Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust - Book Reviews

By Charles Patterson

Lantern Books (paperback 2002), 312 pages, $20.00.

Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust is an extensively documented book in which Charles Patterson looks at the similarities between our species' treatment of nonhuman animals and the Nazi holocaust.

Patterson shows how humans, by thinking of themselves as superior to the other species, distance themselves from other animals. This results in the exploitation of nonhuman animals, who are domesticated, enslaved, and used for various purposes. As Patterson explains, historically:

The enslavement/domestication of animals affected the way humans related to their captive animals and in turn to each other...once animals were domesticated,' herdsmen and farmers adopted mechanisms of detachment, rationalization, denial, and euphemism to distance themselves emotionally from their captives... The main coping mechanism humans employed was the adoption of the view that they were separate from and morally superior to the other animals.

Humans have looked upon (and still look upon) nonhuman animals as inferior beings that don't possess souls, speech, reasoning, and therefore feelings or sensation. This view has made it easy for some to cruelly treat, kill, and eat animals. Patterson describes how slaves were treated similarly to domestic animals:

In slave societies, the same practices used to control animals were used to control slaves -- castration, branding, whipping, chaining, ear cropping. The ethic of human domination that removed animals from the sphere of human concern and obligation, writes Keith Thomas, 'also legitimized the ill-treatment of those humans who were in a supposedly animal condition.'

By designating some people as animals during the Nazi holocaust, humans were able to persecute, exploit and violently deal with their own species. "Not only did the domestication of animals provide the model and inspiration for human slavery and tyrannical government, but it laid the groundwork for western hierarchical thinking and European and American racial theories that called for the conquest and exploitation of 'lower races,' while at the same time vilifying them as animals so as to encourage and justify their subjugation." Patterson states that referring to humans as animals "...is always an ominous sign because it sets them up for humiliation, exploitation, and murder," and he cites numerous examples of races referred to as animals during times when they were exploited, treated brutally, killed, and even exterminated.

Patterson then turns his attention to large-scale violence against both nonhuman and human animals in both the United States and Germany. Some of this violence was due to the American eugenics movement, which, according to Patterson, was in part inspired by the breeding of domesticated, nonhuman animals, and the creation of assembly-line slaughter in America which later "...crossed the Atlantic Ocean and found fertile soil in Nazi Germany."

In 1939 the eugenics movement in Germany included killing mentally challenged people and those with emotional and physical disabilities. Many of the people instrumental in these mass murders came from a background in animal agriculture. According to Patterson, the eugenics movement, sterilization, and murders, combined with the mass industrialized slaughter of nonhuman animals, led to the Nazi "Final Solution."

Patterson points out that the Nazis treated their victims like animals before murdering them. Dehumanizing the victims made it easier to murder them.

By looking at how humans have treated nonhuman animals and other humans seen as inferior, Patterson effectively illustrates how the Holocaust occurred and how similar atrocities occur every day in slaughterhouses and factory farms. The tragic formula is quite simple:

Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species, our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation of our victimization of each other. 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.

The final part of the book looks at Jewish and German people whose advocacy on behalf of nonhuman animals was influenced by the Nazi Holocaust.

In order to create a kinder, more compassionate world, our species must make peace with the nonhuman animals with whom we share the earth and give them the respect that they deserve. As Patterson points out:

The philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), a German Jew who was forced into exile by the Nazis but returned to Germany after the war to a professorship at Frankfurt University, wrote, 'Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.

Every so often a book is written that has the potential to make an incredible difference. Eternal Treblinka is one such book.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Vegetarian Baby and Child
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group