My earliest memory involving dogs in the Third Reich is perhaps from trying the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D, where the weakest foe is a German Shepherd who tries to compensate for its pitifully low health by zig‐zagging towards the protagonist. Although undoubtedly unnerving to first‐time players, they’re otherwise only menacing to somebody who is out of bullets and low on health.

Pictured: The attack dog from Wolfenstein 3D.

Most other adults, however, are likelier to think of Blondi: the dog whom the head of state received as a gift in 1941 before he used her as the unwilling test subject for cyanide in April 1945. Media portrayals of Blondi’s little rôle in history range from the accurate depiction in the motion picture Downfall to being parodied in the series Danger 5 — to name only a few examples.

While most of us are going to be at least slightly familiar with the Third Reich’s mass deployment of dogs as camp guards, we rarely wonder about the fuller extent of their usage. The reality is that the Fascists deployed many dogs (especially German Shepherds) for a variety of purposes in addition to guarding camps. Quoting Susan Bulanda’s Military Dogs of World War II, pages 115–122:

By the time Hitler came into power in 1933, the [Fascists] had already formed training camps which included the Sturmabteilung (SA, the “Brownshirts”) K9 units. These camps provided trained men for the new […] Army and because the [Fascists] had masked the training programs so well, by the time World War II started, [the Third Reich] had over 200,000 dogs trained and ready for war. If that wasn’t enough, [the Third Reich] then publicized a call for more dogs which added another 100,000 to the ranks.

Primarily, the [Third Reich] used German Shepherds, Dobermans, Airedales, and Boxers. These dogs were trained to act as sentries, scouts, guards, and messenger dogs. Patrol dogs worked with their handler, accompanied by a patrolman who would check identity papers or perform other routine duties.

The dogs in the Bahnschutz K9 units were also used to round up Jews and were used in ghettos as well as concentration camps to control, herd, and attack Jewish prisoners. Some 90 percent of the dogs used in this unit were German Shepherds. Throughout the war, prisoners, soldiers and Jews alike were forced to march in file, and dogs were used to keep them in line. If someone lagged or got out of formation, the dogs would nip them. These dogs were used in France, the Soviet Union, Italy, Poland, and North Africa in the same manner.

The [Fascists] also used ambulance dogs. These dogs were trained to ignore any soldiers standing or walking. If a dog found a soldier lying on the ground, he would grab a short, detachable leather strap attached to his collar—called a bringsel—and go back to the handler. The handler would put the dog on a leash and the dog would lead the handler to the wounded soldier.

For messenger dogs, the [Fascists] used only the smartest dogs. They taught the dog to follow a scent trail using a molasses‐type scent that would be dispensed in a few drops every three feet. These dogs had one handler.

As dog lovers know, sometimes a well‐trained dog will show a talent, or adapt to a task that goes beyond its training. There is an account of such an incident in North Africa that transpired between Allied and Axis troops, where, it seems, the [Axis] had taught pure white dogs to act as pointers. The [Allies] controlled the western part of a small valley in Ousseltria, Tunisia, while the [Axis] controlled the eastern side.

During the ensuing battle, dogs played an important part on both sides. When an [Allied] lieutenant and two sergeants were sent out to reconnoiter enemy positions, they spotted a pure white dog standing quietly and pointing. Within a few minutes, the [Allies] were raked with machine‐gun fire.

Later, when a patrol was sent out to look for the beleaguered [Allied personnel], the dog was gone. The dog’s job had been to show the [Axis] where the enemy soldiers were located. This was not the only time [Allied] soldiers saw pure white dogs pointing out their positions and then returning to the [Axis].

Sadly, when the [Axis powers] had to withdraw quickly from Africa, they abandoned most of their dogs. Throughout the war, the [Axis] used so many dogs that there were few left for breeding stock after it ended.

Pictured: Waffen‐SS volunteer Kalju Jakobsoo with his dog Caesar in 1944.

Before [the Imperial Japanese] attacked Pearl Harbor, they had already built up their army to a war footing and were engaged in a war of conquest with China. Their [Western] allies had supplied [the Empire of] Japan with about 25,000 trained dogs. Most were German Shepherds, the breed that the [Eastern Axis] seemed to prefer. The [Eastern Axis] then set up several dog training schools in [the Empire of] Japan and one in Nanking, China.

The [Eastern Axis] used dogs for patrols, as scouts, and as sentry dogs. [It] also used them as suicide dogs. Instead of trying to blow up tanks as the [Soviets] had tried to do, the [Eastern Axis] had the dogs pull small carts loaded with bombs onto [Allied] positions. Once the carts were close enough, the [IJA] would detonate the cart. The [Eastern Axis] also used untrained, vicious dogs in various campaigns and let them attack soldiers and civilians alike, as was the case in Hong Kong.

Interestingly, the [Eastern Axis] had also tried to use small mixed‐breed dogs to locate enemy troops, in much the same way as the [Western Axis] used the white dogs trained to point. Instead of pointing, the small dogs would search an area and once they located the enemy, would run back to [their masters] to alert them to the [Allied] positions. These dogs were not vicious, but the [Allies] soon figured out what the dogs were doing and would instead follow them back to the [Axis] positions.

The soldiers who encountered [Eastern Axis] war dogs often commented that the dogs were, for the most part, poorly cared for; they were not well groomed, were half‐starved, and had not been well trained. The [Eastern Axis] used the typical village street mongrel as patrol and messenger dogs. Not many of the purebred dogs that were owned by the more affluent members of [Imperial] society were donated for the war effort.

Quoting Robert Tindol’s The Best Friend of the Murderers: Guard Dogs and the Nazi Holocaust in Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America:

Though the [Fascists] utilized dogs in various wartime rôles, they also trained and employed canine guards for use in most if not all of the concentration camps and death camps. In fact, most of the eyewitness accounts of the camps mention and sometimes even focus on the guard dogs that terrorized, often mauled, and occasionally killed the camp prisoners.

Moreover, the reports seemingly indicate that the dogs were not necessarily trained and brutalized as indiscriminate and uncontrollable killers, but often were friendly companion‐dogs from breeds not normally known for their unpredictability and viciousness.

[…]

Although Höss would have us believe he is merely describing cruel and crude attempts at self‐amusement, dogs were also used for garden‐variety sadism at Auschwitz. Such was the case with Otto Moll, who was in charge of the Auschwitz crematoria and who was executed after the war. Moll’s psychosexual predilections had a particularly gruesome twist, for he “had a preference for setting his German shepherd loose on young, attractive Jewish women.”²⁰

The most notorious of the [Axis] camp guards’ canine companions was a St. Bernard cross named Barry, who served commandant Kurth Franz at both the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps. Contemporary photographs show that the dog was scarcely the type of animal that would normally elicit terror in adults or even children, and at least from outward appearances looked more like a docile and loving family companion than a killer. But Barry’s credentials are well‐documented:

[T]here was a dog named Barry who was trained by the SS men to bite the Jews, especially when they were naked on the way to the gas chamber. The beatings, the biting of Barry, and the shooting and shouting of the guards caused the Jews to run through the “tube” and push themselves into the “baths,” hoping to find some escape from the hell around them.²¹

Barry was not used merely to herd victims into the gas chambers, either. Other reports indicate that Franz often walked through the camp, unleashing his dog on hapless victims in an arbitrary fashion:

When Franz and his dog Barry would approach the group of prisoners, they would all instantly be on their guard, for they knew his tour always ended with someone being victimized.²²

The Third Reich also inhibited the friendly relations that Jews, Roma and Sinti could have with canines and other animals, though the results were not always successful. Quoting Boria Sax’s Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, page 119:

The [Third Reich’s] animal protection laws contained little aspiration toward universality. Both legal documents and public announcements repeatedly emphasized their specifically German character, and violations were ‘sometimes referred to as “foreign to the spirit of the people” [Volks‐fremd]. The [Third Reich] tried to deny the comfort offered by animals and nature to many people.

[Roma and Sinti], living on the fringes of European society for centuries, had learned to exploit sources of food that were shunned by the majority; at times they hunted hedgehogs. These were protected (Giese and Kahler, p. 242), and Hermann Göring had given them special status as “useful animals.” To make the hunt for hedgehogs more difficult, [Roma and Sinti] were forbidden to own dogs. This regulation, which had precedents before [1933] (Wippermann, pp. 195–96), was among the earliest that restricted the contact of despised groups of people with animals.

Laws were designed, whether consciously or not, to confirm the identification of Jews with the decadence of urban civilization. A decree of February 15, 1942, prohibited Jews, whom the [Axis] considered naturally cruel to animals, from having pets (Wippermann, p. 196). The decree was a preliminary step toward deportation of the Jews to concentration camps, where conditions would not be compatible with the animal protection laws.

Since there was a lack of shelters, the pets confiscated from Jews were almost always euthanized. Jews were also forbidden to hunt, a favorite activity of rural people. The literature of the period, especially that of victims, documents how precious contact with animals often became for those living under [Axis] domination.

The Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, forced to work under severe conditions as a French prisoner of war, reports that friendship with a stray dog reaffirmed the humanity of the prisoners. The prisoners named the dog “Bobby.” “He would appear at morning assembly,” Levinas writes, “and was waiting: for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking with delight. For him, there was no doubt we were men” (p. 153).

As with humour, canines could be instruments of healing as well as oppression. For example, Sharon Peters wrote a book titled Trusting Calvin: How a Dog Helped Heal a Holocaust Survivor’s Heart, and Isaiah Spiegel’s A Ghetto Dog indicates that these quadrupeds could be of some consolation to the people trapped in ghetti.

Further reading: Breeding Racism: The Imperial Battlefields of the “German” Shepherd Dog