Book: Boria Sax; Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust

 

Journal: Contemporary Sociology; Washington; Jan 2002.

 

Reviewed by  Alan M Beck

Volume: 31 Issue: 1

Pages: 75-76

ISSN: 00943061 Full Text:

Copyright American Sociological Association Jan 2002

Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, by Boris Sax. New York: Continuum, 2000.206 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8264-1289-0.

Animals in the Third Reich begins by defending its very existence. As Sax points out, the Third Reich was a relatively brief period of historical time that has received a great deal of scrutiny. To be sure, there have been other periods in history during which humans are documented at their worst. Russia under Stalin and China under Mao probably killed even more people than Germany under Hitler. But Sax argues, "There is a special feeling of horror about Nazi crimes, not fully explained by the death and the suffering they caused." This feeling of horror comes about perhaps because the horrors of the death camps were well documented and perhaps because the impersonal and systematic killing of innocent people invites study, if for no other reason, then to try to understand it. In the context of the Holocaust, Sax appropriately asks why the study of animals is not trivial. But understanding a society's role with animals is a way to understand its history and the social imperatives that shaped the time. The metaphorical role of animals, like in the Bible, is a good background in understanding history. Throughout history, the use of animals separated people from their enemies. In the Renaissance,

witches, or "shape-shifters," who could become animals were enemies. During World War II, U.S. propaganda often depicted the Japanese as monkeys. German propaganda posters portrayed their enemies as monkeys, rats, or leeches.

Even today, those incensed by intensive animal agriculture, the so-called factory farms, often compare them to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The comparison is not simply because of the number of animals killed, but the conditions in which they die. Sax notes that Heinrich Himmler, the founder of the SS who oversaw the Nazi death camps, was in fact a chicken farmer. Many of his ideas of systematic breeding and slaughter of human beings were extensions of his experiences.

At various places the book provides wonderful insights into Europe's biological and psychological enterprises as influenced by the times. Germans identified with the loyalty of wolves. The wolves are forest dweller9', unlike jackals that are solitary and perceived to have no deep moral commitment. The Nazis made analogies to Jews who were presumably from the deserts, a more barren part of the world; therefore Jews were also spiritually barren.

 

Wolf and dog society was popularized by Konrad Lorenz, who took some liberties and made the wolf, and dogs that he believed came most directly from wolves, a model of German bureaucracy. While the wolf may be a convenient model, careful observation shows that wolves are not involved in serious fights but ritual interactions. Perhaps Lorenz was influenced by his politics since he joined the Nazi party and was funded by the Minister of Education. His scientific writings appear to be anti-Semitic though his popular writings were politically correct. Lorenz was captured by the Russians in June 1944 and won the Nobel Prize in 1973. As a general rule, scientists during the Third Reich were not true collaborators or true resisters but attempted to continue their work.

The works of Charles Darwin also influenced the Nazis, like many others. The height of Darwinism came during British colonialism and perhaps encouraged treating native peoples as if they were less than human. For naive people, human evolution was a simple hierarchy with "savages" between apes and civilized people. Evolutionary theory meant that simian features become stereotypes to mark people as being less developed. The Nazis portrayed Jews has having profuse facial and body hair, characteristic of apes. Nazis were also fascinated by their perceived view that evolution was simply a struggle for existence, and Hitler's autobiography is titled simply, Mein Kampf-my struggle.

The Nazis also noted that in an evolutionary term, predator species make the prey species strong: The Third Reich was doing society a favor. Hitler, referring to Jews, stated, "Who is to blame, the cat or the mouse, if the cat eats up the mouse?" Sax proposes that one of the most fundamental myths of the Nazi era was that predators were closer to nature and possessed greater vitality than other creatures.

The most interesting aspect explored by the book is the many contradictions of the Third Reich era. For instance, the Nazis identified with a predator, but Hitler and his senior staff were vegetarians. of course none of those people were particularly Aryan either!

Perhaps the grandest of contradictions of the era was a Germany that was excessively kind to animals but sent innocent people, including children, to concentration camps. In contrast, in 1933 Germany passed strong animal protection laws there were notable for their detail and legal sophistication. The laws of 1933 remained with little change unti11972, when the Federal Republic of Germany replaced them with less stringent code. Nazis recognized that being cruel to animals may lead to being cruel to people, hence Hitler Youth and SS were often required to be cruel to animals to desensitize them.

While some say Hitler was no closer to dogs than he was to people, others disagree. Hitler appeared to love dogs and often had himself photographed with a dog in order to be more appealing, a favorite ploy of politicians to this day. He gave Eva Braun a fox terrier after she tried to commit suicide, and his favorite dog, Blondie, stayed with him in the bunker until the end. The dog was killed with a cyanide capsule like Eva and Hitler.

The book is extremely well written and offers more than a scholarly treatise on the activities of the Third Reich. It provides enough background to help the reader understand what is, for most, not understandable-- the Holocaust. To quote Sax, "Initially devoted to reuniting humanity with the realm of animals, the Nazi regime opened a new divide between the two. The Holocaust now stands as a uniquely human phenomenon."

[Author note] ALAN M. BECK

Purdue University

abeck@purdue.edu