Adolf Hitler: meat-eater
I’ve been meaning posting something debunking the popular vegetarian-bashing calumny that Hitler was a vegetarian, but I hadn’t found an on-line source persuasive enough in terms of citing sources until now .
Robert Payne, whose biography of Hitler, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, has been called definitive, scotches the rumor that Hitler might have been a vegetarian. According to Payne, Hitler’s vegetarianism was a fiction made up by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to give him the aura of a revolutionary ascetic, a Fascistic Gandhi, if you will. It is worth quoting from Payne’s biography directly: “Hitler’s asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany. According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoked nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women. Only the first was true.”
The article does itself a disservice, though, by diluting its good points, which are more than enough it make its case, with conjectures of the form: “And if Hitler were a vegetarian, then surely he’d have done so-and-so, and since he didn’t, we can conclude he wasn’t” including one in which “done so-and-so” was “enjoyed better health.”
Check out this website for an unbiased examination of Hitler's vegetarianism:
www.geocities.com/hitlerwasavegetarian
It debunks Robert Payne's argument and leaves no doubt that Hitler really was a vegetarian!
Posted by Anonymous on September 2 2003 12:28
Mr. Berry has writien extensivly against the idea that Hitler was even sympathetic to vegetarianism because ovcourse-vegetarianism is peacfull and nazism was a violent movement.
It would be interesting for you to check out Savitri Devi.
She was afull interesting.
She too wanted peace---only she beleived the only way there would be peace would be if the corrupt world was destroyed and replaced by the vegetarian world.
We have seen this philosophy in the sect of Israelites known to scholars as "Essenes"....They saw the wolrd as filled with the "Sons of Darkness", they beleived the only way the material world--anhabited and ruled by the Sons of Darkness would be redeemed would be when their "teacher of righteousness" their Messiah came and destroyed the current world with the help of the forces of nature--{in a way in which occured in the time of Enoch and Noah}--to the most fannatical of the Essenes only then would the earth be restored to a prisine order, it would be populated by the Sons of Light and their would be peace that would last thousands of years.
This was their earthshaking worldveiw and as it turns out most of these "Essenes" or "purists" abstained form meat, rejected animal as well as human sacrifice, and were taught not love, but to hate the Sons of Darkness which included the Romans, many Arab peoples, and all physical manifestations of "darkness"---love for them was to be reserved for the righteouss--the desendents of the progeny of light.
There was a woman in our century who would have fit in very well with like minded individuals this woman went by the name of Savitri Devi.
Why don't you do an essay on the not so well known Savitri Devi?
Savitri Devi went vegetarian at age 6 by her own will and came to loath humanity because of their treatment of animals--so-called "inferiors" while demanding that the divine force behind the universe somehow owed them salvation.
At the very least she saw this Christian and humanist Western worldveiw as hypocritical and this is why she became a National Socialist after reading Hitler's Mein Kampf.
.
Savitri Devi went to India in search of Aryanism.
She would admire Hindu's in their life and work and work for Indian independence from Great Britian.
In all I think she was a remarkable personality of the twentieth century and so intresting, from her prophetic remarks about the future of a decaying humanity to her animal rights activism throughout her whole life, extreme environmentalism, "universe worship"--somehow she tied all this into National Socialism and saw Hitler as the incarnation of Vishnu of the Kali Yuga--a saviour which would use violence in order to go "against time" and break the coming Dark Age.
Though I disagree with some aspects of her political nazism I can't help agreeing with her alot.---Here is a fragment from her writing entitled: "Lightning and the Sun"
"Adolf Hitler was, in course of life, to become a more and more convinced vegetarian; and though disaster robbed him of the opportunity of attempting ?after the war,? to give his views, gradually, the force of law, he remains, to my knowledge, the only ruler in the West who, both on hygienic and moral (and aesthetic) grounds, ever earnestly considered the possibility of suppressing meat-eating, and of abolishing thereby the standing horror of the slaughterhouses. This is reported by Dr. Goebbels in his ?Diaries,?2 and brilliantly confirmed by numerous statements ascribed to the F?himself in the ?Dinner-time talks,? also printed after 1945 by the bitterest enemies of National Socialism, certainly not with the intention of exalting him.-----Savitri Devi--National Socialist and life long vegetarian----text---"Lightning and the Sun".
so for the last time, why not do an essay on the strange case of Savitri Devi?
Posted by Anonymous on February 17 2006 13:56
What a crock!
"It ... leaves no doubt that Hitler really was a vegetarian!"
I see a lot of doubt in there at the Geocities URL. Clearly, Hitler ate meat as it points out near the very top. Ipso facto, he was NOT a vegetarian. Just because the author of the Geocities post excuses or rationalizes the fact that Hitler was being promoted as a glorious vegetarian in Nazi propaganda and yet continued to eat meat because "he was struggling with his new diet," that does not make Hitler a vegetarian.
Don't know how much simpler this has to get for you people to get it through your thick heads:
If someone eats meat, they are not a vegetarian.
It doesn't matter what that person claims to be or what their propaganda minister says.
You could say the person was *trying* to go vegetarian, if you really want to bend over backwards to accomodate them, but you cannot honesty call them vegetarian if they eat meat.
Posted by Anonymous on March 17 2006 12:11