Pre-publication comment on Animals in the Third Reich by Boria Sax

 

With the publication of yet another monumental biography of Hitler, Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executions and Finkelstein’s response to it, one might well conclude that the effort to comprehend the Holocaust has gone just about as far as it can, and that there is nothing left to do but stand back in silent horror. Then comes Boria Sax with a totally new slant on the Nazis and their genocidal obsessions. In the chapter “The Aryan Wolf and the Jewish Dog,” he explores an aspect of Nazi ideology and policy that, to my knowledge, no one has seriously studied until now: the Nazi relationship to animals, both as mythic figures and as actual living creatures. I had come across references to Hitler's fixation on wolves in his biographies, but the authors offered no context for this fixation and tended to treat it as yet another idiosyncratic symptom of mental illness. In Sax's book, I learned for the first time of the central role that animals, especially predatory animals, played in the Nazi worldview, and how this colored their perception of Jews as "pigs" and "dogs." This is an utterly fascinating work, enriched by Sax's wide-ranging erudition, and sure to intrigue ordinary readers as well as inspiring scholars for years to come.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich