Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler and Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski (right in the photo).

Speaking to Russia’s top military officers on 24 December 2019, President Vladimir Putin said that he became acquainted with archival documents which were seized during the fall of Berlin in 1945.

They indicate that, in 1938, according to Marshal Józef Piłsudski, Poland contemplated and planned with the German Reich the deportation of Polish and German Jews to Africa.

They are, in all likelihood, related to the "Madagascar plan" which was the subject of the Lepecki Commission, jointly set up by the two states. The plan was promoted by the then French Foreign Affairs Minister, Georges Bonnet [1], who, as an admirer of the Reich policies on Jews, had suggested to his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to deport French and German Jews to that distant French colony.

The plan was abandoned at the start of the Second World War considering the unfeasibility of transporting the Jews to the target destination, due the presence of the British Navy.

President Putin linked this archival evidence both to the historical revisionism of the current Polish government and to an European Parliament resolution making the Soviet Union responsible for the Second World War [2].

[1] Georges Bonnet was a minister affiliated with the right wing of the Radical Party. He was a staunch supporter the Munich Agreement and penned the Franco-German friendship Declaration. See: “The Day the West Likes to Forget”, by Michael Jabara Carley, Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia), Voltaire Network, 25 September 2015.