Report on Animals and the Holocaust Workshop

Blog Post – Report on Animals and the Holocaust Workshop 

by Ramneek Sodhi 

Holocaust Studies Reading Group 

The new and rapidly developing field of Animal Studies has grown to intersect with many disciplines, including History, Philosophy, Sociology, Law, Science and many others. And yet, curiously, it has largely failed to make meaningful impact on the field of Holocaust Studies. The testimonies of Holocaust survivors have time and again mentioned the deeply traumatic use of dogs in Nazi concentration camps, and the loss of their beloved pets due to the Nazi plan to destroy Jewish households, culture and lives. Beyond such personal encounters with animals, there exist many other examples of animal-human encounters in the Third Reich, including: the racially-coded colonial projects to “Nazify” zoos and animal parks, to ban schechitah (ritual slaughter of animals) as an effort to vilify Jewish religio-cultural traditions, to protect (“German”) animals under the series of Nazi Animal Protection laws, and many others. It would seem, then, that while contemporaries of the Third Reich and Holocaust lived and died alongside or on the account of animals, the academic discipline of History and Holocaust Studies have forgotten about animals.  

After completing my comprehensive examinations, I travelled to Germany to begin my dissertational research. On a personal trip to the Berlin Zoo, I learned through the zoo’s signage and newly launched historical exhibition of its close relationship to the Nazi party (NSDAP). Lutz Heck, the Berlin Zoo’s then director, joined the Nazi party in 1938 and had brought zoo “into line” with Nazi policies through the expulsion of the zoological garden’s Jewish stakeholders. That a place as seemingly ‘apolitical’ as a zoo could have been a part of the Nazis’ antisemitic project was shocking to me. I felt compelled to investigate the significance animals, animal spaces, and human-animal encounters may have held to the Second World War and Holocaust. And, despite my concerns that the archive would reveal little to no empirical evidence, I found a wealth of evidentiary insight that forced me to reimagine the Third Reich within the biopolitically curated world that encompassed meaningful human and animal experiences together. 

The ‘Animals and the Holocaust’ workshop, hosted by University of Oxford’s Barnabas Balint and USC’s Charlotte Gibbs, marked the first international endeavour to explore the role animals played in the Holocaust in a truly academic and interdisciplinary fashion. Balint and Gibbs organized the workshop to start a scholarly roundtable on a topic that today is in its infancy and poses much new investigatory ground and questions about methodology. Accordingly, panelists presented a collection of ten academic papers on the topic of animals and the Holocaust from across the disciplines of Literature, Film, History and Holocaust Studies. Divided into three subpanels, the first addressed the ways in which animals might serve as representational vehicles for human poetic, cinematic and literary expression within the context of Holocaust memory; the second raised questions about the sources we might use to uncover a history of animals in the Holocaust, such as in the archives of Yad Vashem and USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive; and, finally, the third panel all explored the significance animals held for both Nazi perpetrators and for Jewish survivors.  

Each of the panelists were helpful, offering up fascinating sources and critical feedback on each paper that was presented. Each speaker brought new research and fresh perspectives, but most importantly, more questions. We wondered about the relevancy of animals in the Holocaust, whether or not they hold agency, and the archival obstacles in studying them as historical subjects. We endeavoured to determine the degree (if any at all) of historical agency they may be imbued, and asked whether a discussion of animals in the Holocaust presents any moral dilemmas for historians. As a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, my dissertation focuses on the roles animals played in the Third Reich and Holocaust. When I learned of this workshop, I applied in hopes of learning about the archival finds and methodological approaches others working in this blossoming field had to offer. This workshop proved to offer valuable insight, perspective and a sounding board for questions I had that I’d struggled to answer myself. For example: “how might we discuss the roles animals played in an overwhelmingly human experience?” My own question – can animals be considered perpetrators? - and others asked at the workshop, such as “can animals be considered witnesses in a post-witness world?” were all avidly discussed and, generally, answered with a comfortable degree of conviction. 

By the end of the workshop, we made important revelations and identified future directions. First, any single field’s methodological approach in a historical exploration of the role animals played in the Holocaust cannot always apply. Due to its necessarily interdisciplinary nature – and more importantly, the animal is only accessible through human voice – we agreed that animals can be studied as vehicles of representation, as well as historical actors. In our discussions of how to study and access the animal, we agreed that historians must employ a broad selection of sources, including photographs. We explored the validity of photographs as historical sources and the problems of contextualization and interpretation that come therewith. We also explored the difficulty of looking for sources in the archives, though we were able to share exciting archival finds by Barnabas Balint, Hannah Wilson, Cheuk Him Ryan Sun and my own in the Yad Vashem, USHMM, and Bundesarchiv.  

Fears of decentering the human horrors of the Holocaust by inviting animals into this traditionally human space were duly expressed and acknowledged. During the closing discussion of the workshop, participants agreed that it is possible to study animals during mass violence without trivialising the Holocaust. In fact, we revealed more about what it meant to be human through learning about human-animal relationships during times of war and genocide. 

Biography: 

Ramneek Sodhi is a PhD candidate in the History department at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, “Hitler’s Ark: Animals in the Third Reich”, under the supervision of German historian Rebecca Wittmann explores the multifaceted and complex roles animals played in Nazi law, society, culture and war. Her research casts a wide net to explore the development of German law regarding animals (in the context of vivisection, experimentation and slaughter) from 1871 – 1945, the impact of the Tierschutzgesetze, the role of animals as perpetrators and victims during the war, and the trauma of the loss of pets belonging to Jewish families due to the Nazis’ 1942 decree banning “Jewish pets.” She has found archival evidence of the Buchenwald Zoo at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during an ITS Workshop in 2015, and through her invitation to access the Berlin Zoo’s archive in 2019.

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