In the summer of 1942, Fritz Sendel, chief of staff of the German Order Police in occupied Poland, sent a message to the force’s commanding officers. Its subject: protecting the rights of animals that were transported on trains. “In the spirit of the Reich Animal Protection Act, I order, with immediate effect, that the officers of the stations (German and non-German) intervene immediately in cases of cruelty to animals, put a stop to it and report the offenders,” he wrote.Sendel noted that “the majority of cases involving the cruelty to animals until now have been observed in regard to the horses used by the police forces.” On top of this, “the crowded conditions in the railway cattle cars, especially for animals being sent to slaughter, have also led to many credible complaints.”The document in question was found in Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance by Eliyahu Klein, a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University, whose dissertation, under the supervision of Prof. Havi Dreifuss and Dr. David Silberklang from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, focuses on the relationship between Jews and non-Jews under the German occupation in Poland and elsewhere.Sendel added an appendix containing precise instructions, ordering the police officers to take action to prevent cruelty to animals and to report on any colleagues who mistreated them. The recommendations included reducing the number of animals per railcar, allowing them to have time to rest and monitoring their condition.“The text mentions the need to oversee the conditions of the animals being transported,” Klein says. Officers were urged to ensure that the railcars were properly ventilated, to take note of the capacity of the cars and keep track of the number of animals loaded onto each one, and to make note of their physical condition, including details of injuries, respiratory problems and other symptoms. In addition, the German personnel were to see to it that the animals were not struck unnecessarily while being loaded onto the train, and asked to report on cases of sickness or death during the transport.
Klein mentions an exchange of correspondence in the summer of 1942 between two high-ranking Nazi figures. In it the deputy transport minister of Nazi Germany, Albert Ganzenmueller, updated Karl Wolff, chief of staff of Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler, about the transports to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto. In response, Wolff wrote, as quoted in Kerstin von Lingen’s 2013 book “Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals”: “I note with particular pleasure after reading your communication that a train with 5,000 members of the chosen people has been running daily [to Treblinka] for 14 days and that we are accordingly in a position to continue with this population movement at an accelerated pace. ..."
Notice how Ganzenmueller sarcastically refers to Jews as the "chosen people" in a way not dissimilar to how we see the term used by today's anti-Zionists.
The seeming contradiction between how Nazis treated Jews and how they treated animals is not a new topic. I found a very interesting 1992 article that tried to explain this dichotomy in terms of Nazi ideology and its German antecedents.
It would be easy to dismiss the apparently benevolent Nazi attitude toward animals as “hypocrisy,” but this would be a facile way of evading an examination of the psychological and social dynamics of Nazi thinking and behavior. Rather than questioning the authenticity of the motivations behind Nazi animal protection—a question that is unanswerable—it may be more useful to ask how such thinking was possible and what significance it had.
One motivation was the German desire to distinguish themselves morally from Jews. The practice of Jewish ritual slaughter was attacked in the 19th century by German animal rights activists and banning kosher slaughter was one of the first acts of the Nazi government. Propaganda films that attempted to show how cruel Jews were to animals were widely distributed. Moreover, Nazis framed animal experimentation as a "Jewish" practice which should be curtailed (although laws to that effect had many loopholes.)
More interestingly, the paper argues that while there was no consistent Nazi ideology, to a large extent Nazis regarded all humans as animals, with Aryans as the highest form of animal that had to be protected from intermixing with lower forms such as Jews (untermenschen.) It quotes one SS document:
The subhuman—that creation of nature, which biologically is seemingly quite identical with the human, with hands, feet, and a kind of brain, with eyes and a mouth—is nevertheless a totally different and horrible creature, is merely an attempt at being man—but mentally and emotionally on a far lower level than any animal. In the inner life of that person there is a cruel chaos of wild uninhibited passions: a nameless urge to destroy, the most primitive lust, undisguised baseness… But the subhuman lived, too… He associated with his own kind. The beast called the beast… And this underworld of subhumans found its leader: the eternal Jew!
In the hierarchy of the animal kingdom, the Jews occupied the lowest possible position:
When groups of people, most commonly Jews, were likened to specific animal species, it was usually “lower” animals or life forms, including rodents, reptiles, insects, or germs. Hitler (1938), for instance, called the Jews a “pack of rats,” and Himmler, in order to help soldiers cope with having just shot one hundred Jews, told them “bedbugs and rats have a life purpose…but this has never meant that man could not defend himself against vermin” (Hilberg 1961, 219). The propaganda film Triumph of the Will superimposed images of rats over presumed “degenerate people” such as the Jews, and the 1940 film The Eternal Jew portrayed Jews as lower than vermin, somewhat akin to the rat—filthy, corrupting, disease carrying, ugly, and group oriented (Herzstein 1978, 309). ... Jews were also likened to bacteria and “plagues” of insects (Herzstein 1978, 354).
But the Germans even regarded Aryans, in a sense, as animals. Nazis proposed ways to breed superhumans the same way that animals are bred, reducing even Aryan human beings to little more than breeding stock:
Much of Himmler’s knowledge about animal breeding practices was directly applied to plans for human breeding to further Aryan traits (Bookbinder 1989). One of Himmler’s obsessions was the breeding of many more superior Nordic offspring (Shirer 1960, 984). Financial awards were made for giving birth if the child was of biological and racial value, and potential mothers of good Aryan stock who did not give birth were branded as “unwholesome, traitors and criminals” (Deuel 1942, 164–65). Encouraging the propagation of good German blood was seen as so important that several Nazi leaders advocated free love in special recreation camps for girls with pure Aryan qualities. In one of Himmler’s schemes, he argued that if 100 such camps were established for 1000 girls, 10,000 “perfect” children would be born each year (Deuel 1942, 165). Despite the criticism of the Reich Minister of the Interior, who opposed the “idea of breeding Nordics” when it reached the point of “making a rabbit-breeding farm out of Germany” (Deuel 1942, 203), plans were developed for a series of state-run brothels, where young women certified as genetically sound would be impregnated by Nazi men. The intent was to breed Aryans as if they were pedigreed dogs (Glaser 1978).
This viewpoint of all living beings as on the same continuum where the higher animals must be protected from the lower animals is, on its own terms, a coherent moral philosophy that was twisted into a monstrous reality.
It is all too simple to relegate Nazis to cartoonish villains as being evil for evil's sake. But the frightening part is that they justified their evil in the language of ethics. Their position towards animal rights were the most advanced in the world at the time and (unconsciously) influences animal rights activists' philosophy today. Similarly, Nazi Germany was in the forefront of medical ethics, using the same kind of logic described here to justify persecuting Jews as an ethical imperative to protect Aryans.
We see this same perverted twisting of ethics in the 21st century.
Today, there is an unmistakable singling out of Jews as the world's worst violators of ethics, just as the Nazis positioned Jews as morally reprehensible in their treatment of animals.
And today we see "human rights defenders" justifying murdering Jews as an ethical imperative of "resistance.".
Today's supposed "human rights" leaders believe that they have the moral high ground and cannot even see their own bigotry is being justified by their bizarre, twisted sense of ethics. Like the Nazis, they are writing long, seemingly well-researched papers to justify their foregone conclusions in the name of social justice.
Their justifications for attempting to destroy Israel are an eerie echo of the Nazis' ethical justifications for destroying the Jewish people.
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