Animals In The Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust

by Boria Sax

Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., (370 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10017), 2000. 206 pages, paperback. $19.95.

Reviewed by Merritt Clifton

Hitler was a vegetarian, probably in emulation of the composer Richard Wagner, Boria Sax asserts, but claims, as vegetarian historian Rynn Berry and others have documented, that “Hitler was probably not entirely consistent in his vegetarianism.”

Adds Sax, “Several leading figures in the [Nazi] government followed Hitler’s example, including [Rudolph] Hess and [Joseph] Goebbels; Heinrich Himmler, who was influenced by Buddhism, even mandated vegetarian meals for leaders of the SS. It is true that the Nazi leaders never tried to promote vegetarianism beyond the ruling circles,” Sax allows. “An entry in Goebbels’ diary dated April 26, 1942 stated that this omission was dictated by necessity. According to Goebbels, Hitler was more deeply convinced than ever that eating meat was wrong, but Hitler could not revolutionize food production while the war was in progress.”

Boria Sax
(Facebook photo)

Self-image belied by reality

Sax concludes that Hitler saw himself as not only a vegetarian but an ethical vegetarian, as did other leading members of the Nazi high command–– but this is not to suggest that their self-image matched reality.

Sax goes on to document and explore other Nazi attitudes and policies which parallel the rhetoric, at least, of the modern animal rights movement, and are often cited by propagandists for the animal use industries.

Unlike the propagandists, Sax is not content to draw a simple equation of Nazism with animal rights advocacy. Instead he investigates the paradox that Hitler et al developed scruples about killing nonhumans, yet seemingly had none about killing the human animal; opposed vivisection of nonhumans, yet vivisected humans by the tens of thousands; supposedly disagreed with the premise of factory farming yet helped to introduce it; and showed none of the concern for compassion on the one hand and moral consistency on the other that has historically characterized authentic animal rights advocacy.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Points of difference

Nazi “animal rights” views, Sax indicates, represented a convergent evolution of rhetoric, rather than a direct antecedent to the animal rights movement of today. The Nazi ideas mostly came from different directions, led to different conclusions, and the points of similarity were relatively superficial compared to the points of difference.

Most notably, Hitler and the Nazis were the most extreme champions of eugenics yet to emerge. The central concept of eugenics is that animals and humans can be improved through selective breeding.

This has been obvious as regards physical characteristics since goatherds introduced animal husbandry to ancient Mesopotamia toward the dawn of human civilization, and is still the premise of much leading-edge scientific research, for example in the development of gene therapy to combat cancer and other diseases.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Eugenics vs. moral evolution

Eugenicists, however, depart from mainstream science in asserting that moral perfection can also be achieved through selective breeding, typically by encouraging reproduction of “us,” whoever the preferred people may be, and exterminating “them,” the alleged moral inferiors.

Eugenics were enthusiastically promoted by late 19th century and early 20h century Utopians of both “left” and “right” leanings, including many of the aristocrats who standardized dog breeds.

Yet the whole notion of eugenics was emphatically rejected by most social reformers, including the founders and leaders of the humane movement.

Especially in the U.S., where the humane movement emerged directly from anti-slavery activism, central concerns of the founders and early leaders included not only animal advocacy but also the achievement of universal free public education, women’s suffrage, an end to child labor, and relief for disadvantaged and destitute humans, especially widows, orphans, and the physically or mentally handicapped.

Nazis wooed humane leadership

Nazi and fascist sympathizers made a concerted effort to woo the leadership of the Royal SPCA and the American Humane Association between 1933 and 1939, and won several editorial endorsements of Nazi legislation from the AHA magazine, The National Humane Review.

Paradoxically, The National Humane Review editor at the time, Richard Craven, was second only to his predecessor, Sydney Coleman, in denunciations of eugenics.

Craven and the rest of the American Humane Association leadership, including Coleman, seem to have been very slow to recognize that the Nazis were eugenicists, but when they did, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, they apologized profusely for previous naivete.

Hitler & one of his German shepherds. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Humane movement founders would have had no truck with Hitler

Two generations earlier, American SPCA founder Henry Bergh, Massachusetts SPCA founder George Angell, and Women’s Humane Society and American Anti-Vivisection Society founder Carolyn Earle White were acutely aware of the influences of poverty and poor education in producing moral devolution.

None of them would have had even the slightest truck with Hitler.

Among the few inspiring aspects of the otherwise dismal record of the U.S. humane movement during the several decades after their passing was humane opposition to precisely the kinds of cruel experiments on prisoners that the Nazis advanced as an alternative to experimentation on nonhuman subjects.

(Beth Clifton collage)

Nazi legislation

Sax details the 32 “animal protection laws” adopted by Nazi Germany in only 10 years, demonstrating that many and perhaps most were really just thinly disguised cover for oppression of Jews, gypsies, and other minorities. The first two of those laws banned kosher slaughter; the last one barred Jews from keeping pets.

In between, mongrels called “Jewish dogs” endured discrimination comparable to that of Jewish people, as did livestock seized from Jews.

The most telling distinction between Nazisim and authentic animal rights advocacy, however, may be in their definitions of human perfection.

(Beth Clifton collage)

“Compassion is the ultimate ethic”

So many animal advocates have stated over the years that “Compassion is the ultimate ethic” that establishing who said it first is virtually impossible, though the earliest attributed source may have been the Buddha.

Hitler, on the other hand, as Sax records, in 1934 proclaimed “I desire a violent, domineering, fearless and ferocious upcoming generation. It must be able to bear pain. It must show no signs of weakness or tenderness.”

The strongest Nazi influence on animal advocacy may have been through Jewish activists who suffered the Holocaust and saw in it a parallel to the slaughter of animals for human consumption.

Henry Spira & friend.

Singer, Spira, Singer, & Hershaft

The Holocaust metaphor has been prominently advanced by PETA vegetarian campaigners, who have been predictably counter-attacked with allegations of anti-Semitism and assertions of Hitler’s quasi-vegetarianism, but the PETA use of Holocaust imagery to describe animal slaughter was at least 40 years behind that of Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer.

The comparison was later made by Coalition for Nonviolent Food founder Henry Spira, who survived Krystalnacht before escaping from Nazi Germany, and Farm Animal Rights Movement founder Alex Hershaft, who states that he knows what a veal calf feels like, living in tight confinement in the dark, constantly in terror, because he spent much of his childhood living in a closet to hide from the Nazis.

Beth & Merritt Clifton
Animals 24-7

The Holocaust metaphor is also used by Animal Liberation author Peter Singer, whose entire family except for his mother and father were killed by the Nazis.

Sax did not note any of this. Perhaps he did not know. If he did know, his very thorough review of the status of animals under the Third Reich would almost certainly have made mention of it.

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Vasu Murti says

June 11, 2018 at 6:17 am

Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, which has been called definitive, scotches the rumor that Hitler might have been a vegetarian. Robert Payne, Albert Speer, and other well-known Hitler biographers, mentioned Hitler’s predilection for Bavarian sausages, ham, liver, and game.

European chef, Dione Lucas was an eyewitness to Hitler’s meat-eating. In her Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook (1964), Lucas, drawing on her experiences as a hotel chef in Hamburg during the 1930s, remembered being called upon quite often to prepare Hitler’s favorite dish: “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,” she writes, “but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often. Let us not hold that against a fine recipe though.”

According to Carol Orsag, in The People’s Almanac (1975), Adolf Hitler “…became vegetarian because of stomach problems” rather than because of compassion for animals, and “was criticized for eating pig’s knuckles” (a popular Geman delicacy, known as “Eisbein”), which means Hitler really wasn’t a vegetarian.

According to the late vegetarian historian Rynn Berry (1945 – 2014), when Hitler became chancellor, he started persecuting vegetarian groups: “Although he didn’t send vegetarians to the death camps with Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and other ‘subhumans,’ he made life extremely unpleasant for them. For instance, a publisher of a vegetarian newspaper in Germany, Werner Altpeter, was even fined (for stating) in an article in his paper that Hitler was a vegetarian… during the Reich, vegetarians were forbidden to organize new groups or to start publications… Members of these former vegetarian societies were subject to searches in their homes; during these raids, the Gestapo even confiscated books that contained vegetarian recipes…

“While he was chancellor, Hitler did nothing to advance the cause of vegetarianism in Germany. With a stroke of his pen he could have made vegetarianism the dietary law of the land. Instead, he did everything he could to thwart it… Matters of compassion did not weigh much with Hitler when he was making a cold political calculation. On learning that thirty thousand horses were about to fall into the hands of the Russians at Krim, Hitler immediately ordered the horses to be slaughtered.”

In a 1996 article, “Nazis and Animals: Debunking the Myths,” in the Animals’ Agenda, Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights says Hitler “had a special fondness for sausages and caviar, and sometimes ham,” as well as “liver dumplings.” Kalechofsky says the Nazis experimented on animals as well as humans in the concentration camps:

“The evidence of Nazi experiments on animals is overwhelming. In The Dark Face of Science, author John Vyvyan summed it up correctly: ‘The experiments made on prisoners were many and diverse, but they had one thing in common: all were in continuation of, or complementary to, experiments on animals. In every instance, this antecedent scientific literature is mentioned in the evidence, and at Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps, human and animal experiments were carried out simultaneously as parts of a single programme.’”

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, became a vegetarian in 1962. He asked, “How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? How can we speak of rights and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?”

The thoroughly debunked myth of Hitler’s “vegetarianism” did not prevent Isaac Bashevis Singer from comparing humanity’s mass killing of fifty billion animals every year to the Nazi Holocaust, saying for the animals it is an “eternal Treblinka” (concentration camp). Isaac Bashevis Singer also expressed the view that unnecessary violence against animals by human beings will only lead to further violence in human society:

“I personally believe that as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a’ la Hitler and concentration camps a’ la Stalin — all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice.’ There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”

If Hitler had been a vegetarian, he would not have banned vegetarian organizations in Germany and the occupied countries; nor would he have failed to urge a meatless diet on the German people as a way of coping with Germany’s World War II food shortage.

Would not a genuine reverence for life — elevating animal rights to the level of human rights, giving animals the level of concern we now give human beings — lead to compassion for every living creature? There is no evidence that vegetarianism (for reasons of health or ethics or social justice: global hunger, global warming, the energy, environmental, population, water crises, etc.) will make people saints nor give them Gandhian compassion, but neither is there any evidence that it will make people Nazis.

Dr. Richard Schwartz, author, Judaism and Vegetarianism, writes: “The Nazis explicitly structured their industrial destruction of the Jews on the model of animal slaughter. This … shows that the way we treat animals is similar to the way the Nazis treated us.”

Comments

Vasu Murti says
June 11, 2018 at 6:17 am
Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, which has been called definitive, scotches the rumor that Hitler might have been a vegetarian. Robert Payne, Albert Speer, and other well-known Hitler biographers, mentioned Hitler’s predilection for Bavarian sausages, ham, liver, and game.
European chef, Dione Lucas was an eyewitness to Hitler’s meat-eating. In her Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook (1964), Lucas, drawing on her experiences as a hotel chef in Hamburg during the 1930s, remembered being called upon quite often to prepare Hitler’s favorite dish: “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,” she writes, “but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often. Let us not hold that against a fine recipe though.”
According to Carol Orsag, in The People’s Almanac (1975), Adolf Hitler “…became vegetarian because of stomach problems” rather than because of compassion for animals, and “was criticized for eating pig’s knuckles” (a popular Geman delicacy, known as “Eisbein”), which means Hitler really wasn’t a vegetarian.
According to the late vegetarian historian Rynn Berry (1945 – 2014), when Hitler became chancellor, he started persecuting vegetarian groups: “Although he didn’t send vegetarians to the death camps with Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and other ‘subhumans,’ he made life extremely unpleasant for them. For instance, a publisher of a vegetarian newspaper in Germany, Werner Altpeter, was even fined (for stating) in an article in his paper that Hitler was a vegetarian… during the Reich, vegetarians were forbidden to organize new groups or to start publications… Members of these former vegetarian societies were subject to searches in their homes; during these raids, the Gestapo even confiscated books that contained vegetarian recipes…
“While he was chancellor, Hitler did nothing to advance the cause of vegetarianism in Germany. With a stroke of his pen he could have made vegetarianism the dietary law of the land. Instead, he did everything he could to thwart it… Matters of compassion did not weigh much with Hitler when he was making a cold political calculation. On learning that thirty thousand horses were about to fall into the hands of the Russians at Krim, Hitler immediately ordered the horses to be slaughtered.”
In a 1996 article, “Nazis and Animals: Debunking the Myths,” in the Animals’ Agenda, Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights says Hitler “had a special fondness for sausages and caviar, and sometimes ham,” as well as “liver dumplings.” Kalechofsky says the Nazis experimented on animals as well as humans in the concentration camps:
“The evidence of Nazi experiments on animals is overwhelming. In The Dark Face of Science, author John Vyvyan summed it up correctly: ‘The experiments made on prisoners were many and diverse, but they had one thing in common: all were in continuation of, or complementary to, experiments on animals. In every instance, this antecedent scientific literature is mentioned in the evidence, and at Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps, human and animal experiments were carried out simultaneously as parts of a single programme.’”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, became a vegetarian in 1962. He asked, “How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? How can we speak of rights and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?”
The thoroughly debunked myth of Hitler’s “vegetarianism” did not prevent Isaac Bashevis Singer from comparing humanity’s mass killing of fifty billion animals every year to the Nazi Holocaust, saying for the animals it is an “eternal Treblinka” (concentration camp). Isaac Bashevis Singer also expressed the view that unnecessary violence against animals by human beings will only lead to further violence in human society:
“I personally believe that as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a’ la Hitler and concentration camps a’ la Stalin — all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice.’ There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”
If Hitler had been a vegetarian, he would not have banned vegetarian organizations in Germany and the occupied countries; nor would he have failed to urge a meatless diet on the German people as a way of coping with Germany’s World War II food shortage.
Would not a genuine reverence for life — elevating animal rights to the level of human rights, giving animals the level of concern we now give human beings — lead to compassion for every living creature? There is no evidence that vegetarianism (for reasons of health or ethics or social justice: global hunger, global warming, the energy, environmental, population, water crises, etc.) will make people saints nor give them Gandhian compassion, but neither is there any evidence that it will make people Nazis.
Dr. Richard Schwartz, author, Judaism and Vegetarianism, writes: “The Nazis explicitly structured their industrial destruction of the Jews on the model of animal slaughter. This … shows that the way we treat animals is similar to the way the Nazis treated us.”
- Elizabeth Clifton says
  June 11, 2018 at 6:34 am
  Dearest Vasu,
  Thank you for your thoughtful, informative comment. For me, this confirms and sheds light on the truth of Adolph Hilter’s vegetarian and animal rights exploits or lack thereof!
- Dr. Will Tuttle says
  June 12, 2018 at 10:45 pm
  Thanks Vasu for this helpful information and shining more light on this dark subject!