“..Following the latest letter on September, 1991, the New York Times published two rejoinders to this question.
Under the headline, “Don’t Put Hitler Among the Vegetarians,” the correspondent(Richard Schwartz, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism ) ..
.. pointed out that Hitler would occasionally go on vegetarian binges to cure himself of excessive sweatiness and flatulence ..
.. but that his main diet was meat-centered.
He also cited Robert Payne, Albert Speer, and other well-known Hitler biographers, who mentioned Hitler’s predilection for such non-vegetarian foods as Bavarian sausages, ham, liver, and game.
Furthermore, it was argued, if Hitler had been a vegetarian, he would not have banned vegetarian organizations in Germany and the occupied countries; ..
..nor would he have failed to urge a meatless diet on the German people as a way of coping with Germany’s World War II food shortage.
Under the headline, “He Loved His Squab,” another correspondent cited a passage from a cookbook that had been written by a European chef, Dione Lucas, who was an eyewitness to Hitler’s meat-eating.
In her Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook (1964), Lucas, drawing on her experiences as a hotel chef in Hamburg during the 1930s, remembered being called upon quite often to prepare Hitler’s favorite dish, which was not a vegetarian one.
“I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab,” she writes, “but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often.
Let us not hold that against a fine recipe though.”
Not even the august New York Times has a staff large enough to verify all the facts in the letters published in the Letters to the Editor section; ..
.. so I decided to look up the specific passages in Payne’s biography of Hitler .. and Dione Lucas’s The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook that cast doubt on Hitler’s vegetarianism.
Sure enough, Robert Payne, whose biography of Hitler, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, has been called definitive, scotches the rumor that Hitler might have been a vegetarian.
According to Payne, Hitler’s vegetarianism was a fiction made up by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to give him the aura of a revolutionary ascetic ..
.. a Fascistic Gandhi, if you will.
It is worth quoting from Payne’s biography directly:
“Hitler’s asceticism played an important part in the image he projected over Germany.
According to the widely believed legend, he neither smoked nor drank, nor did he eat meat or have anything to do with women.
Only the first was true.
He drank beer and diluted wine frequently, had a special fondness for Bavarian sausages and kept a mistress, Eva Braun, who lived with him quietly in the Berghof.
There had been other discreet affairs with women.
His asceticism was fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men.
By this outward show of asceticism, he could claim that he was dedicated to the service of his people.”
“In fact, he was remarkably self-indulgent and possessed none of the instincts of the ascetic.
His cook, an enormously fat man named Willy Kanneneberg, produced exquisite meals and acted as court jester.
Although Hitler had no fondness for meat except in the form of sausages, and never ate fish, he enjoyed caviar.
He was a connoisseur of sweets, crystallized fruit and cream cakes, which he consumed in astonishing quantities.
He drank tea and coffee drowned in cream and sugar.
No dictator ever had a sweeter tooth.”
So there we have it: Hitler doted on Bavarian sausages and caviar.
Not even the loosest definition of vegetarianism could be stretched to fit these gastronomic abominations.
Yet, because non-vegetarians often have an elastic definition of what constitutes a vegetarian ..
.. they think that people like Hitler who eat fish, pigeon and sausages are vegetarians..”
go to source/story>>Why Hitler Was Not a Vegetarian - Vegsource.com
