Angora project

The Angora rabbit project was a project administered by the SS for breeding Angora rabbits. The objective was to provide fur for, the linings of jackets for Luftwaffe pilots. Angora rabbits were raised in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.

Chicago Tribune war correspondent Sigrid Schultz found the book in its hiding place near Himmler's Alpine villa, and described the significance of the Angora project:

In the same compound where 800 human beings would be packed into barracks that were barely adequate for 200, the rabbits lived in luxury in their own elegant hutches. In Buchenwald, where tens of thousands of human beings were starved to death, rabbits enjoyed beautifully prepared meals. The SS men who whipped, tortured, and killed prisoners saw to it that the rabbits enjoyed loving care.

Many of the artifacts left by Nazi Germany could be considered bizarre. But few are as chilling as the beautifully bound volume covered in woven gray wool, titled "Angora." It belonged to one of history's most ruthless men, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS in Nazi Germany and head of its concentration camps. Himmler's "Angora" album, which he hid in a farmhouse with his other papers near the end of World War II, tells the story of the Angora rabbit project that operated in all the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.

The rabbits were raised for their soft, warm fur, which was shaved and used for, among other things, the linings of jackets for Luftwaffe pilots. And it is believed that the rabbits also served as a reminder to the prisoners that they were valued less than animals near the bottom of the food chain. Himmler had given speeches bragging that "We Germans are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude towards animals." He also described his prisoners in the camps as "human animals" but added that "it is a crime against our blood to worry about them."

Few accounts of the Nazi angora rabbit project have survived, though American liberators at one camp reported that when prisoners were asked to slaughter the rabbits at the end of the war to make stew, they couldn't bear to do it.

Today photographs, charts and maps from Himmler's "Angora" are among the 25,000 WHS images that are on Wisconsin Historical Society's Web site, and will be featured in an online gallery.

External link

History Museum of Wisconsin