Question
Wasn't Hitler a vegetarian?
Alternatives
Sometimes it is Pol Pot, Mussolini, Charles Manson, or whoever was a terrible human being.
Summary
Hitler was one of the worst people in history, but associating him with all vegetarians is a stretch, just as it is to associate him with all Germans, people with bad moustaches, or dog lovers. We should be more informed and respectful about historical atrocities than to use their victim's suffering for our own ideological purposes. The phrase for this is "false moral equivalence". It is not only illogical but perversely ironic to try to morally equate those who perpetrated the mass killing of one species with those trying to stop the mass killing of other species. Studies show that people who care about animal rights are more likely, not less, than the rest of the population to be concerned with human rights. It is no shock that it is a general apathy rather than a specific compassion for animals that we must struggle against. Veganism is about compassion and encompasses all animals, even humans.
Discussion
Godwin’s law arose in the early days of Internet discussion. It states that as a discussion or debate goes on, the probability of someone making a comparison involving the Nazis approaches certainty. The original law also said the person who first makes such a comparison is said to lose the debate. So it was inevitable that people would try to equate those who want to be kinder to animals with some of history’s worst monsters. Vegans and vegetarians are seen as choosing to care about animals, and people decide, with zero evidence, that this must not include people. Misanthropes may be slightly overrepresented in the vegan and vegetarian community compared to the rest of society, but they are a minority. Surveys repeatedly show that caring about humans and non-humans is not a dichotomy. Caring about both is a mutually reinforcing expression of deeper compassion.
We should tread extremely carefully in making comparisons between aspects of one historical injustice and another. This is especially true if we don't have a deep understanding of or personal relationship with the injustices we are comparing. Whilst there may be some important ways in which atrocities can be similar, as they involve illegitimate force and inflicting pain, there are always fundamental ways in which they are different and defy easy comparison. If we want to communicate with others, we need to understand their different experiences and worldviews. Even discussing the treatment of animals and humans in the same conversation can be triggering or controversial to people who have a speciesist and anthropocentric mindset. We might think the comparisons we make between human and non-human injustice help them to understand our point, but might actually be creating an unnecessary barrier to them hearing what we say at all. So, we must try to tread carefully in discussing this issue, as I will try to here as well.
Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mussolini all said a lot of things, far too many things, but none ever said they were vegan. While in his last years, Hitler claimed to be a vegetarian, the evidence is fairly shaky that this was true, as we shall see. Despite this, people repeatedly try to make these claims to denigrate the idea of compassion towards animals, so such myths are something we need to address. We can start by acknowledging that evil people have eaten vegetables, maybe even a lot of vegetables. It is also statistically certain that there will be evil and terrible people over the last few thousand years who have followed a vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diet. The questions we have before us, however, are whether a plant-based diet or philosophy either caused those people to be evil or made them more evil. Perhaps we can discover a scale on which we can equate a person's level of evil with the proportion of vegetables in their diet. At the outset, this seems highly implausible, and indeed we might expect the opposite to be true.
Dietary choices and moral complexity
Tolstoy said vegetarianism was proof that a person's pursuit of moral perfection is sincere. In our modern world of factory farming, this probably needs an update to include “veganism”, but while it sounds nice, not everyone gives up eating meat for the pursuit of ethics. Health, religion, spirituality, culture, digestive issues, allergies and trying to impress an attractive vegetarian or vegan are all common reasons for abstaining from animal products that have nothing to do with ethics. If a person abstains from eating animal products for reasons other than ethics, it probably doesn’t tell us too much about their ethics.
People have often claimed that eating meat changes our nature, saying that the violence we do to animals ferments in our soul, or even that the violence pervades their flesh and inhabits us when we consume it. Stopping eating meat would definitely make us less violent, but mainly because we would stop the violence done during its production. It may be possible that there are hormonal or other chemical transfers going on when we consume animal flesh that might make us more prone to violence, but we'd need better evidence for this. It’s also possible for the opposite to be true, that meat makes us more passive; some of the animals we consume have gentle natures, which is part of the reason they make good targets for oppression, and perhaps we become more docile like them as we consume their hormones and so on. For now, though, we don’t seem to be able to confidently assign good or bad behaviour to what people eat. People are complex, and most of us are ethical in some areas but have moral blind spots in others, so what parts should we blame on their diet? We need to know more about someone to say if they are overall a good person than what they had for dinner. Families in India have abstained from meat for many centuries, but it's doubtful that every single person they produced was some sort of saintly figure. Vegetarians and vegans are flawed, trying to figure out this life and making mistakes as they go along, just like everybody else.
A traitor to humanity
Now, let's add to the millions of words humanity has wasted talking about the wretched and pathetic Adolf Hitler. Hitler definitely ate meat regularly until he was almost 50, by which time he had taken over Germany and was having his political enemies put to death, followed by Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Seventh Day Adventists, and people with disabilities. Mass killings of non-Aryans started after the invasion of the USSR in 1941. Yet it was 1942, 21 years after Hitler became head of the National Socialists, well into the war and almost 10 years after the first concentration camps were opened, before he ever seemed to say anything remotely vegetarian. So the claim is immediately on shaky ground. If we think his diet was in any way related to his crimes, it is not his late vegetarianism we might look at, but rather his 50 years of meat eating before it.
So why did Hitler experiment with vegetarianism? Hitler had long-term stomach problems, and some say doctors advised him to eat a mostly vegetable diet around 1937, though Herman Hess said Hitler always made exceptions for his favourites like liver dumplings. It seems eating less meat was a common prescription for stomach problems at the time, as it was also given to Mussolini. Even later on, people, apparently unafraid of the consequences of crossing Hitler, snuck meat into his food, and if Hitler noticed, he would complain about it hurting his stomach. Hitler's primary chef claimed she used animal broth in cooking for him, and his dietitian also claims to have snuck bone marrow into his food. So, how much Hitler was ever really vegetarian is hard to tell from these anecdotes. It's also worth noting that the Nazis banned existing vegetarian societies in 1935 and forced them to merge into Nazi-controlled health organisations. Hitler did show some concern for animals, liked dogs, and the Nazis did enact laws against animal cruelty. Of course, if people were just pure evil, history would be a lot simpler, and the Germans would have figured out he wasn't a worthy leader much sooner. The Nazis also had social programmes and helped the poor, so although the Nazis as a collective were incomprehensibly vile, not every single thing they did was. As they say, even a stopped clock can be right twice a day. Hitler may have been mostly vegetarian for a few of his final years, but what can we draw from that?
Pol Pot and the meaning of words
Pol Pot led an insane and murderous regime in Cambodia. The problem for people claiming that Pol Pot was a vegetarian or even a vegan is that this is relatively recent history. The people who cooked for Pol Pot are still alive, and we can ask them about it. People have and they have told us that he ate all sorts of things, fish, cobra, boar, etc. While he was forcing much of the population of Cambodia to starve, Pol Pot and the members of his regime were eating well, consuming their meat with imported wines. An official who knew him seemed to say he was a vegetarian, but who knows what they were basing that on? Certainly, I can't find anywhere that Pol Pot made the claim about himself.
We must understand that many people get confused about what the word vegetarian means, and this was even more true in the past. A relevant passage talking about Hitler’s diet from the New York Times in 1937 says, “It is well known that Hitler is a vegetarian”, which the article then follows with “he occasionally relishes a slice of ham and relieves the tediousness of his diet with such delicacies as caviar”. Studies show that even today, many people, especially older people, get confused when asked to define vegan or vegetarian. They regularly think it is just excluding red meat, or not eating much meat, or eating chicken or fish. Diet surveys have had to be amended because of the poor understanding of the terms vegetarian and vegan. Now, after a survey asks people if they are vegetarian or vegan, they will often then ask, "When was the last time you ate chicken/fish?" etc. This is necessary because of the confusion about what people ascribe to the word. If people today use terms like vegetarian and vegan loosely and incorrectly, when plant-based diets are much more present in the culture, we shouldn't expect people decades ago to be clearer about them. What did someone in 1940s Germany mean when they said vegetarian, or in 1970s Cambodia? Pol Pot doesn’t seem to have been vegan or vegetarian, so you can't tarnish us with him. Instead, he seems to be another moral blight on the carnists of the world.
One for the haters
Finally, Charles Manson. A lot of slightly unhinged websites gleefully assert he was a vegetarian and a couple of better-hinged ones as well, though none of them provides much evidence, so I had to search for it myself. Manson certainly wasn't a vegetarian when he was younger, and his first stint in prison has no records of him requesting non-standard prison meals. Once he left prison to find the flower power generation in full steam, that's when he started changing his look and diet. From Manson's statements after this time, he says things about killing animals, but they seem as much to point out the hypocrisy of society and its attitudes towards killing as to tell people not to eat meat. Charles "Tex" Watson, in his autobiographical account of his time in The Manson Family, wrote that Manson's vegetarian rhetoric was often selectively applied. Though the group preferred to scavenge vegetarian food, they would accept animal products. Watson also described the Family butchering animals at their Spahn Ranch, and it was said that Manson would frequently visit a hot dog and burger bar. After this, though, the evidence for Manson's vegetarianism becomes clearer. In Manson's murder trial, he asserted, "I don’t even like to eat meat - that is how much I am against killing". Apparently, at least Charles Manson believes that vegetarianism leads to the opposite of murderousness. Manson started requesting vegetarian meals in his later, longer stint in prison, and his cellmates also agree that he consistently ate vegetarian meals. So it is clear that Manson was a vegetarian for most of his later life. We will chalk this one up as a "win" for the naysayers, though again, with the caveat that Manson wasn't a vegetarian until his early to mid-30s. Of course, there was a wave of vegetarianism amongst the hippie culture in 1960s California, but as much as conservatives feared it at the time, there wasn't a wave of Manson Family-style psychopathy.
Linking diet and personality
If anyone wanted serious answers as to whether violent people were more likely to eat or not eat meat, it would seem a reasonably simple area to study. Get prison meal records and see which diet correlated with the most violent offenders. One suspects that if people in the legal and justice system noticed an outsized number of cases linking vegetarianism or veganism to murderousness, someone would have already done this relatively simple study. What has been studied is whether a healthy diet helps people reduce their violent tendencies, and the result is pretty conclusive that it does, so maybe people who are worried about high levels of violence should advocate for healthy eating over stirring up a culture war.
What motivates the repetition of this claim about Hitler et al to people who don't eat meat? There is evidence that some people seem to want to pre-emptively attack people who take a strong ethical stance because they imagine the other person will judge or shame them. It is like there is a defensive conversation already going on in their mind that someone taking an ethical stance unknowingly steps into. People don’t want to be looked down upon; they deeply want status, including moral status, and will do substantial intellectual callisthenics to claim it. Surveys show that many meat eaters are uncomfortable about the treatment of animals in the food system, but they are stuck in the habit of how they eat and don’t want to change. This leaves them in an uncomfortable mental state, which psychology calls cognitive dissonance. To continue eating animal products without it overly troubling their conscience, they need to try to find strong intellectual justifications for their behaviours. What could be stronger than associating vegans and vegetarians with history's worst monsters like the Nazis? We can imagine a simple subconscious internal dialogue, "It seems more ethical to be vegetarian. I am not a vegetarian and do not wish to become so. To maintain my ethical status, I must undermine vegetarianism". So you get "Hitler was bad. Hitler was a vegetarian. All vegetarians are bad", but more importantly, what follows: "I am not a vegetarian, therefore I am good". Aristotle wouldn't have thought much of this syllogism, but even poor logic will be looked upon favourably by a person desiring an exit from a moral quandary. Judging others negatively is a primary way that people redirect their negative inner voice away from themselves.
Adding to poor logic, we also have poor statistics. You can't make widespread inferences about a group of people from cherry-picked examples. Even if Hitler and Pol Pot actually were ethical vegetarians, what about Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Talat Pasha, Suharto, Saddam Hussein, Atilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Nero, Caligula, King Leopold, Idi Amin, and also the rest of the Nazis? The Nazis may have looked up to Hitler, but very few of them were tempted to follow his diet. But you don’t find vegans saying to carnists, “Oh, you eat meat, well, did you know that most of history's greatest monsters were avid meat eaters?” Although it may be true, it doesn’t tell us much about the character of the meat eater we are talking to. It's actually hard to say whether a vegan diet makes someone anything, because most vegans didn’t start life as vegans; they too ate meat, not because they were bad people, but because they unquestioningly conformed to what they were taught while being raised. Vegans should be able to understand what it is like to be someone who hadn’t really considered the lives of other animals enough, or didn’t have the tools and mindset to do something about it, because they were once there themselves.
Universal compassion
Given the scale of animal suffering at human hands, the billions huddled in factory farms, their bodies altered to be production machines, and the many wild species of the world in retreat or facing extinction, it seems impossible to argue against the fact that the way humans treat animals is a moral blind spot on which some light is urgently needed. People judging those who argue for kinder treatment of animals should think carefully before engaging in knee-jerk reactions against them. Even if you think vegans are wrong, is having compassion, maybe even too much compassion for other species, something more terrible than the problem animal advocates are trying to bring attention to? This is not to say that unempathetic vegans should get a free pass to be rude or inconsiderate. Veganism, when properly understood, is about compassion and consideration for all that can suffer, and this should include humans. Vegans would be advised to try to consistently embody the compassion inherent in their message in the way they present it.
Finally, I will speak for veganism, because that is what I am, and I have no place to speak for vegetarianism. The intellectual and ethical progress of humanity has always been improved by widening our circles of compassion. Any outlook that considers humans but not animals, or animals but not humans, or some subset of humans or animals, is incomplete. All sentient beings deserve consideration of their interests, at the very least, in concordance with their level of sentience. An ethically and intellectually consistent life has at its core compassion for all beings who can suffer, for all earthlings thrown into these evolutionary moments of existence together. Veganism is not purely a diet; it spans far beyond that into a philosophy of universal compassion. Anyone advocating violence towards sentient beings, or even degrading the value of their lives, cannot be a vegan.