that evacuation and deportation were no longer the last stages of the “solution.” His department had become merely instrumental. Hence he had every reason to be very “embittered and disappointed” when the Madagascar project was shelved; and the only thing he had to console him was his promotion to Obersturmbannführer, which came in October, 1941.