Customer Reviews

Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust

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In this useful and interesting book, Sax discusses the treatment of animals in the Third Reich, but the focus is broader than that; he also explores the way that metaphors from the animal kingdom became an important way of expressing the Nazi world view. In the twisted ideology of the Third Reich, there was no important differentiation between "human" and "animal" life. Instead, the Nazis tended to look on the world as a continuum. The highest position on the continuum belonged to healthy humans the "Aryan race." Animals could be found lower down on that continuum, while lower still were the humans who were considered inferior because of their racial identity or mental handicaps. As Sax put it in the introductory material, "In their nihilistic perspective the important distinction was not between "humans" and "aniimals" .... It was between victor and vanquished, between master and slave. The underlying paradigm was ... that of predator and prey." This attitude reflected the viewpoint in National Socialism that depicted nature as "a harsh and implacable power," demanding obedience.

Anyone who reads this book and criticizes its scholarship is suspect in my opinion. The scholarship here is excellent, its the information that is controversial. The book contains translations of many of the National Socialist Animal Rights Acts.

Animal rights activists will hate the conclusions to be drawn from this research, in the same way that they hated the Nazi War on Cancer. However, understanding that the National Socialists had a domestic problem that would appeal to many modern progressives makes it that much more fascinating.

Unfortunately, this beautifully written, morally reflective book was inadequately researched. Many of the author's anecdotes were simply culled from secondary sources (some of questionable reliability), and the book even contains lengthy sections of entirely unfootnoted assertions. Sax seems unaware of major recent work on Nazi Germany of direct relevance to the issues he addresses - Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men," Ian Kershaw's "Hitler Myth", Paul Weindling's "Health, Race and German Politics" and Kurt Schleunes', "A Twisted Road to Auschwitz" are all missing from his bibliography. As a result, his book unfortunately adds little to contemporary scholarly understanding of the Nazi regime, despite the novelty and importance of his initial questions.