Just an ordinary interlude in the life of the Der Fuehrer.
In one of the countless documentaries on Nazis I’ve seen over the years, one elderly lady told about how she watched Hitler playing with a group of Kindergarten age kids. They were playing Circus Train, and they would imitate an animal getting on a pretend train. Then they would choo choo around the room, stop, and pretend to be a different animal.
I always liked that story.
She didn’t say if at one of the stops they pretended to be Jews.
Yeah, one of the great ironies of Nazism was that it treated animals like people and people like animals. Their animal protection laws were some of the most progressive ever written. There was even a claim that following the war Hitler was planning on banning animal slaughter. There was at least one case where Goring saw a fisherman cutting up a frog for bait and had him sent to a concentration camp. They banned animal experimentation and required animals be sedated before being slaughtered. They had very progressive environmental policies that eliminated most hunting and trapping and protected forests.
People not like them they hated. Animals they loved.
Since I brought this story up, it need hardly be pointed out that from
Nietzsche loved animals.
Some Nazis loved animals.
there follows no syllogism…
I don’t know who first came up with this account of Nietzsche and the Horse or when, but it appears designed to illustrate what he truly felt about what is permissible or moral.
Less apocryphal are his rants, with varying amounts of marbles in the background, against religious and political leaders and anti-Semites.