Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust - Tapa dura

"This is an utterly fascinating work, enriched by Sax's wide-ranging erudition, and sure to intrigue ordinary readers as well as inspiring scholars to come." - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War; "[Sax] not only throws light on the Nazis and the Holocaust, he also forces us to confront our own uncertainties and ambivalences about what is human, what is animal, and what is the difference." - Andrew N. Rowan, The Humane Society"

Contrasting Jewish, Christian and polytheistic traditions and contemporary German attitudes regarding the treatment of animals, Boria Sax documents how Nazis manipulated these attitudes to conform to their own symbolic system - Aryan wolves and horses, Jewish pigs and apes. By equating the Nazi party with "nature", the Nazis reduced all ethical issues to biological questions. Thus predatory animals were exalted along with their human counterparts - party leaders and functionaries - while enemies were identified as sheep destined for slaughter. This history untangles paradoxes such as the Nazi's rigorous laws regarding the humane transport of cattle in the same railroad cars that carried suffocatingly packed human victims to death camps.