Where does all the war, racism, terrorism, violence,
and cruelty that's so endemic to human civilization come from? Why
do humans exploit and massacre each other so regularly? Why is our
species so violence-prone? To answer these questions we would do
well to think about our exploitation and slaughter of animals and
its effect on human civilization. Could it be that we oppress and
kill each other so readily because our abuse and slaughter of
animals has desensitized us to the suffering and death of others?
The "domestication"
of animals--the exploitation of goats, sheep, cattle, and other
animals for their meat, milk, hides, and labor that began in the
Near East
about 11,000 years ago--changed
human history. In earlier hunter-gatherer societies there had been
some sense of kinship between humans and animals, reflected in
totemism and myths which portrayed animals, or part-animal
part-human creatures, as creators and progenitors of the human race.
However, mankind crossed the Rubicon when Near Eastern herdsmen and
farmers started castrating, hobbling, and branding captive animals
to control their mobility, diet, growth, and reproductive lives. To
distance themselves emotionally from the cruelty they inflicted,
they adopted mechanisms of detachment, rationalization, denial, and
euphemism, and in the process became a harder, more ruthless lot.
In 1917 Sigmund
Freud put the issue in perspective when he wrote: "In the course of
his development towards culture man acquired a dominating position
over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom. Not content with
this supremacy, however, he began to place a gulf between his nature
and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to
himself he attributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine
descent which permitted him to annihilate the bond of community
between him and the animal kingdom."
The domination,
control, and manipulation that characterizes the way humans treat
animals who come under their control has set the tone and served as
a model for the way humans treat each other. The
enslavement/domestication of animals paved the way for human
slavery. As Karl Jacoby writes, slavery was "little more than the
extension of domestication to humans."
In the first
civilizations that emerged in the river valleys of ancient Egypt,
Mesopotamia, India, and China, the exploitation of animals for food,
milk, hides, and labor was so firmly established that these
civilizations sanctified the notion that animals existed solely for
their benefit. That allowed humans to use, abuse, and kill them with
total impunity. It also led humans to place other humans--captives,
enemies, strangers, and those who were different or disliked--on the
other side of the great divide where they were vilified as "beasts,"
"pigs," "dogs," "monkeys," "rats," and "vermin." Designating other
people as animals has always been an ominous development because it
sets them up for humiliation, exploitation, and murder. As Leo Kuper
writes in Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth
Century, "the animal world has been a particularly fertile
source of metaphors of dehumanization."
From
Slaughterhouse to Death Camp
The relationship of animal
exploitation to the Holocaust is less apparent than it is in
the case of slavery, but there is a connection nonetheless. Take the
case of Henry Ford, whose impact on the twentieth century began,
metaphorically speaking, at an American slaughterhouse and ended at
Auschwitz.
In his
autobiography, My Life and Work (1922), Ford revealed that
his inspiration for assembly-line production came from a visit he
made as a young man to a Chicago slaughterhouse. "I believe that
this was the first moving line ever installed. The idea [of the
assembly line] came in a general way from the overhead trolley that
the Chicago packers use in dressing beef." A Swift and Company
publication from that time described the division-of-labor principle
that so impressed Ford: "The slaughtered animals, suspended head
downward from a moving chain, or conveyor, pass from workman to
workman, each of whom performs some particular step in the process."
It was but one step from the industrialized slaughter of animals to
the assembly-line mass murder of people. In J. M. Coetzee's novel,
The Lives of Animals, the protagonist Elizabeth Costello
tells her audience: "Chicago showed us the way; it was from the
Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process
bodies."
Most people are not
aware of the central role of the slaughterhouse in the history of
American industry. "Historians have deprived the packers of their
rightful title of mass-production pioneers," writes James Barrett in
his study of Chicago's packinghouse workers in the early 1900s, "for
it was not Henry Ford but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who
developed the assembly-line technique that continues to symbolize
the rationalized organization of work."
Henry Ford, who was
so impressed by the efficient way meat packers slaughtered and
dismantled animals in Chicago, made his own unique contribution to
the slaughter of people in Europe. Not only did he develop the
assembly-line method that Germans used to kill Jews, but he launched
a vicious anti-Semitic campaign that helped make the Holocaust
happen.
In the early 1920s
Ford's weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published
a series of articles based on the text of the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract that had been circulating
in Europe. Ford published a book-length compilation of the articles
entitled The International Jew, which was translated into
most of the European languages and was widely disseminated by
anti-Semites, chief among them the German publisher Theodor Fritsch,
an early supporter of Hitler. Thanks to a well-financed publicity
campaign and the prestige of the Ford name, The International
Jew was hugely successful both domestically and internationally.
The
International Jew found its most receptive audience in Germany
where it was known as The Eternal Jew. Ford was enormously
popular in Germany. When his autobiography went on sale there, it
immediately became the country's number one bestseller. In the early
1920s The Eternal Jew quickly became the bible of the German
anti-Semitism, with Fritsch's publishing house printing six editions
between 1920 and 1922.
After Ford's book
came to the attention of Hitler in Munich, he used a shortened
version of it in the Nazi propaganda war against the Jews of
Germany. In 1923 a Chicago Tribune correspondent in Germany
reported that Hitler's organization in Munich was "sending out Mr.
Ford's books by the carload." Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the
Hitler Youth movement and the son of an aristocratic German father
and American mother, said at the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trial
that he became a convinced anti-Semite at age seventeen after
reading The Eternal Jew. "You have no idea what a great
influence this book had on the thinking of German youth. The younger
generation looked with envy to symbols of success and prosperity
like Henry Ford, and if he said the Jews were to blame, why
naturally we believed him."
Hitler regarded
Ford as a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of him on
the wall next to his desk in his office in Munich. In 1923 when
Hitler heard that Ford might run for President of the United States,
he told an American reporter, "I wish that I could send some of my
shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the
elections. We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing
Fascist movement in America. We have just had his anti-Jewish
articles translated and published. The book is being circulated in
millions throughout Germany." Hitler praised Ford in Mein
Kampf, the only American to be singled out. In 1931, when a
Detriot News reporter asked Hitler what Ford's portrait on
the wall meant to him, Hitler said, "I regard Henry Ford as my
inspiration."
Although Ford
stopped publishing the Dearborn Independent in late 1927 and
agreed to withdraw The International Jew from the book
market, copies of The International Jew continued to
circulate in large numbers throughout Europe and Latin America. In
Nazi Germany the influence of The Eternal Jew continued to be
strong and lasting, with German anti-Semites advertising and
distributing it throughout the 1930s, often putting the names of
Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler together on the cover. By late 1933,
Fritsch had published twenty-nine editions, each with a preface
praising Ford for his "great service" to America and the world for
his attacks on the Jews.
In 1938, on the
occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Henry Ford, the great
admirer of the efficient way they slaughtered and cut up animals in
America, accepted the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German
Eagle, the highest honor Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner
(Mussolini was one of the three other foreigners to be so honored).
On January 7,
1942--exactly one month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
that brought the United States into the war--Ford wrote a letter to
Sigmund Livingston, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League,
in which he expressed his disapproval of hatred "against the Jew or
any other racial or religious group." By that time,
Einsatzgruppen (German mobile killing squads) in the East had
already murdered hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and
children, and the first German extermination camp at Kulmhof
(Chelmno) was already operational.
From Animal
Breeding to Genocide
Another American contribution to
Nazi Germany's Final Solution--eugenics--was rooted in animal
exploitation. The breeding of domesticated animals--breeding the
most desirable and castrating and killing the rest--became the model
for American and German eugenic efforts to upgrade their
populations. America led the way with regard to forced
sterilizations, but Nazi Germany quickly caught up and went on to
euthanasia killings and genocide.
The desire to
improve the hereditary qualities of the human population had had its
beginnings in the 1860s when Francis Galton, an English scientist
and cousin of Charles Darwin, turned from meteorology to the study
of heredity (he coined the term "eugenics" in 1881). By the end of
the nineteenth century, genetic theories, founded on the assumption
that heredity was based on rigid genetic patterns little influenced
by social environment, dominated scientific thought.
The eugenics
movement in America began with the creation of the American
Breeders' Association (ABA) in 1903. At the second meeting of the
ABA in 1905, a series of reports about the great success achieved in
the selective breeding of animals and plants prompted delegates to
ask why such techniques could not be applied to human beings. The
creation of a committee on Human Heredity, or Eugenics, at the third
ABA meeting in 1906 launched the American eugenics movement in
America.
Its leader was
poultry researcher Charles B. Davenport, who served as the director
of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor on Long
Island in New York. Davenport, who described eugenics as "the
science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding,"
looked forward to the time when a woman would no more accept a man
"without knowing his biologico-genealogical history" than a
stockbreeder would take "a sire for his colts or calves who was
without pedigree." He believed that "the most progressive revolution
in history" could be achieved if "human matings could be placed upon
the same high plane as that of horse breeding." Sterilization
began in America in 1887, when the superintendent of the Cincinnati
Sanitarium published the first public recommendation for the
sterilization of criminals, both as a punishment and a way to
prevent further crime. Authorities used the same method to sterilize
male criminals that farmers used on their male animals not selected
for breeding--castration. Castration was the preferred method used
to sterilize male criminal offenders until 1899, when vasectomy was
adopted because it was more practical.
Indiana passed the
first state sterilization law in 1907. By 1930 more than half the
American states passed laws that authorized the sterilization of
criminals and mentally ill people, with California leading the way
with more than sixty percent of the country's forced sterilizations.
By the 1930s compulsory sterilization had widespread support in the
United States, with college presidents, clergymen, mental health
workers, and school principals among its strongest supporters. The
United States quickly became the model for other countries that
wanted to sterilize their "defectives." Denmark was the first
European country to pass such a law in 1929, followed in rapid
succession by other European nations.
In Germany, which
passed its sterilization law six months after the Nazis came to
power, eugenics established deep roots in medical and scientific
circles after World War I. In 1920 two respected academics--Karl
Binding, a widely published legal scholar, and Alfred Hoche, a
professor of psychiatry with a specialty in
neuropathology--published Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens (Authorization for the Destruction of
Life Unworthy of Life). In it they argued that German law should
permit the mercy killing of institutionalized patients who were
lebensunwert ("unworthy of life") and whose lives were
"without purpose" and a burden to their relatives and society.
Beginning in the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation and other
American foundations provided extensive financial support for
eugenics research in Germany. By the time the Nazis came to power,
more than twenty institutes for "racial hygiene" had already been
established at German universities.
The Law on
Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny, which the Nazi government
issued on July 14, 1933, required the sterilization of patients
suffering from mental and physical disorders in state hospitals and
nursing homes. By then, the United States had already sterilized
more than 15,000 people, most of them while they were incarcerated
in prisons or homes for the mentally ill. America's sterilization
laws made such a favorable impression on Hitler and his followers
that Nazi Germany looked to the United States for racial leadership.
Hitler took a special interest in the progress of eugenics in the
United States. "I have studied with great interest the laws of
several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by
people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be
injurious to the racial stock." However, Nazi Germany's
sterilization efforts quickly surpassed those of the United States.
Estimates of the total number of Germans sterilized under the Nazis
range from 300,000 to 400,000.
The Germans were
also impressed by America's immigration laws, which barred people
with hereditary diseases and limited people from non-Nordic
countries. In 1934 the German race anthropologist Hans F. K. Gunther
told an audience at the University of Munich that American
immigration laws should serve as a guideline and inspiration for
Nazi Germany. German race scientists also admired America's
segregation and miscegenation laws. In fact, Nazi theorists
complained that German race policies lagged behind America's,
pointing out that in certain southern states a person with 1/32
black ancestry was legally black, while in Germany, if somebody was
1/8 Jewish or in many instances 1/4 Jewish, that person was
considered legally Aryan.
Americans were the
strongest foreign supporters of Nazi race policies. In 1934
Eugenic News proclaimed that in "no country of the world is
eugenics more active as an applied science than in Germany" and
praised the Nazi sterilization law as an historic advance. Scores of
American anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and
geneticists visited Nazi Germany where they had high-level meetings
with Nazi leaders and scientists and visited racial hygiene
institutes, public health departments, and hereditary health courts.
When the Americans returned and reported on their visits in
professional journals and newsletters, they lauded the German
sterilization program.
Like the American
Charles Davenport, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS and a main
architect of the Final Solution, began his eugenics education with
animal breeding. His agricultural studies and experience breeding
chickens convinced him that since all behavioral characteristics are
hereditary, the most effective way to shape the future of a
population--human or otherwise--was to institute breeding projects
that favored the desirable and eliminated the undesirable. Himmler
was soon in a position to apply eugenic principles and methods to
human beings in a way no American eugenicist was ever able to
do.
Rudolf Hoss, the
commandant of Auschwitz and another strong supporter of eugenics
with a farming background, wrote in his autobiography after the war
that the original plan for Auschwitz had been to make it into a
major agricultural research station. "All kinds of stockbreeding was
to be pursued there." However, in the summer of 1941 Himmler
summoned him to Berlin to inform him of the fateful order for the
mass extermination of the Jews of Europe, an order that soon turned
Auschwitz into "the largest human slaughterhouse that history had
ever known." By the summer of 1942 Auschwitz was a vast,
full-service eugenics center for the improvement of animal and human
populations, complete with stockbreeding centers and the Birkenau
extermination camp for the culling of Jews, Gypsies, and other
"sub-humans." Germany's eugenics campaign entered a new,
deadly phase in 1939 when Hitler issued a secret order for the
systematic murder of mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, and
physically infirm Germans who were an embarrassment to the myth of
Aryan supremacy.
Once "defective"
children were identified and institutionalized, doctors and nurses
either starved them to death, or gave them lethal doses of luminal
(a sedative), veronal (sleeping pills), morphine, or scopolamine.
The "euthanasia" program--named Operation T4, or simply
T4--transported adults to special killing centers outfitted with gas
chambers. T4 killed between 70,000 and 90,000 Germans before it was
officially stopped in August 1941. In 1942, not long after German
psychiatrists had sent the last of their patients to the gas
chambers, the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association
published an article that called for the killing of retarded
children ("nature's mistakes").
The breeding and
culling of animals that was at the center of American and German
eugenics produced a number of key T4 personnel, including those sent
to Poland to operate the death camps. Victor Brack, T4's chief
manager, received a diploma in agriculture from the Technical
University in Munich, while Hans Hefelmann, who headed the office
that coordinated the killing of handicapped children, had a
doctorate in agricultural economics. Before spending more than two
years at the Hartheim euthanasia center in Austria, Bruno Bruckner
had worked as a porter in a Linz slaughterhouse. Willi Mentz, an
especially sadistic guard at Treblinka, had been in charge of cows
and pigs at two T4 killing centers, Grafeneck and Hadamar.
Treblinka's last commandant, Kurt Franz, trained with a master
butcher before joining the SS. Karl Frenzel, who worked as a stoker
at Hadamar before being posted to the Sobibor death camp, had also
been a butcher. For German personnel sent to Poland to exterminate
Jews, experience in the exploitation and slaughter of animals proved
to be excellent training.
The exploitation
and slaughter of animals provides the precedent for the mass murder
of people and makes it more likely because it conditions us to
withhold empathy, compassion, and respect from others who are
different. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "There is only one little
step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler."
Indeed there is. About the same time the German Jewish philosopher
Theodor Adorno made a similar point: "Auschwitz begins whenever
someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."
Indeed it does.
