Jewish Animals and Fascism: Animality, Sexuality and Imperium in Nazi Germany

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and the Holocaust, Session 2

Abstract

Ever since the end of the Second World War, various scholarly attempts have been made to explain the rise of Nazism and its aftermath in Germany. While these debates have been fruitful for a deeper understanding of fascism, genocide and dehumanization worldwide, most of them do not adhere to the connection between nazi ideology and practice, to animals and animality.

This paper examines how anti-Jewish sentiments in Nazi Germany were based on the idea of the animals, and their lives as always already meaningless and disposable. Not only were the death camps based on the blueprint of the industrialized slaughterhouse; the very notion of the Jewish “rat”, “pig” or “vermin” were predicated on the ontological violence against animals. This, in turn, mirrored and exacerbated the genocide of the Nama and Herero people in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the 20th-century.

The paper will consist of three parts: First, I will analyze the Nazi discourse on the animality of Jews, and illustrate how these notions were based on the idea of “filthy” animals. Second, I will expand on the gendered and sexual notions of this discourse, basing Nazi fascism within a trajectory of human and heterosexual superiority. Lastly, I will elaborate on how these notions were predicated on anti-Blackness notions of imperial Germany, where both the German genocide in what is modern-day Namibia, as well as the rise of the animal factory farm, have constituted “experiments” in genocide before the Holocaust.

By drawing these trajectories, connections and affects, I aim to formulate an analysis of fascism as based both on human superiority and gendered/sexual oppression. This, in turn, will contribute to future research on neofascism in Germany today, as well as fascism and genocide worldwide.

Author

• Atalia Israeli-Nevo, The University of Texas at Austin