Why Was Hitler Vegetarian?
I ask people what they think might be the answer to this question and I am consistently amazed by how people react to it. Most find it confounding. Some immediately attack the premise, questioning whether Hitler was a vegetarian at all. He was, very publicly, from about 1937 to the end of his life. Upon acceptance of my insistence on the fact or, for the more skeptical, after some corroboratory googling, the initial resistance to the question usually evolves into sheer bewilderment. In asking people this question I have heard answers, almost none of which are correct.
The most common path people pursue is what I now deem the medical path. I watched someone literally scratch their head for a while, clearly deeply thinking through different possible scenarios, before asserting that Hitler must have been vegetarian due to some health condition that prevented him from eating meat. Emphasis on the must. After all that head scratching this person was certain that this could be the only possibility.
Others came up with variants along the medical path, the most generous of assessments of which were that Hitler was vegetarian to be healthier. This isn’t necessarily entirely wrong. The Nazis, given their obsession with perfecting the form of the human body, were major proponents of healthy eating. It’s thus possible that this factored somewhat into Hitler’s vegetarianism, though this wasn’t the primary reason and other prominent Nazis followed equally healthy diets inclusive of meat. Other ideas people have had to the question of why Hitler was vegetarian have veered into the absurd.
One person, for whom this question triggered a particular conniption, came to another conclusion with high confidence. This person asserted that Hitler must have been vegetarian because he “liked killing plants.” I didn’t take this response seriously at first, but quickly realized that it was sincere. Hitler was pretty mean after all, so this meanness could be the only plausible explanation for his dietary habits. This also may have been true. I guess some people take some sort of sick demented pleasure in cutting down trees and stomping on flowers. And perhaps in the future when we can manifest food from non-multicellular organisms society will look down upon us plant eaters for all of our unnecessary plant killing. That said, per the fairly clear historical record, this assessment couldn’t be further from the truth.
As it turns out, the simplest answer to the question, that no one I have asked has ever mentioned as a possibility and would be relatively obvious had I asked about anyone other than Hitler, is that Hitler was vegetarian because he was an animal lover. The preponderance of evidence supports the thesis that Hitler was vegetarian because he didn’t like the idea of killing animals.
By numerous accounts, Hitler would become distraught by any mention or witnessing of animal suffering. He would ramble to dinner guests telling detailed stories about the horrors of the slaughterhouse, low key guilting his guests as they were presumably eating slaughtered cow right in front of him. Part of his vision for Greater Germany, had the Nazis been successful in war, was to eventually ban slaughterhouses throughout the Empire. Hitler was ready to act on tackling animal suffering. It’s clear why this is so hard to swallow today.
That a man who had so much regard for the welfare of animals could have had such little regard for the welfare and sanctity of human lives is understandably confusing, but shouldn’t be. Hitler may be an extreme example of this, but nobody is ideologically pure or consistent lest that ideology be having no ideology (and even that is inconsistent because an ideology of no ideology is an ideology). It is a flaw in our instinctive pattern of reasoning to bucket actions into good or bad and assume those carrying out a good will always carry out good, and those carrying out a bad will always carry out bad. Let’s take another example.
My friend’s girlfriend was visiting from Berlin, Germany, a very progressive place for the most fort. At the time my quarter time NYC residence was in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood that is gentrifying and seeing an influx of businesses catering to the hipster type. Amongst these new businesses was a vegan cafe and juice bar. From the progressive vantage, vegan is good. Vegan food does not harm animals and is viewed as being more environmentally friendly than animal based foods (though, we should remember: plants are being killed). My progressive Berliner friend should have loved this place, and she did until we got our food.
The food was great, but she was upset. We ordered the food to take out and it came in plastic containers with plastic utensils and, to ruin the experience further, all in a plastic bad. In case you haven’t picked up on it, vegan is good but plastic is bad. She was confused by incongruity and it really upset her. She vowed to never go there again, which she probably wouldn’t have in any case as she was only there for a day and lived in Berlin, but her reaction stuck with me.
It’s not as if she expected perfect sustainability from every business. To the contrary, it didn’t bother her at all when the corner store would wrap our deli in food in all the most unsustainable packaging. She wasn’t even strictly vegan. But it deeply unsettled her when a place she associated with good did bad. Just like how it bothers people when they learn that a person who did very bad things also did good things. These realities are complex while we tend to prefer the simple.
We have a tendency, to put people into the simple binary buckets of good or evil. We presume good people do what we believe to be good actions and bad people do what we believe to be bad actions.
Historians themselves are not immune to this. Despite the preponderance of information supporting the prevailing theory of the rationale for Hitler’s vegetarianism, many have proposed alternate theories, all of which are some degree of a stretch. One I find particularly intriguing is the notion that Hitler’s vegetarianism was an adverse psychological reaction to the death of his niece.
I’ll leave it to the reader to read on that if interested, but perhaps it suffices to say that arguing for theory requires taking some serious liberties. I think it’s fairly clear that Hitler did care about animal welfare and that attempts to find alternative explanations for his vegetarianism are driven less by a conscious desire to find the truth and more by a subconscious drive to resolve a seeming moral dilemma. I must clarify that I myself am not above these flawed patterns of thinking, though I recall when I first came to these patterns in myself.
I grow up in a pretty liberal, party line Democratic town and knew of almost no one who thought differently. My elite DC prep school was different in that some, if not necessarily most, people were of different political persuasions. I thought I knew about politics in high school, but I really came in knowing nothing important.
I remember talking to an older conservative student at lunch and finding myself agreeing with him on a number of his views. I believe he was a senior and I was a freshman at the time (or Form VI vs III, for those versed in fancy prep school lingo). He then asked whether I was a liberal or conservative. I had no idea. Though I didn’t say this out loud, I remember wondering — “which ones are the Democrats?” I was later a bit disappointed when I learned they were the liberals, as I really liked that senior and he was much nicer to me than most others had been.
Eventually I got a bit a savvier and actually become a member of the school’s elite Government Club. One had to know a lot more than the difference between a liberal and conservative to be accepted, and upon admission we had extraordinary access to real heads of states and members of Congress. Just a few weeks after being admitted I was sitting in then senator Obama’s office discussing race and politics with him. One can’t understate how privileged an experience I had as a high schooler in that club.
The club was split into two factions — the liberals and conservatives — and I applied and was accepted to the liberal wing. I was excited to have an opportunity prove just how right I was to everyone who was wrong. I was pretty persuasive to others, but somewhat less so to myself. I began to doubt some of my own views. That plus going to school with the children and neighbors of politicians gave me a glimpse into the personal, human side of politics; an opportunity to learn about who these people actually were versus what they said they were.
In hindsight I realize that I had probably expected, given my simplistic views at the time, the Democrats to be good the Republicans to be bad. I expected Democrats to be nice people and Republicans to be mean people. It was almost a reflex. Not only was that not that case; the reality seemed closer to the opposite. Though, there were good and bad, nice and mean people on both sides. My preconceptions due to almost arbitrary moralizing associations were totally off. These days, I try not to make too many assumptions about people based on particular actions or views I may deem good or bad. People will surprise you.
You might be reading this wondering why I ask people this strange Hitler question at all. Why prod at such weighty issue knowing I’m likely to lead people down a path to dissonance? I think it’s important to call out flawed models of reasoning. This question is part test, part opportunity.
I have written in the past, and will most certainly continue to write in the future, about the concept of “clarity.” One with clarity has a model of the world that accurately represents the motivations and drivers of nature and people so that one can accurately predict an effect given a cause. Acknowledging that there is no “Truth” and that reality is subjective and possibly ephemeral, if we accept certain common assumptions like the existence of others and continuity of natural laws we can create relatively more or less accurate models of our world. I value clarity in others because I think it’s important to have.
We evolved mental patterns and heuristics to serve us efficiently in small communities in which individual humans had nowhere near that power that some do today. We live in a world where an individual can press a few buttons and destroy the world. The people with this power should have clarity. I think it’s in the general interest of people that we find and encourage clarity, even if at times that requires poking some holes in people’s models of the world.
There was one man who answered the question of Hitler’s vegetarianism correctly and right off the bat, though not necessarily for the right reason. He was this one stereotypical Texan conservative. He was from Fort Worth, had many guns, rode horses and always wore a cowboy hat and drove a pickup. He was the Texan caricature one has heard of but almost never encounters in real life in the largely cosmopolitan DFW area. When asked why he thought Hitler might have been vegetarian, he quickly answered that Hitler was a socialist, aka liberal, and liberals don’t like hurting animals, so that’s probably why he didn’t eat them.
Never mind that, despite national socialism involving some socialism, it makes far more sense to describe Hitler as a far rightwing fascist than a leftist. In his world Hitler was bad and not eating meat was bad so it added up that a bad person would do bad. The question didn’t phase him at all and he had no internal dilemma to resolve. He added, almost as if on cue, that if Hitler had come to rule the world he would have probably banned the rest of us from eating meat, too. He wasn’t wrong.
