J is for JUST COULDN’T FIT IN

Apologies for another long break, but I thought I’d sneak in an entry for Christmas. Earlier in this blog I mentioned how I ended up with so much research material it was impossible to include it all. I had literally hundreds of pages of notes; I could have written a non-fiction book. So I thought I’d survey some of the things I toyed with including in The Madagaskar Plan but I JUST COULDN’T FIT IN.

Financing of the Plan

The most fascinating aspect of the Madagascar Plan which I had to omit was its funding. One reason for this was the sheer complexity of it all, but to summarise: the SS planned to finance the Jewish deportation by seizing their assets and investing them in a new intra-European bank overseen by Göring. This bank would pay for the Jews’ transportation costs from Europe to Africa as well as investing in the basic infrastructure needed on the island to cope with such a large influx of numbers. The resettlement would therefore be self-funding with the top Nazis creaming off a levy on all transactions. After the Jews were settled, the bank would take on a new role as the economic intermediary between the island and the rest of the world. Jews would be allowed to run small farms and businesses on the island but not trade directly. Thus ‘Jewish financial contagion’, as the Nazis saw it, would never again threaten the global economy.

Zionism

Zionism was an ever present difficulty to me as I worked on the book. It would be impossible to write something about the Madagascar Plan, let alone a Jewish uprising on the island, without broaching the subject. Yet every time I looked at Zionism it seemed too big, too unwieldy to fit in. Nevertheless I didn’t want to leave myself vulnerable to accusations of overlooking it or, worse, being ignorant about it. My solution was a compromise. It’s mentioned a few times – with an extended paragraph in Chapter 24 – but in my world it is not significant to the plot or characters.

Plan Z

This was a plan approved by Hitler in 1939 to build a huge surface fleet for the Reich, one that would eventually challenge British naval supremacy. It was intended as a decade long expansion centred on a dozen battleships, four aircraft carriers and various strategic ports around the globe, including Konakry, Walfisch Bucht and Diego Suarez in Africa. The beginning of World War 2 meant it was never properly implemented. Because of the significance of Diego to the plot of The Madagaskar Plan, Plan Z was mentioned in the early drafts of the book but later cut to make things leaner.

One of the Nazis' unbuilt aircraft carriers, in scale to their existing largest ship (with green keel)

 Heydrich’s Jewish heritage

As staggering as this sounds, Heydrich, effectively the Number Two of the SS, had a Jewish (or at least partly Jewish) father. This is not conjecture or gossip but documented fact. It actually appeared in the early drafts of the book and was a minor subplot – but eventually I removed it as I felt it complicated the narrative unnecessarily. I may resurrect it in Book 3.

Globus’s Lariam allergy

In the 1950s, the best defence against malaria was Lariam. Nazis operating in the tropics and other malarial areas (such as parts of southern Russia), routinely took it. In my research on Globocnik I discovered he had taken it and was allergic to it, causing bouts of sickness, depression, paranoia and nightmares. In the first couple of drafts. Globus was forced to take Lariam before visiting the mosquito-hive that is Antzu, leading to an adverse effect on his mental state in the final quarter of the book. In the end, I decided he was already sufficiently unhinged not to need this further complication.

Odin as Santa Claus

Finally, and fittingly for this time of year, in Chapter 4 Hochburg drives through a Stanleystadt still decked for Christmas. I managed to squeeze in the Nazis’ plans for ‘Julfest’ but one detail I didn’t have room for was that they intended to do away with Santa Claus and replace him with Odin, ruler of the Norse gods. He would still have a flowing white beard but his robes would no longer be Coca-Cola red but swastika scarlet. Who knows what they had in mind for Rudolph...

*

There was one other thing that didn’t make the published edition of the book. It was by far and away the most substantial omission and deserves an entry of its own, which leads me to the final blog of this A to Z. I’ll post it in the New Year: L is for...

D is for Diego

DIEGO Suarez – a huge natural harbour on the northern tip of Madagascar – is the setting for some of the climactic scenes of the book. It was also the final stage of my journey around Madagascar.

Welcome to Diego!

I reached the city in the late afternoon and have two particularly vivid memories of my arrival. The first was the dense perfume of ylang-ylang plants; the second was having a hot shower! By that point I’d been on the road for days and although I’d sometimes had the luxury of running water, that water had never been heated. In Diego I not only stayed in what was recognisably a hotel, it had decent plumbing. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that shower. Afterwards I sat on the veranda of my room which overlooked the Indian Ocean. Writing is often a miserable business but on occasions I can think of no better profession.

Diego Suarez was named after two Portuguese admirals: Diego Diaz and Fernando Suarez, which is rather forgiving given that on arrival in 1506 they murdered and enslaved the locals. Despite attempts to revert back to its native name of Antsiranana most people still call it Diego. It is a pleasant port city: a fusion of Indian, African and Arab influences. Bustling and lushly tropical. During my visit hot winds seemed to blow continually. Just outside the city are empty beaches of white sand and azure waves. But I wasn’t here as a tourist. On my first morning I had an appointment at the city’s naval base.

There’s been a military base on the site since the French established one in 1885. From my research for Afrika Reich I knew the Nazis wanted to build a naval fortress here (it’s specifically mentioned in the Bielfeld Memorandum, their blueprint for the continent if they had conquered it). Over the years this fortress had grown in my mind until it became a towering polygon of steel and concrete housing aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships. The reality was...er... rather different. Although the port impressed with its sheer size, it was utterly dilapidated, and with Madagascar being so poor its navy is hardly formidable.

Nevertheless, the Base Commander, the improbably named Randrianarisoa Marosoa Nonenana, was keen to give me a guided tour – and once again this walking the ground proved invaluable when I came to write the final scenes at Diego: from how the landscape tiers down to the water, to the palm trees sprouting among the barracks; the positions of the gun emplacements and the layout of the workshops.

Across the water there was also a huge runway – which gave me an unexpected motive for Salois’s mission. As an aside, in the months before my visit, the US military had been wanting to use the runway as a staging post for bombers to Afghanistan. The appearance of a strange foreigner fuelled all sorts of rumours amongst the Malagasy sailors. In the few hours I was at the base word got back to me that I must be a CIA agent casing the place out. The other alternative – that I was a British writer researching a book – was dismissed as too improbable.

D is also for DIE HARD

Did you get the reference? This is a clue

Many readers of the first book detected multiple references to DIE HARD. As I wrote at the time, none of these were intended, indeed to the best of my knowledge there’s no allusion to the film anywhere in Afrika Reich. Nevertheless people were adamant, so when I came to Madagaskar I thought I’d put an extended reference to the film in the book. Doubtless, this time round no one will identify it as such! Did you spot it?