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, Germans, people with moustaches, or dog owners is pretty sketchy. 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 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 others. 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 that we must struggle against. Veganism is about compassion for both human and non-human animals.
Discussion
Godwin’s law arose in the early days of Internet discussion. The law states that as a discussion or debate goes on, the probability of someone making a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches certainty (and in the original law, the person who first makes such a comparison is said to lose the debate). So it is inevitable that people would try to equate those who want to be kinder to animals with 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. There are perhaps more misanthropes in the vegan and vegetarian community than in the rest of society, but they are a minority. Surveys repeatedly show that caring about animals and humans is not a dichotomy. One can do both in a mutually compatible expression of wider 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 to, the injustices we are comparing. Whilst there may be some important ways in which atrocities are often similar, involving illegitimate force and inflicting pain, there are always important facets in which they are not. We also need to understand the worldview of different people if we want to communicate with them. Even discussing the treatment of animals and humans in the same conversation can be controversial to people who have a speciesist and anthropocentric mindset. We think we are making comparisons to help them understand our point, when we might be creating an unnecessary barrier to them hearing our points at all. So, hopefully, taking my own advice, I will try to tread carefully in discussing this issue.
Hitler, Pol Pot, Mussolini and Charles Manson all said a lot of things, too many things, but none ever claimed to be vegan or even vegetarian. Despite this, people repeatedly try to make this claim to denigrate the idea of compassion towards animals, so it is something that needs to be addressed. We should start by acknowledging that evil people may 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 there is some scale on which we can map levels of evil to the proportion of vegetables someone eats? At the outset, this seems highly implausible when 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. 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 a hot vegetarian or vegan are all common reasons that have nothing to do with ethics. If a person abstains from eating meat for reasons other than ethics, it probably doesn’t tell us too much about them.
People have claimed that eating meat changes our nature, like the violence done to the animal pervades their flesh and inhabits us when we consume it. Stopping eating meat would definitely make us less violent, but mainly because of 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 also complex, and most of us are ethical in some areas but have moral blind spots in others, so what parts would we blame on diet? We need to know more about someone to say if they are overall a good person than what they had for dinner. Brahmin 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 regular flawed people, trying to figure out this life and making mistakes as they go along, like everyone else.
A traitor to humanity
Now, let's add to the millions of words humanity has wasted talking about the wretched Adolf Hitler. He definitely ate meat regularly until he was almost 50, by which time he had taken over Germany and was having his political enemies, followed by Jews, Roma, people with disabilities and others put to death. Mass killings 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 on shaky ground straight away. If we think his diet was in any way related to his crimes, it is not his late vegetarianism we should be looking 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 only if Hitler noticed this would he complain about it hurting his stomach. His chef claimed she used animal broth in cooking for him, and his dietitian claims to have snuck bone marrow into his food. So, how much he was ever really vegetarian is hard to tell from these anecdotes. Hitler did show some concern for animals, liked dogs, and the Nazis did enact laws against animal cruelty. If people were just pure evil, history would be a lot simpler. 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.
Pol Pot and the meaning of words
On to Pol Pot and his murderous regime. The problem for people claiming this is that Pol Pot was relatively recent, and the people who cooked for him are still alive. They say 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 plenty; eating meat while they drank imported wine. 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, especially 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 they then follow 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 fish. Diet surveys have had to be amended because of the poor understanding of the terms vegetarian and vegan. Now, after the surveys ask people if they are vegetarian or vegan, they then ask "When was the last time you ate chicken/fish?" etc, to try to make sure people mean what we usually ascribe to the word. If people today use these terms 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 does someone in 1940s Germany mean when they say vegetarian, or 1970s Cambodia? Pol Pot doesn’t seem to have been vegan or vegetarian; indeed, he seems to clearly be another moral blight on the animal product eaters 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. 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. Looking at 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 group butchering animals at Spahn Ranch, and it was said 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", showing that at least Charles Manson thinks 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, and there wasn't a wave of Manson Family-style psychopathy.
Linking diet and personality
If anyone wanted serious answers as to whether killers 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 they are being judged. It is like there is a conversation already in their head that a vegan or other person 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 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 state, what psychology calls cognitive dissonance. To avoid the perceived, mostly social, difficulty of eating less animal products without having it overly trouble their conscience, they need to try to find strong intellectual justifications for their behaviours. What could be stronger than associating vegans and vegetarians with the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis and the Manson Family? It is a simple subconscious internal dialogue we can imagine, "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 perhaps most importantly, "I am not a vegetarian. 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, very few of whom were tempted to follow Hitler's diet. But you don’t find vegans saying to carnists, “Oh, you eat meat, well, all but a tiny handful 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 person we are talking to. Many 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 as they were raised. They 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.
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 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 it is trying to bring attention to? This is not to say that vegans who lack empathy for people 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 their message.
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.