There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany (German: Tierschutz im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland) among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.
Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler made an effort to ban the hunting of animals. Hermann Göring was a professed animal lover and conservationist, who threatened to commit Germans who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. In his private diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian who was contemptuous of Judaism for the ethical distinction they drew between the value of humans and the value of animals; Goebbels also mentions that Hitler planned to discourage slaughterhouses in the German Reich following the conclusion of World War II. The Nazi government made a law against animal testing.
The current animal welfare laws in Germany were initially introduced by the Nazis.
Measures At the end of the nineteenth century, kosher butchering and vivisection (animal experimentation) were the main concerns of the German animal welfare movement. The Nazis adopted these concerns as part of their political platform. According to Boria Sax, the Nazis rejected anthropocentric reasons for animal protection—animals were to be protected for their own sake. In 1927, a Nazi representative to the Reichstag called for actions against cruelty to animals and kosher butchering.
In 1931, the Nazi Party (then a minority in the Reichstag) proposed a ban on vivisection, but the ban failed to attract support from other political parties. By 1933, after Hitler had ascended to the Chancellery and the Nazis had consolidated control of the Reichstag, the Nazis immediately held a meeting to enact the ban on vivisection. On April 21, 1933, almost immediately after the Nazis came to power, the parliament began to pass laws for the regulation of animal slaughter. On April 21, a law was passed concerning the slaughter of animals; no animals were to be slaughtered without anesthetic.
Göring also banned commercial animal trapping and imposed severe restrictions on hunting. He prohibited boiling of lobsters and crabs. In one incident, he sent a fisherman to a concentration camp for cutting up a bait frog.
On November 24, 1933, Nazi Germany enacted another law called Reichstierschutzgesetz (Reich Animal Protection Act), for protection of animals. This law listed many prohibitions against the use of animals, including their use for filmmaking and other public events causing pain or damage to health, force-feeding fowls and tearing out the thighs of living frogs. The two principals (Ministerialräte) of the German Ministry of the Interior, Clemens Giese and Waldemar Kahler, who were responsible for drafting the legislative text, wrote in their juridical comment from 1939, that by the law the animal was to be "protected for itself" ("um seiner selbst willen geschützt"), and made "an object of protection going far beyond the hitherto existing law" ("Objekt eines weit über die bisherigen Bestimmungen hinausgehenden Schutzes").Clemens Giese and Waldemar Kahler (1939). Das deutsche Tierschutzrecht, Bestimmungen zum Schutz der Tiere, Berlin, cited from: Edeltraud Klüting. Die gesetzlichen Regelungen der nationalsozialistischen Reichsregierung für den Tierschutz, den Naturschutz und den Umweltschutz, in: Joachim Radkau, Frank Uekötter (ed., 2003). Naturschutz und Nationalsozialismus, Campus Verlag , p.77 (in German)
On February 23, 1934, a decree was enacted by the Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Employment which introduced education on animal protection laws at primary, secondary and college levels. In 1934, Nazi Germany hosted an international conference on animal welfare in Berlin. On March 27, 1936, an order on the slaughter of living fish and other poikilotherms was enacted. On March 18 the same year, an order was passed on afforestation and on protection of animals in the wild. On September 9, 1937, a decree was published by the Ministry of the Interior which specified guidelines for the transportation of animals. In 1938, the Nazis introduced animal protection as a subject to be taught in public schools and universities in Germany.
On June 28, 1935, Nazi Germany enacted legislation that created a separate category in Paragraph 175 for "fornication with animals" and penalized offences of this type with up to five years in prison.
Effectiveness Although various laws were enacted for animal protection, the extent to which they were enforced has been questioned.
The Nazi government implemented policies to achieve "nutritional freedom" by discouraging the population's consumption of certain foods. The discouraged foods were not restricted to animal products, and some animal products such as quark were actively encouraged, but overall, between 1927 and 1937, these policies resulted in a decline in consumption of 17 percent for meat, 21 percent for milk, and 46 percent for eggs.
Animal experiments in Nazi Germany
The law A total ban on vivisection was enacted on August 1933, by Hermann Göring as the prime minister of Prussia. He announced an end to the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments" and said that those who "still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property" would be sent to concentration camps.
However, the law was revised by a decree three weeks later in September 1933, with laxer provisions, allowing the Reich Interior Ministry to distribute permits to some universities and research institutes to conduct animal experiments under conditions of anesthesia and scientific need. Goering stated that it would be the experts who would determine which animal experiments would be conducted and which would be stopped, according to their degree of necessity. Furthermore, in November 1933, a decree from the minister of the interior excluded animal protection organizations from working in the universities' animal protection commissions. Eventually, the ministry of the interior sent blank permits to university institutes to conduct experiments on animals and avoided closer supervision of experiments.
In 1936, the Tierärztekammer (Chamber of Veterinarians) in Darmstadt filed a formal complaint against the lack of enforcement of the animal protection laws on those who conducted illegal animal testing, saying that this "may completely paralyze the effect of the law."
The practice In practice, animal experimentation flourished in Nazi Germany.C Ray Greek, M. D., and Jean Swingle Greek. Sacred cows and golden geese: The human cost of experiments on animals. Continuum publishing, 2001. p. 90 The Nazi government not only avoided supervision of animal experiments, but often asked for animal testing and preferred using animals instead of humans when conducting biological experiments. The Weimar Republic passed a law according to which any experiment conducted on humans must first be conducted on animals. Nazi Germany did not repeal this law, and when the Nazi researchers asked to conduct experiments on humans, they stated in their request that they had previously conducted the required experiments on animals. The historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg described experiments that the Nazis conducted on animals before they also conducted them on humans.Arnold Arluke, Clinton Sanders (1996). Regarding Animals. Temple University Press. p. 135. .
Anti-tobacco research thrived in Nazi Germany. Cancer research during the Nazi regime was very advanced, and many studies on the harm of smoking were conducted in Germany during this period. The German experimenters placed rats in cells into which cigarette smoke was introduced. The rats gasped, fell on each other, and finally suffocated to death.Proctor, Robert. Nazi Science and Nazi Medical Ethics: Some Myths and Misconceptions. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 43, Number 3, Spring 2000, pp. 338. Other experiments were conducted in which it was shown that the tar emitted in cigarette smoke caused cancer in mice at a high rate. Researchers also exposed mice to asbestos to prove that it can cause lung cancer. In 1939, the SS doctor, Sigmund Rascher, performed a series of experiments on animals with the direct cooperation of Himmler. He conducted his experiments mainly in cancer research.Angelika Ebbinghaus. The Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/1947. Guide to the Microfiche Edition. De Gruyter; Reprint edition. 2001. p. 129
At the University of Freiburg, an experiment was conducted on cats with brain electrode implants.Uekötter, Frank. The green and the brown: A history of conservation in Nazi Germany. Cambridge University Press, 2006. pp. 56-57 In 1942 the German Nobel laureate bacteriologist Gerhard Domagk conducted infection experiments on animals when he examined the effect of sulfa on gangrene necrosis in animals. The German dermatologist Hans Theodor Schreus also conducted similar infection experiments in animals. In 1941, he infected exposed muscles of mice, then crushed their muscles to encourage the development of infection.
From 1933, the Nazi doctor Carl Clauberg conducted experiments on animals in research on reproduction. In his research he demonstrated how the fertility of animals can be neutralized and then restored. The Nazi neurologist Georg Schaltenbrand studied multiple sclerosis between 1935–1942. As part of his research, he injected into the spines of great apes fluid from the spines of humans with sclerosis. The monkeys fell ill, but Schaltenbrand was not sure it was multiple sclerosis. In an attempt to find out, he injected the liquid from the monkeys into the spines of 14 mentally and physically disabled people. The German authorities ordered the German chemist Gerhard Schrader to perform experiments on animals in the field of nerve gas research, and in these experiments, all the animals died. The German army ordered more extensive experiments in nerve gas research on baboons and other types of monkeys. These animals vomited, excreted feces uncontrollably, lost control of their body movements, and convulsed until they died. After these experiments, the German army began to perform identical experiments on prisoners of war who died the same way.
In 1941, the Nazi propaganda film I Accuse was released. The purpose of this film, commissioned by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, was to encourage the public to support euthanasia. In one of the scenes in the film, German researchers (who are trying to find a cure for multiple sclerosis) conduct experiments on mice in an attempt to infect them with the disease. When one of the lab mice drags its hind leg, one of the researchers calls out to his colleagues excitedly, expressing joy at having succeeded in paralyzing the mouse.Ich klage an, directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner, 1941. Minute 43:40