Holocaust analogy in animal rights

Last updated May 03, 2024

Several individuals and groups have drawn direct comparisons between animal cruelty and the Holocaust. The analogies began soon after the end of World War II, when literary figures, many of them Holocaust survivors, Jewish or both, began to draw parallels between the treatment of animals by humans and the treatments of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The Letter Writer, a 1968 short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a literary work often cited as the seminal use of the analogy.^[1] The comparison has been criticized by organizations that campaign against antisemitism, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, particularly since 2006, when PETA began to make heavy use of the analogy as part of campaigns for improved animal welfare.^[2]

Comparisons

Perhaps the earliest use of the analogy comes from Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a German concentration camp survivor and journalist, who wrote in 1940 in his "Dachau Diaries" from inside the Dachau Concentration Camp that "I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures' suffering by virtue of my own".^[4]^[5] He further wrote, "I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale".^[4]

Another Holocaust survivor who has written on the subject is Alex Hershaft, now a vegan activist, who also compared the treatment of livestock to the Holocaust.^[6]^[7] He has stated that "We're focusing on the victims rather than the cancer of oppression itself",^[8] and that "I noted with horror the striking similarities between what the Nazis did to my family and my people, and what we do to animals we raise for food: the branding or tattooing of serial numbers to identify victims, the use of cattle cars to transport victims to their death, the crowded housing of victims in wood crates, the arbitrary designation of who lives and who dies — the Christian lives, the Jew dies; the dog lives, the pig dies."^[6]

Polish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, made the comparison in several of his stories. In the 1968 The Letter Writer, the protagonist says, "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka."^[3] In The Penitent the protagonist says "when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi".^[9]

J. M. Coetzee, a South African–Australian writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, said of the Nazis' treatment of Jews: "... in the 20th century, a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings."^[10]

In her 2005 book The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, animal rights advocate Karen Davis says that the horrors of the Holocaust and the treatment of animals by contemporary society can and should be "reasonably and enlighteningly compared" as a way to raise awareness to something that "most people do not want to hear about, or have trouble imagining, or would just as soon forget." The general population cannot fathom the comparison, she maintains, as the Holocaust has become "iconic and 'historical,' whereas the human manufacture of animal suffering is so pervasive that many people find it hard to even regard the slaughter of animals as a form of violence." She quotes Matt Prescott, creator of PETA's controversial "Holocaust on your Plate" campaign, who says "Holocaust victims WERE treated like animals, and so logically we can conclude that animals are treated like Holocaust victims."^[11]

In 2014, philosopher and animal rights activist Steven Best argued that using a phrase like "animal holocaust" in a serious way can help illuminate the "incomprehensible scale and scope of the violence humans inflict on animals," which amounts to hundreds of billions of terrestrial and aquatic animals killed annually just for food alone. He also notes that conditions on CAFOs "resemble the mechanized production lines of concentration camps" where animals are "forced to produce maximal quantities of meat milk and eggs – an intense coercion that takes place through physical confinement but also now through chemical and genetic manipulation. As typical in Nazi compounds, this forced and intensive labor terminates in death."^[12]

Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar wrote that if we had not accepted the inhumane transportation of animals to the slaughterhouses we would not have accepted the transportation of humans to the concentration camps.^[13] In another article, she wrote that every act of cruelty suffered by thousands of living creatures is a crime against humanity.^[14]

American animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky compared factory farms to concentration camps. He has stated, "Jews have been, while animals still are, treated like nothing, as if their lives don't matter. You can also compare the two holocausts this way. ... Go to the nearest cow or pig slaughterhouse and remove the animals and replace them with humans. You have now re-created Birkenau."^[15]

The ADL has also listed a number of animal rights groups that have made the comparison. No Compromise , a website for radical animal liberationists, likened the direct action of the Animal Liberation Front to "those who destroyed Forever[ sic ] the gas chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz".^[16]

PETA comments and imagery

In 2006, Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), said: "Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses" as part of the organization's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign.^[17] An exhibition for the campaign consisted of eight 5.6-square-metre (60 sq ft) panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory-farmed animals. Photographs of concentration camp inmates were displayed next to photographs of battery chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. Captions alleged that "like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps."^[18] The exhibition was funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist,^[19] and created by Matt Prescott, who lost several relatives in the Holocaust. Prescott said that "what Jews and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms".^[19]

The exhibition was criticized by Abraham Foxman, chairman of the ADL, who said the exhibition was "outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights ... The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent."^[19] Stuart Bender, legal counsel for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote to PETA asking them to "cease and desist this reprehensible misuse of Holocaust materials."^[2] The campaign was also criticized by holocaust survivor Alex Hershaft, who has himself used the analogy to advocate for animal rights, but criticized PETA's campaign for making the comparison too lightly and recklessly, saying that "It's not O.K. for us. We wouldn't do it. The only reason I drew the comparison is because I was asked. And I did it very carefully, and I presented it in terms of my personal story, of the conclusions that I drew from my personal story. I didn't present it as an edict."^[7]

In 2005, Newkirk apologized for the pain the campaign had caused some people, while defending the goals of the campaign.^[20]^[16]The Guardian said Newkirk's comments "[did] little to calm the fury of Jewish groups".^[19] The campaign was also banned in Germany for making the Holocaust seem "insignificant and banal".^[21]

On February 20, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court dismissed a legal move challenging an appeal court's ruling that PETA's campaign was not protected by free speech laws. While not entering formal proceedings to decide in the matter, the court expressed severe doubts as to whether the campaign constituted an offense against human rights in its opinion to dismiss the appeal, as had been found by the orderly courts, but acceded to the other grounds of the former rulings that the campaign constituted a trivialization of the Holocaust and hence a severe violation of living Jews' personality rights.^[22]

Criticism

Antisemitism

The ADL says that the use of Holocaust imagery by animal rights activists is "disturbing" and antisemitic.^[16] Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights argues in her essay "Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons" that, although there is "connective tissue" between animal suffering and the Holocaust, they "fall into different historical frameworks, and comparison between them aborts the ... force of anti-Semitism."^[23] Holocaust survivor Abraham Silverman argued that the comparison is offensive, undermines the suffering of Jews during World War II, and inspires antisemitism online.^[24]

Alex Hershaft, who is himself a Jew and a Holocaust survivor, has stated he does not take accusations of antisemitism seriously, adding: "The main criticism is that we're making light of the sacrifice of the Holocaust, and of course, we're not. Far from it. We're honoring it by trying to draw some lessons for humanity."^[7]

Comparability

Roberta Kalechofsky has written that she "agree[s] with I.B. Singer's statement, that 'every day is Treblinka for the animals'", but also that "some agonies are too total to be compared with other agonies", and compared it to telling a dying child's parent: "Now you know how an animal feels."^[23]

Lack of human conflict with animals

Roberta Kalechofsky, a Jewish animal rights activist, wrote: "The agony of animals arises from different causes from those of the Holocaust. Human beings do not hate animals. They do not eat them because they hate them. They do not experiment on them because they hate them, they do not hunt them because they hate them. These were the motives for the Holocaust. Human beings have no ideological or theological conflict with animals."^[23]

In regards to the objection that, unlike the Holocaust, humans do not kill animals due to hatred, Alex Hershaft said: "I don't think hatred is the relevant thing here. I think indifference is the key factor. Because the people who were gassing the Jews were not doing it out of hatred. It was their job. They didn't hate the Jews any more than the slaughterhouse workers hate the pigs. It's not a matter of personal feelings. Obviously, Hitler had the hatred. I'm not saying that element doesn't exist. But it's not very relevant. The hatred alone wouldn't do it. You couldn't get these thousands of executioners to hate in the way that Hitler hated. If you look at the map of Treblinka, the guards and the commandant were living on the camp grounds. You can't live with people you hate. These were people to be killed and they were the killers."^[7]

Related Research Articles

Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.

Treblinka was the second-deadliest extermination camp to be built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, 4 km (2.5 mi) south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is an American animal rights nonprofit organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, and led by Ingrid Newkirk, its international president. PETA says that its entities have more than 9 million members globally.

Nazi concentration camp badges, primarily triangles, were part of the system of identification in German camps. They were used in the concentration camps in the German-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. The triangles were made of fabric and were sewn on jackets and trousers of the prisoners. These mandatory badges of shame had specific meanings indicated by their colour and shape. Such emblems helped guards assign tasks to the detainees. For example, a guard at a glance could see if someone was a convicted criminal and thus likely of a tough temperament suitable for kapo duty.

The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the most-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists the names of all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million Jews were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.

A Holocaust memorial day or Holocaust remembrance day is an annual observance to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews and of millions of other Holocaust victims by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Many countries, primarily in Europe, have designated national dates of commemoration. In 2005, the United Nations instituted an international observance, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Roberta Kalechofsky was an American writer, feminist and animal rights activist, focusing on the issue of animal rights within Judaism and the promotion of vegetarianism within the Jewish community. She was the founder of Jews for Animal Rights and Micah Publications or Micah Books, which specializes in the publication of animal rights, Jewish vegetarianism, and Holocaust literature.

Nazi analogies or Nazi comparisons are any comparisons or parallels which are related to Nazism or Nazi Germany, which often reference Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the SS, or the Holocaust. Despite criticism, such comparisons have been employed for a wide variety of reasons since Hitler's rise to power. Some Nazi comparisons are logical fallacies, such as reductio ad Hitlerum. Godwin's law asserts that a Nazi analogy is increasingly likely the longer an internet discussion continues; Mike Godwin also stated that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945.

Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.

The Holocaust on your Plate was an exhibition mounted by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 2003. It was funded by an anonymous Jewish philanthropist, and consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each with a juxtaposition of images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of battery chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. Captions alleged that "like the Jews murdered in concentration camps, animals are terrorized when they are housed in huge filthy warehouses and rounded up for shipment to slaughter. The leather sofa and handbag are the moral equivalent of the lampshades made from the skins of people killed in the death camps."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hedy Epstein</span> American political activist(1924 - 2016)

Hedy Epstein was a German-born Jewish-American political activist and Holocaust survivor known for her support of the Palestinian cause through the International Solidarity Movement.

Holocaust trains were railway transports run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and other European railways under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies, for the purpose of forcible deportation of the Jews, as well as other victims of the Holocaust, to the Nazi concentration, forced labour, and extermination camps.

Holocaust trivialization refers to any comparison or analogy that diminishes the scale and severity of the atrocities that were carried out by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The Wiesel Commission defined trivialization as the abusive use of comparisons with the aim of minimizing the Holocaust and banalizing its atrocities. Originally, holocaust meant a type of sacrifice that is completely burnt to ashes; starting from the late 19th century, it started to denote extensive destruction of a group, usually people or animals. The 1915 Armenian genocide was described as a "holocaust" by contemporary observers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norm Phelps</span> American activist

Norm Phelps was an American animal rights activist, vegetarian and writer. He was a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV), and a former outreach director of the Fund for Animals. He authored four books on animal rights: The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible (2002), The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights (2004), The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA (2007), and Changing the Game: Animal Liberation in the Twenty-first Century (2015).

Alex Hershaft is an American animal rights activist, Holocaust survivor, and co-founder and president of the Farm Animal Rights Movement (FARM), the nation's oldest (1976) organization devoted exclusively to promoting the rights of animals not to be raised for food. Previously, he has had a 30-year career in materials science and environmental consulting and a prominent role in movements for religious freedom and environmental quality.

Charles W. Patterson is an American author, historian, and animal rights advocate, best known for his books, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond, Animal Rights,The Civil Rights Movement, and Marian Anderson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rudolf Masarek</span> Nazi extermination camp escape leader and Holocaust victim (1913–1943)

Rudolf (Rudi) Masarek was a Czech prisoner of the Treblinka extermination camp and a prominent member of the Treblinka prisoner uprising. Deported from the Theresienstadt concentration camp to Treblinka on 8 October 1942, Masarek was killed during that camp's prisoner uprising on 2 August 1943.

Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in some veins of anti-Zionism in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The legitimacy of these comparisons and their potential antisemitic nature is a matter of debate. Historically, figures like historian Arnold J. Toynbee have drawn parallels between Zionism and Nazism, a stance he maintained despite criticism. Scholar David Feldman suggests these comparisons are often rhetorical tools without specific antisemitic intent. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sees them as diminishing the Holocaust's significance.

Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust is a non-fiction book by the American author Charles Patterson, first published in December 2001.

References

↑ Spiro, Amy (July 17, 2018). "Natalie Portman pays vegan tribute to Isaac Bashevis Singer". Jerusalem Post. Retrieved January 23, 2022.
1 2 Willoughby, Brian (March 7, 2003). "PETA Turns Holocaust into Pig Pen". Tolerance.org. Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on August 20, 2006.
1 2 Patterson, Charles (2002). Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust . New York, NY: Lantern Books, pp. 181–188.
1 2 Kupfer-Koberwitz, Edgar (1956). Animal Brothers: Reflection on an Ethical Way of Life (4th ed.). Mannaheim, Germany: Warland-Verlagsgenossenschaft eG Mannaheim. Translated by Ruth Mossner for Vegetarian Press, Denver.
↑ Kupfer-Koberwitz, Edgar. "Animals, My Brethren". peaceCENTERbooks.
1 2 3 Dolsten, Josefin (October 7, 2016). "Holocaust survivor likens treatment of livestock to Shoah". Times of Israel. Retrieved December 27, 2021.
1 2 3 4 Isaacs, Anna (October 2, 2015). "Q&A: Animal Rights Activist and Holocaust Survivor Alex Hershaft". Moment Magazine. Retrieved January 24, 2022.
↑ "WATCH: Holocaust Survivor Compares Concentration Camps To Animal Agriculture". Plant Based News: Disrupting The Conventional Narrative. June 4, 2017. Retrieved January 24, 2022.
↑ Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1983). The Penitent, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, p. 39.
↑ Coetzee, J. M. (February 22, 2007). "Exposing the beast: factory farming must be called to the slaughterhouse". The Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on January 9, 2008. Retrieved February 25, 2007.
↑ Davis, Karen (2005). The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities. Lantern Publishing & Media. pp. 1–5. ISBN 978-1590560914.
↑ Best, Steven (2014). "The New Abolitionism: Capitalism, Slavery, and Animal Liberation". The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 29, 35. doi:10.1057/9781137440723_2. ISBN 978-1137471116.
↑ Yourcenar, Marguerite. Une politique pour demain (in French). Archived from the original on May 18, 2015.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
↑ Yourcenar, Marguerite. Une civilisation à cloisons étanches (in French). Archived from the original on May 18, 2015.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
↑ "Gary Yourofsky to Haaretz: 'Animal Holocaust' Isn't Over". Haaretz. October 25, 2013. Archived from the original on March 20, 2021. Retrieved January 29, 2021.
1 2 3 "Holocaust Imagery and Animal Rights". Anti-Defamation League. August 2, 2005. Archived from the original on April 1, 2011. Retrieved August 17, 2006.
↑ Shafran, Avi (May 20, 2005). "This time PETA's guilty of missing the point". j. Archived from the original on May 25, 2006.
↑ Smith, Wesley J. "PETA to cannibals: Don't let them eat steak" Archived January 4, 2012, at the Wayback Machine , San Francisco Chronicle , December 21, 2003.
1 2 3 4 Teather, David. "'Holocaust on a plate' angers US Jews" Archived August 25, 2020, at the Wayback Machine , The Guardian , March 3, 2003.
↑ Newkirk, Ingrid. "Apology for a tasteless comparison" Archived June 17, 2006, at the Wayback Machine , IsraelInsider, May 5, 2005.
↑ "20 Minuten Online - Nachrichten - Panorama". 20min.ch. March 26, 2009. Archived from the original on March 29, 2009. Retrieved May 11, 2017.
↑ Bundesverfassungsgericht (March 26, 2009). "Erfolglose Verfassungsbeschwerden eines Tierschutzvereins gegen das Verbot einer auf einem Holocaustvergleich aufbauenden Werbekampagne" (in German). Archived from the original on November 10, 2012. Retrieved April 13, 2012.
1 2 3 Kalechofsky, Roberta. Animal Suffering and the Holocaust: The Problem with Comparisons Archived September 4, 2009, at the Wayback Machine , Micah Publications, 2003, last accessed November 3, 2009.
↑ Zoledziowski, Anya (February 3, 2021). "Vegan Influencers Keep Comparing Meat-Eating to the Holocaust and Slavery". www.vice.com. Retrieved January 25, 2022.