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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.
In part one of Eternal Treblinka, Patterson opens chapter one by quoting Sigmund Freud. “In the course of his development towards culture man acquired a dominating position over his fellow-creatures in the animal kingdom.” [1] This quote sets the stage for the first chapter which expresses the relationship between humans and animals. Patterson describes how the domination of man over animals is a recent phenomenon. “Mans emergence as the dominant species is a very recent development.” [1]
He brings in Carl Sagan's idea of the Cosmic Calendar to show just how little time humans have actually spent on this earth to begin to portray this idea. He then illustrates the different arguments on what caused the technological advances of the human species beyond that of animals, by presenting the ideas of those ranging from Jared Diamond to Barbara Ehrenreich. Once the proper technological advances of humans were acquired, then came the domestication of animals. Patterson quotes “The transition to herding and farming happened gradually. Those who hunted wild sheep and goats attached themselves to a particular herd, which then became “their” herd to follow and exploit.” [2] Patterson notes that in order to domesticate animals for human purposes such as meat and labor, herders learned how to control the animals whole lives through the use of “castration, hobbling, branding, ear cropping, and such devices as leather aprons, whips, prods, and eventually chains and collars…” [3]
He describes the brutal processes such as castration, and the early weaning of calves from their mothers. He then goes on to divulge the relationship between the exploitation of animals and victims of the Holocaust. “Once animal exploitation was industrialized and accepted as part of the natural order of things, it opened the door to similar ways of treating other human beings, thus paving the way for such atrocities as human slavery and the Holocaust.” [1]
Patterson also brings up the topic of how the domestication of animals has led to the domination and sexual subjection of women. He quotes Elizabeth Fisher, “The domestication of women followed the initiation of animal keeping.” she writes “and it was then that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, enforcing chastity and sexual repression.” [3] Fisher wrote this in her book Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society [4] "Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Fisher (1979) was one of the first authors to discuss the link between domination of women and the domestication of animals." [5] Patterson believes that the keeping of animals set a model for the domination over women and the enslavement of humans in general.
Patterson writes that slaves were even branded and castrated just as animals still are to this day. “Branding was used as a way to mark and identify slaves throughout the Americas until the late 1700s.” [1]
Patterson then moves on to the idea of The Great Chain of Being. It was created by Plato, which “Formalized the belief of the Greeks that they ranked higher than non-Greeks, women, slaves, and, of course, animals.” [1] Because of this early hierarchical arrangement, Patterson thinks that this is part of the reason that men look upon themselves as better and more superior than animals. It created a hierarchy of social classes and determined their place in society. According to the human-centric view, animals were made for man, thus creating the human/animal divide. Patterson insists that Descarte and his followers had a large influence in this when they maintained that animals did not feel pain and claimed that their cries, howls, and writhings were only external reflexes, unconnected to inner sensation. Patterson quotes that “Widening the gulf between man and animals to such an extent provided by far the best rationalization yet for the human exploitation of animals.” [1]
In chapter two he uncovers how humans began vilifying others as animals. Since Europeans began describing Native Americans and Africans as animals, it justified slavery to them. Since animals were already looked down upon them as less superior, when they associated Africans with animals it made it easier for them to treat them this horribly. Patterson writes “Calling people animals is always an ominous sign because it sets them up for humiliation, exploitation, and murder.” [1] When the Europeans traveled to Africa in the sixteenth century some described the people there as rude and beastlie; they even referred their language to that of apes because they did not understand. Native Americans were vilified as well, in a similar way as a prelude to their destruction. “Stannard writes that in California, as elsewhere, whites described indians “as ugly, filthy, and inhuman ‘beasts,’ ‘swine,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘wolves,’ ‘snakes,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘baboons,’ ‘gorillas,’ and ‘oran-gutans,’ to cite only a few of the press's more commonly published characterizations.” [1] Even Japanese were vilified as animals during World War II. They were seen as animals, reptiles, and insects. Patterson quotes John Dowers words from his book War Without Mercy. "Japanese were perceived as animals, reptiles, or insects (monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice and rats, vipers and rattlesnakes, cockroaches, vermin..” [6] After Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans were literally treated like animals. They were rounded up and forced to live in animal facilities.
Lastly, Patterson brings up the topic of the vilification of Jews. “In Germany this kind of vilification began long before the Nazis came to power. At first, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther (1483-1546) praised Jews for rejecting the corrupt teachings of the papal “antichrist.” But when it soon became clear the Jews weren't all that eager to convert to his brand of Christianity, he denounced them as “pigs” and “mad dogs.”" [1] Patterson then begins to discuss the topic of the Holocaust and how Jews were viewed during this time. He quotes one of the leading members of the Nazi party on his views of Jews. “Heinrich Himmler, who regarded the Jew as “spiritually and mentally much lower than any animal,” saw the war as a racial struggle to the death against the horde of “Asiatic animals” under the control of Jewish Bolshevism.”” [1]
Jews were viewed as animals by members of the Nazi Party. Viewing Jews as animals made it easier for Nazis to do their job. It made them feel less connected to them emotionally and physically. “The use of animal terms to vilify and dehumanize the victims, combined with the abominably degraded conditions in the camps, made it easier for the SS to do their job, since treating prisoners like animals made them begin to look and smell like animals.” [1] Since civilization was built on the murder and exploitation of animals, it was easier to kill the lower and more degraded human victims. The commandant of Auschwitz is quoted, describing the extermination camp as a “human slaughterhouse”.
In part two of Eternal Treblinka, Patterson draws direct connections to the industrialization of animal slaughter and the Holocaust [1] Patterson cites German Jewish philosopher, Theodor Adorno, who he claims said “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.” [7] However, this quote is apocryphal, and there is no evidence Adorno said those words. [8]
Patterson then delves into the foundations of the industrialized factory farms that began with Western expansion. Patterson says “the European settlers brought with them to the Americas their practices of exploiting animals for labor, food, clothing, and transportation.” [9] He says the slaughter of animals in North America arrived with the English. To describe this phenomenon he discusses the famine facing the Jamestown settlers in the winter of 1607-8 where they slaughtered and ate all the animals they brought from England. After the livestock supply was replenished they butchered the surplus at the start of each winter, and soon the settlers of Jamestown were continuing the slaughter and meat preservation process in bulk. [10] The industrialization of slaughter continued with the colony of New Amsterdam, which became New York in 1664; by 1665 the number of butchered animals a year was almost 10,000 and the colony required slaughter permits. As the amount of slaughter increased, the slaughterhouses kept moving “in deference to the public, wanting to be spared the sights, sounds, and smells of slaughter” [10] Patterson notes that the first step toward the division of labor that would transform the American meat industry was evident in Cincinnati by the mid-1800s when larger plants combined their slaughter and meatpacking operations. [10]
According to Patterson, by the 1850s the construction of Union Stock Yards turned meatpacking into a major industry and Chicago became the slaughter capital of America [11] The Meatpacking industry also introduced the conveyor belt, increasing the efficiency and speed of the nation's first mass-production industry with the assembly line process [11] In 1905, after the meat industry lobby blocked a bill in Congress that would’ve implemented meat inspection standards, the paper The Appeal To Reason enlisted Upton Sinclair to investigate the Chicago meatpacking industry. [12] Sinclair published fictional novel The Jungle based on what he saw while investigating, which exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry to the public. [13]
Patterson says that the biggest difference between the slaughter of animals today and in the early 1900s is that slaughterhouses have become faster and increased in volume of production, “[a slaughterhouse] today... kills more animals in a single day than all the slaughterhouses in Sinclair's day killed in a year.” [14] Patterson then discusses political artist, Sue Coe's, book Dead Meat about her six years visiting slaughterhouses around the country. [15] In her book Coe says that the Holocaust kept coming to mind as she visited the slaughterhouses, “she says she wonders if [the Holocaust] is ‘the comforting measuring rod by which all horrors are evaluated?’” [16] Patterson continues his argument of relating the industrialization of the meat industry to the Holocaust by discussing Henry Ford, “whose impact on the twentieth century began, metaphorically speaking, at an American slaughterhouse and ended at Auschwitz.” [17]
In his autobiography, Ford said that his inspiration for assembly-line production came from visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse. [17] Patterson states that not only did Ford help the Holocaust happen by developing the assembly-line method that the Germans used for killing, but he also launched an anti-Semitic campaign. [18] Hitler praised Ford; he even said “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration." [19]
According to Patterson, Ford was not the only American influence on the Holocaust, the eugenics movement and Mendel's theory of heredity had an impact, as well. [20] In addition to eugenics, sterilization in America influenced German atrocities. [21] Patterson claims that “Nazi Germany looked to the United States for racial leadership” because Hitler was impressed by America's laws on sterilization, racial segregation and immigration restrictions. [22] Patterson continues by describing how the Nazi's compared mentally challenged people to animals in order to justify and practice research on sterilization and eugenics on them. [23]
Patterson then discusses Heinrich Himmler, attributing Himmler's experience operating on a chicken farm to his prior familiarity with mass killing; “Himmler didn’t consider his victims human, so he was not at all concerned about their suffering or their fate." [24] By 1942, Himmler's work led to a running Auschwitz for the mass extermination of all “sub-humans." [25]
Patterson's final relation between animal slaughter and the Holocaust culminates in his last chapter. He states, “the study of human history reveals the pattern: first humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them." [26] It was not only in the murdering that the Nazis dehumanized their victims, but in their treatment before it as well; they were naked and crowded together in herds, stripped of individuality. [27] Similar to the process of animals transported to slaughterhouses, victims who arrived to concentration camps sick were shot on the spot rather than sent through the system. [28]
Patterson says that “children were shown no mercy at death camps either,” although their cries were known to have deeper psychological impact on the perpetrators, similar to slaughterhouse workers forced to kill baby animals. [29] The Nazis created a hierarchy in which “sub-humans,” such as minorities, were ranked below animals and thusly treated that way. Patterson ends by mentioning a little girl in a Warsaw ghetto that said, “I would like to be a dog because the Germans like dogs, and I would not have to be afraid they would kill me." [30]
1. Treblinka: The name of a Nazi death camp during the World War II era, where an estimated 800,000 Jews were killed. Treblinka and the Holocaust are related to the human treatment of animals. [31]
2. Human Megalomania: The self-declared ownership humans gave themselves over other occupants of the world, such as animals. This idea is the basis for chapter one, and breaks down human supremacy over other inhabitants on earth. Synonym: "Human Arrogance". [32]
3. Amar-kud: Sumerian term for castrated slave boys, donkeys, oxen, and horses. That the ancient Mesopotamian city-states used the same term for these indicates that they treated their slaves and livestock in the same manner. [33]
4. Emasculation: The act of weakening or depriving a man of his identity as a male. It was used in the book to describe how American colonists treated black slave men, for example, by castrating them. They castrated male slaves the same way they castrated bulls. This exemplifies how white men exerted their self-declared power over black men, by treating them as they did animals. [34]
5. Homo Ferus: "A wild man who was four-footed, mute and hairy." The term was coined by Carolus Linnaeus to characterize non-whites as being half human and half animal. [35]
6. Great Chain of Being: A concept originating from Plato that places organisms in a hierarchy with Greeks at the top, followed by non-Greeks, women, and then slaves and animals. [36]
7. Subhuman: Being lesser than human. This is referred to often in reference to treatment of prisoners during the Holocaust. [37]
8. Craniometry: The scientific measurement of brain sizes. This was used as a way to rank humans based on brain size in order to portray specific foreign people as lesser. [38]
9. Extermination: The killing of an entire group, originally referencing animals and insects, but used by the Nazis to refer to people. [39]
10. Foramen Magnum: The hole located in the base of one's skull where the spinal cord passes through. Research on the location of the foramen magnum, done by a French pathologist, determined black people's skulls resembled those of monkeys in order to place them as lesser than white people. [40]
Political Affairs called Eternal Treblinka, "a wonderful book about terrible subjects". [41] JVNA called it "very well researched ... written with great sensitivity and compassion". [42]
Eternal Treblinka has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Russian, and Japanese, and Korean. [43] [44]
The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
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.
Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide. In the time frame of July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone.
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was a Nazi Party official from Austria and a perpetrator of the Holocaust. A high-ranking leader of the SS, Globocnik played a leading role in Operation Reinhard, the organized murder of around one and a half million Jews, mostly of Polish origin, during the Holocaust in the Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec extermination camps. Historian Michael Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known". Globocnik killed himself shortly after his capture and detention by British soldiers.
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.
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.
The Eternal Jew is a 1940 antisemitic Nazi propaganda film, presented as a documentary. The film's initial German title was Der ewige Jude, the German term for the character of the "Wandering Jew" in medieval folklore. The film was directed by Fritz Hippler at the insistence of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last is a pamphlet that promotes Holocaust denial and other neo-Nazi sentiments, allegedly written by British National Front (NF) member Richard Verrall under the pseudonym Richard E. Harwood and published in 1974 by neo-Nazi propagandist Ernst Zündel, another Holocaust denier and pamphleteer. The NF denied that Verrall was the author in a 1978 edition of World in Action.
Near the end of his life, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) followed a vegetarian diet. It is not clear when or why he adopted it, since some accounts of his dietary habits prior to the Second World War indicate that he consumed meat as late as 1937. In 1938, Hitler's doctors put him on a meat-free diet, and his public image as a vegetarian was fostered; from 1942, he self-identified as a vegetarian. Personal accounts from people who knew Hitler and were familiar with his diet indicate that he did not consume meat as part of his diet during this period, as several contemporaneous witnesses—such as Albert Speer —noted that Hitler used vivid and gruesome descriptions of animal suffering and slaughter at the dinner table to try to dissuade his colleagues from eating meat. An examination carried out by French scientists on a fragment of Hitler's skull in 2018 found no traces of meat fibre in the tartar on Hitler's teeth.
Untermensch is a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', that was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/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."
The legal aspects of ritual slaughter include the regulation of slaughterhouses, butchers, and religious personnel involved with traditional shechita (Jewish) and dhabiha (Islamic). Regulations also may extend to butchery products sold in accordance with kashrut and halal religious law. Governments regulate ritual slaughter, primarily through legislation and administrative law. In addition, compliance with oversight of ritual slaughter is monitored by governmental agencies and, on occasion, contested in litigation.
There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.
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. 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.
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).
German Equipment Works was a Nazi German defense contractor with headquarters in Berlin during World War II, owned and operated by the Schutzstaffel (SS). It consisted of a network of requisitioned factories and camp workshops across German-occupied Europe exploiting the prisoner slave labour from Nazi concentration camps and the Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland. DAW outfitted the German military with boots, uniforms and materials on the eastern front at a windfall profit, and provided wood and metal supplies, as well as reconstruction work on railway lines and freight trains.
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.
Animal–industrial complex (AIC) is a concept used by activists and scholars to describe what they contend is the systematic and institutionalized exploitation of animals. It includes every economic activity involving animals, such as the food industry, animal testing, medicine, clothing, labor and transport, tourism and entertainment, selective breeding, and so forth. Proponents of the term claim that activities described by the term differ from individual acts of animal cruelty in that they constitute institutionalized animal exploitation.
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