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"). 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."
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