Animals, Slavery, and the Holocaust
By Charles Patterson

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Animals, Slavery, and the Holocaust

By Charles Patterson

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.

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Charles Patterson is the author of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust http://www.powerfulbook.com/.

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