Published in Anthrozoos, vol 14, #2 2001, p. 116-118.

 

 

 

Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust ; Boria Sax. New York: Continuum Press, 2000. 206 pages. ISBN: 0-8264-1289-0 (hardback) .

 

The Nazi era is full of curious contradictions and complexities. The Nazi support for nature and animal protection is one such complexity, and one that has not received a great deal of attention. Many Nazi leaders were passionate about the need to protect against unnecessary cruelty to animals, and laws were passed to express these passions.

The Animal Protection Law of November 24, 1933, for example, barred the release of tamed animals into the wild and the use of animals in public amusements. Cockfights and bullfights were barred, along with clipping the ears of dogs, the use of blinders on horses, and the use of dogs in the chase (which put an end to the aristocratic tradition of fox hunting). Castration practices were cur- tailed, and limits were placed on the kinds of work that could be demanded of animals on farms and in mines. A Hunting Law of July 3, 1934, established further limits on the equipment that could be used in hunting: the setting of traps and the use of buckshot were banned, and endangered species were placed off limits. And though limits were never placed on the number of animals one could kill, holders of hunting licenses were required to help maintain the population of game, e.g., by helping to set out food in the winter. Penalties for violations could be severe -two and a half years in prison for anyone who would "needlessly torment or mishandle" an animal, for example. Drafters of the Animal Protection Law noted that the statute was unique in applying to wild as well as domestic animals; France's earlier loi Grammont of 1850, for example, had provided protection only to domestic animals (and especially pets).

Germany's animal protection laws were the most strict in the world, though not as strict as Hitler had hoped. The Fuehrer had wanted to ban all animal experiments, a stipulation softened on the request of his personal physician, Doctor Morell, who cautioned that a total ban would impede the progress of medical research. Animal experimentation did in fact continue, albeit with occasional bumps, as when the zoologist {and later Nobel laureate) Karl von Frisch was reprimanded for having failed to properly anesthetize some of the worms he was cutting up for an experiment. Animals were often used in military research, as when Gerhard Schrader tested his newfound nerve gas on monkeys and baboons prior to a series of tests involving Russian prisoners of war. The official commentary on the Animal Protection Law defended experimentation with the argument that "when necessary, single individuals are sacrificed in the interests of the entire body" (p. 112).

Sax is well aware that Nazi animal protections must be seen in the context of larger Nazi policies, including the dehumanization of Jews, Gypsies, and other groups excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft (notably the mentally or physically disabled). Animals were given increased protection, even as racial inferiors were denied first, the privileges of citizenship, and later the right to life. Sax takes great pains to see Nazi animal safeguards in light of this larger story. Animals figure in Nazi policies in several different ways: as social and political metaphors, as rationalizations for political adventures, as objects of fetishes and as projections of fantasies. Animal images were used to debase certain kinds of people, while elevating others. Sax shows how Nazi animal ideologies penetrated into some rather obscure nooks and crannies, and the reader may share some of the same astonishment as the Nazi- era woman who was surprised to learn there was such a thing as a "non-Aryan cow" {p. 3)

Sax's is not a long or overly detailed book, but it is lively in its prose and provocative in the hypotheses advanced. Separate chapters treat" Romantic Terror, " "Grandfather Ape," "Blood of the Lamb," "The Sacrificial Pig, " "The Aryan Wolf, " "The Jewish Dog, " and half a dozen others. A chapter on "Predator and Prey" notes how predation "provided the model for dominance, conquest, and the idea of a master race" in Nazi Germany (p. 93); 0swaId Spengler had celebrated the animal of prey as "the highest form of mobile life, " and Nazi-era politicians made a self-conscious effort to exalt the predatory virtues of eagles, wolves, and other carnivorous beasts. (Many top Nazis were vegetarians, however, suggesting that it was the capture and killing that were to be admired). Wolves were said to be to Aryans as jackals were to Jews. Hitler himself adopted as a code-name "The Wolf," and gave his various headquarters and command centers names like "Werewolf" (Wehrwolf), "Wolf's Gulch" (Wolfschlucht) and "Wolf's lair" (Wolfschanze). Even his post-war secret terrorist armies were known as Werewolves. The fascination was expressed in science, as studies of lupine ethology became fashionable in the Thousand Year Reich -e.g., by Rudolf Schenkel, who like many others at this time tended to exaggerate the ferocity of wolf behavior.

Another interesting chapter on "Our Comrade in Arms, the Horse " tells how horses were honored in rhetoric,  while being brutalized in combat. Nearly three million horses were used by the Germans during the war, and few of these survived the hostilities. More than 50,000 died during the battle at Stalingrad alone. Horses were often shot for food (there is one gruesome story of a beast being stripped of its flesh while still alive), but were also sometimes killed as part of the German army's policy of "scorched earth." On May 4, 1944, for example, during the retreat from Crimea, 30,000 horses were killed to keep them from falling into the hands of the Red Army. The animals were led to the brink of a cliff, where each received a fatal shot to the head. The animals were then thrown off the cliff and left to rot.

Sax points out that animal protection laws were often used as instruments to hound racial minorities. Gypsies were barred from owning dogs, for example, to prevent them from hunting hedgehogs, a traditional Roma and Sinti staple at the dinner table. Jews were barred from keeping pets (in 1942), and though Sax mentions that such policies may have been intended to help prepare for deportation, he also notes that the law was applied even to Jews who were managing to survive unharmed. Victor KIemperer, whose diaries have made such a splash recently in Germany, writes about his pain at being forced to turn over his cat, dog and canary for euthanasia, after a judicial proceeding. He survives the war as a result of luck and laxity on the part of Nazi bureaucrats (his marriage to an influential Aryan also helped), and later expressed his frustration that such senseless cruelties -  meaning the killing of his pets - were never investigated at Nuremberg..

Sax also shows how animal cruelties continued, despite the rhetoric and policies against such practices. When his poodle was  attacked by another dog, Party Chancellery chief Martin Bormann ordered the offending canine seized, soaked in gasoline, and set on fire. Cruelty to animals -and therein often implicitly to humans -figured in several Nazi initiation rites, as when boys in certain 55 camps were forced to twist the heads off pigeons or to swallow live toads. Sax tells how some members of the 55 were required to rear a German shepherd for twelve weeks, then strangle the dog under the supervision of an officer.

The reader does hear several touching stories of how people found comfort from animals, even in such dire straits. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, for example, while imprisoned in a POW camp managed to befriend a stray dog whose greetings at morning assembly helped remind him, as he later put it, that he and his comrades still "were men." Sax reminds us that Anne Frank found pleasure in her cats while hiding in her Amsterdam attic, and even have stories of top Nazis enjoying their pets -though here the point is often to juxtapose the comforts granted to animals against the denial of such comforts to Jews and other Volksfeinde. The book contains several apt and revealing illustrations: an 55 officer posing proudly with his dog, romantic landscapes with animals, the monumental horse and human sculptures of Josef Thorak, the premodern depiction of Jews as brutes, the visual clichés of Julius Stretcher's rabidly antisemitic rag, Der Stuermer. Sax also makes the interesting observation that though steps were taken to punish cruelty against animals, little was done to encourage the warm and meaningful sharing of lives with other animals.

There are some minor mistakes: the famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch is described as a veterinarian (p. 88), and the names of a couple of leading Nazis are misspelled (e.g., Hitler's personal physician, Theodor Morel). The "night of long knives," when Hitler purged the SA of homosexuals and other dissidents, is placed in 1936 when it actually occurred in 1934 .Sax saddles the German evolutionist Ernst HaeckeI with more than his share of the blame for German racialism, and there is also the somewhat misleading statement that Jews were classified as Caucasian" until the middle of the nineteenth century (p. 53). The term was not coined until 1795 and should probably not be used in any event with outcome kind of comment. I was also not convinced by his rather psychoanalytic suggestion that Nazism should be understood as having fostered a "cult of death." Life and health were fetishized as much as death; indeed, the period can be regarded to a certain extent as pro-life and health obsessed, since sickness and infirmity were stigmatized while prizes were given for women with the highest number of children. The point is that distinctions were constantly being made between "lives worth living" and to be exterminated. Sax captures much of this when he states that the Nazis reduced the significance of the divide between humans and animals, while exaggerating the divide between sickness and health.

Sax's book contains a great deal of food for thought, and helps us see both the banalities and the atrocities from this era in new and revealing lights. There is a great deal of material on the symbolism of blood, and some intriguing discussion of ritual animal sacrifice. Nazi regulations of how animals should and should not be slaughtered also come into focus: stockyard animals and fish had to be stunned before being killed, for example, and lobsters were not to be cooked in a slowly heated kettle, but rather plunged immediately into boiling water. Konrad Lorenz is sharply and appropriately criticized, both for his tacit endorsement of certain forms of political predation (recall that he joined the Nazi party in 1938) and his Nazi-sympathizing view that "for us, race and ethnicity are everything, the individual human being as good as nothing" (p. 22). The book should be of interest to any- one seeking to understand either the larger context of the Holocaust or the history of animal protection and abuse; one can also hope that books like this will help provoke further examination of the intertwined histories of the brutalization of humans and the treatment of animals as unfeeling objects.

 

Robert N. Proctor

Pennsylvania State University

University Park

Pennsylvania 16802 .USA

 

 

 

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