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.
