Hitler was a Meat-Eater!
1. Adolf Hitler was NOT a "vegetarian."
According to Carol Orsag, in Irving Wallace and David Wallechinsky’s The
People’s Almanac (1975), Adolf Hitler "...became vegetarian because of
stomach problems" rather than out of compassion for animals, and "was
criticized for eating pig’s knuckles." (a popular Geman delicacy, known as
"eisbein.")
In a 1996 article, "Nazis and Animals: Debunking the Myths," which
originally appeared in the Animals' Agenda, Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for
Animal Rights states that Hitler "had a special fondness for sausages and
caviar, and sometimes ham," as well as "liver dumplings." Kalechofsky states
further that the Nazis experimented on animals as well as humans in the
concentration camps:
"The evidence of Nazi experiments on animals is overwhelming. In The Dark
Face of Science, author John Vyvyan summed it up correctly: ‘The experiments
made on prisoners were many and diverse, but they had one thing in common:
all were in continuation of, or complementary to, experiments on animals. In
every instance, this antecedent scientific literature is mentioned in the
evidence, and at Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps, human and
animal experiments were carried out simultaneously as parts of a single
programme.’"
Would not a genuine reverence for life — elevating animal rights to the
level of human rights, showing animals the level of concern we now show
human beings —have had the opposite effect? Compassion for every living
creature?
There is no evidence that vegetarianism (for reasons of health or ethics or
social justice: global hunger, global warming, the energy, environmental,
population, water crises, etc.) will make people saints or give them
Gandhian compassion, but neither is there any evidence that it will make
people Nazis.
2. Dr. Richard Schwartz (author, Judaism and Vegetarianism) comments on Rynn
Berry's 2004 book, Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover.
"The case for vegetarianism is, in my opinion, unassailable. How can anyone
defend an animal-based diet that involves the gratuitous slaughter of
billions of animals every year, most of them raised under extremely cruel
conditions on "factory farms"?
"How can one defend a diet that has so many devastating effects on human
health; that significantly accelerates global climate change, species
extinction, soil erosion and depletion, the destruction of tropical
rainforests and other valuable habitats; and that requires far more land,
water, fuel, and other agricultural resources than plant-based diets? All
this at a time when billions of people lack adequate food and clean water.
"Robert Payne, Albert Speer, and other well-known Hitler biographers,
mentioned Hitler's predilection for such non-vegetarian foods as Bavarian
sausages, ham, liver, and game.
"European chef, Dione Lucas was an eyewitness to Hitler's meat-eating. In
her Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook (1964), Lucas, drawing on her
experiences as a hotel chef in Hamburg during the 1930s, remembered being
called upon quite often to prepare Hitler's favorite dish, which was not a
vegetarian one. 'I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,"
she writes, "but you might be interested to know that it was a great
favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often. Let us not hold that
against a fine recipe though.'
"Robert Payne's The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, which has been called
definitive, scotches the rumor that Hitler might have been a vegetarian...
"If Hitler had been a vegetarian, he would not have banned vegetarian
organizations in Germany and the occupied countries; nor would he have
failed to urge a meatless diet on the German people as a way of coping with
Germany's World War II food shortage.
"... perhaps people will focus on the important vegetarian-related issues,
and on history's vegetarian humanitarians, such as Tolstoy, George Bernard
Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Rav David Cohen (the "Nazir"),
and Rav Chaim Maccoby (the 'Kamenetzer Maggid')."
3. The myth of Hitler’s "vegetarianism" did not prevent Isaac Bashevis
Singer from comparing humanity’s mass killing of 50 billion animals every
year to the Nazi Holocaust.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, became a
vegetarian in 1962. He asked, "How can we pray to God for mercy if we
ourselves have no mercy? How can we speak of rights and justice if we take
an innocent creature and shed its blood?"
The myth of Hitler’s "vegetarianism" did not prevent Isaac Bashevis Singer
from comparing humanity’s mass killing of 50 billion animals every year to
the Nazi Holocaust, saying for the animals it is an "eternal Treblinka"
(concentration camp).
Isaac Bashevis Singer has also expressed the view that unnecessary violence
against animals by human beings will only lead to further violence in human
society: "I personally believe that as long as human beings will go on
shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only
one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a’ la Hitler
and concentration camps a’ la Stalin — all such deeds are done in the name
of ‘social justice.’ There will be no justice as long as man will stand with
a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote:
"...there are few people who have never thought about suicide at one time or
another. The same is true about vegetarianism. We find very few people who
have never thought that killing animals is actually murder, founded on the
premise that might is right.
"This is true today and it was also true in ancient times as Ovid, Plutarch,
Porphyry, and in later generations, Byron and Shelley and still later
Bernard Shaw and Edward Fitzgerald were all interested in this question...
"I'm often astonished when I read about highly sensitive poets, preachers of
morality, humanists, and do-gooders of all kinds who found pleasure in
hunting... I often read of people who say that when they retire they will go
fishing... It never occurs to them for a moment that innocent beings will
suffer and die... by eating the flesh of animals, by hunting, they are
committing murder all the time.
"All their nice talk about humanism, a better tomorrow, a beautiful future,
has no meaning at all as long as they kill for pleasure...
"I personally believe that as long as human beings will go on shedding the
blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little
step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a’ la Hitler and
concentration camps a’ la Stalin — all such deeds are done in the name of
‘social justice.’ There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a
knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is."
4. In his 1979 book, Aborting America, Dr. Bernard Nathanson (co-founder of
NARAL, a physician who presided over some 60,000 abortions before changing
sides on the issue) similarly wrote:
"Anti-abortion authors cannot restrain themselves from dragging Adolf Hitler
out of the grave. A society that accepts abortion, we are told, is doing
what the Nazis did when they killed off the handicapped, the retarded, the
gypsies, and the Jews.
"The facts are these. The German Nazis had strict anti-abortion policies --
for 'Aryans.' Jews were encouraged to abort, as part of Hitler's racial
purity madness...
"Strange that Right-to-Lifers do not make more of the fact that the pioneer
in liberal abortion was not Hitler but V.I. Lenin, in 1920. The Soviet Union
is not exactly one's ideal of a humanitarian, life valuing state, either."
5. Meat-eaters, NOT vegetarians, are anti-semitic.
Adolf Hitler thought Albert Einstein's scientific discoveries were mere
"Jewish science" and thus not applicable to gentiles. This is the mentality
of meat-eating Christians towards vegetarianism, which they regard as a
sectarian (like circumcision) dietary restriction (like "keeping kosher")
rather than as a universal ethic for all mankind (like abstaining from
cannibalism).
Meat-eating Christians, relegating animal rights and vegetarianism solely to
Judaism are as bigoted as Hitler. There is a sad irony here as many liberals
see the abortion issue as sectarian, too: if you're not born again, you
don't have to be pro-life.
We don't hear meat-eating Christians say, "God bless the Jews. They gave the
world monotheism. They gave the world Jesus. Albert Einstein's scientific
discoveries revolutionized the world in which we live. And now, it's time to
end animal slavery. And the Hebrew Scriptures, which make up half of our own
Christian canon, provide a basis for doing that!"
Leonardo Da Vinci, Count Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw,
Susan B. Anthony, Percy Shelley, were all vegetarian, and none of them were
Jewish! At the end of 2007, shortly before moving to Israel, Pete Cohn of
Veggie Jews in San Francisco said to me, "PETA's not Jewish."
Go on to: Honest Enough
Return to: Articles
