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Franz Rademacher (20 February 1906 – 17 March 1973) was a German lawyer and diplomat. As an official in the Nazism government of the Third Reich during World War II, he was known for initiating action on the Madagascar Plan.
Rademacher studied law in Rostock and Munich and entered the profession as a jurist in April 1932.
From 1937, he was a diplomat with the German Foreign Office and served at the German embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay, until May 1940. In 1940, he was selected to lead Referat D III, or Judenreferat, of Joachim von Ribbentrop's Foreign Affairs Ministry. His direct superior was the Nazi diplomat Martin Luther. It was during his tenure in that office, throughout the spring and summer of 1940, that Rademacher initiated the Madagascar Plan, which sought to forcibly deport all of Europe's Jews to the island of Madagascar. He clashed briefly with Adolf Eichmann over organizational control of the plan, which would shortly be abandoned because of Germany's changing fortunes in World War II.
In October 1941, Rademacher was responsible for mass deportations and executions of Serbian Jews. He also had a hand in the deportation of Jews from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. After his visit to Belgrade, Rademacher filed an expense claim stating that the official purpose of the trip was to "liquidate the Jews". In 2010, the German Foreign Ministry released an 880-page report on the diplomats of the Third Reich, entitled The Ministry and the Past ( Das Amt und die Vergangenheit), which mentioned that particular expense claim and brought Rademacher a degree of latter-day notoriety.
In 1943, Rademacher became embroiled in Luther's attempted coup to oust Ribbentrop. He was dismissed from the Foreign Affairs Ministry and sent to fight in the navy as an officer for the remainder of the war. He ended up with Admiral Karl Dönitz's cypher-breaking unit at Flensburg-Mürwik under the command of Captain Kupfer. Immediately after the war, the unit was put at the disposal of Sefton Delmer's news agency in Hamburg.
In 1971, a West German high court in Karlsruhe overruled the judgment against Rademacher and ordered a new trial for his crimes during the Second World War. He died on 17 March 1973 before proceedings had begun.
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