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with little evidence to suggest that the scheme had intended their widespread murder. This is supported through a quote from "one of the main agitators"4 for radical action against the Jews, Joseph Goebbels, who talks of the Fuhrer wanting to "gradually push them all out"5 and how the Madagascar Plan would be "most suitable"5 for achieving such an aim, views which at no point suggest a more sinister motive.

Despite this, a number of historians are convinced that the scheme was littered with connotations for the Final Solution. Christopher R. Browning for instance suggests that had the Nazis "succeeded in carrying out the plan as they intended, it would have been a murderous operationnot yet the Final Solution but nonetheless genocidal in its implications"6. Though this view is strengthened by the fact that the Holocaust began a year later in 1941, Browning's opinion is weakened by evidence from a conversation between Hitler and the German Ambassador to France, Otto Abetz, whereby the Fuhrer had stated his intention to "evacuate all Jews from Europe after the war"7. This conversation clearly opposes Browning's view in that there is little evidence to suggest Hitler had ever intended a "murderous"6 Madagascar Plan, or even the Holocaust at this point in time. Overwhelming evidence therefore suggests truth in the idea that the Fuhrer had no intent for mass execution of Jews through the Madagascar plan in the late 1930s, nor had he any murderous intent toward Jews prior to the formation of the plan.

Despite Browning's earlier views of a "murderous"6 underlying theme to the Madagascar Plan, he appears to contradict himself later in his work, suggesting that the scheme, along with the resultant Final Solution, were "not pre-conceived plans for Jewish genocide, but more discovered possibilities"8 through which Hitler was influenced to implement by radical party members. Saul Friedlander holds a similar view; arguing that the "idealistic goal and murderous rage shared by Fuhrer and the hard core' of the party led to Hitler's ultimate decision to exterminate the Jews"9. This such view suggests no prior intent on Hitler's part for mass execution, but more the possibility that Nazi party members latched on to, and subsequently influenced Hitler's policies for complete Aryanisation' to include mass extermination; therefore satisfying their own "murderous"6 rage . It was this correlation of beliefs that ultimately resulted in increasingly extremist tactics and anti-Semitic

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