"How to build a slaughterhouse" by Richard Selzer

The short story "How to Build a Slaughterhouse" by Richard Selzer, can be looked at as a metaphor for the Nazi interment camps. The author portrays the slaughterhouse as a very uniform killing factory, much like the interment camps in Nazi Germany. The workers are so numb to the killing of the cows, that they act like killing an animal isn't a big deal. This is called physic doubling. The slaughtering of the cows is …

…die? Through this short essay Selzer is trying to show how easy it was for the Nazi soldiers to kill the Jews. When they stop thinking that the Jews, or in this case cows are less then human, it makes them easier to kill. And when it makes them easy to kill, the workers don't feel so bad about killing hundreds of "units" every day, and also makes the workers feel less guilty about killing.