The Nazis not only wanted to breed the “Germanic master race”, but also the bloodthirsty Germanic super cow. Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring drove the development, his henchmen were the directors of the zoos in Berlin and Munich. Many people died in the project.
In 1937, Hermann Göring invited to the large international hunting exhibition in the capital of the Reich. Hunting was his passion and he wanted to show it to the world. The second man of the Third Reich, the main office head of the Reich Ministry of Aviation, had acquired a whole series of titles since the “seizure of power” in 1933 and one of them was that of “Reichsjägermeister”.
Because fat Goering was a passionate hunter. Again and again he went to his hunting ground in the Rominter Heide and shot down everything that came in front of his gun barrel. He liked capital deer best. He then liked to boast about the “achievement” of having killed a defenseless animal.
But deer were not enough for the mighty Goering. And so he planned something sensational: he wanted to resurrect an extinct creature that would make even a full-grown stag look like a cute fawn: the aurochs. In his confused imagination, the aurochs roamed through the Germanic primeval forests, a bloodthirsty, aggressive beast that terrified people. And would be killed by the brave Reichsjägermeister.
2,000 years earlier, another famous statesman had expressed a due respect for the aurochs in the gloomy Germanic forests. The Roman general Julius Caesar wrote in his work “De bello Gallico” that he was almost as big as an elephant, strong and aggressive and spared neither man nor beast. If the Romans were not at all familiar with these unspoilt people from the north, this was especially true for the aurochs, which at least reached a height of 1.85 meters and a weight of one ton. And what he could do with his 80 centimeter long horns, the battle-hardened Romans preferred not to test.
The Germans were not so squeamish. They hunted the aurochs, also called urochs or ur, until there was none left. In what is now Germany, the last specimen was shot towards the end of the 15th century. In Poland it lasted a little longer until the last specimen died there in 1627.
But now the aurochs was to rise again so that he, the Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring, could kill him. Of course from a safe distance with a rifle. A man who was considered a proven expert put the flea from the ox in Göring’s ear: Lutz Heck. He was born in 1892 in the Berlin Zoological Gardens, as his father was the director of the facility. Heck followed in his footsteps and took over his old master’s post in 1932.
As early as the 1920s he had a self-imposed mission, which he worked on with his younger brother Heinz. He also made a career and became director of Munich Zoo Hellabrunn. The two had set themselves the goal of resurrecting the aurochs through reverse breeding. They were of the opinion that every extinct animal could be bred again by crossing offspring, because these offspring still contained the genetic material of the protozoan. Now we know that’s scientifically nonsense, but back then the Heck brothers weren’t the only ones who thought so.
Hermann Göring was enthusiastic when Lutz Heck confronted him with his idea. He supported the effort and so the brothers traveled across Europe and as far as Canada to find such descendants of Urs. They collected Spanish fighting bulls, steppe cattle from Hungary, cows from England and France and a few other specimens and crossed them over several years. Because Hermann Göring attached particular importance to this, they made sure that the resulting cattle displayed a certain characteristic: They should be particularly aggressive.
At least it worked. Otherwise, the “Heckrinder”, as they were later christened, bore as much resemblance to the original aurochs as a rickety old small car bears to a Porsche Cayenne. Just as both cars have four wheels and headlights, so the two kinds of cattle had four legs and horns. But the Nazi wannabe aurochs were much smaller, standing about 1.45 meters high and weighing up to 600 kilograms, and only vaguely resembled the Ur.
Nevertheless, Lutz Heck reported proudly: “The attempt was successful,” and Hermann Göring was enthusiastic about the mongrel mix. He released them in his hunting grounds in the East Prussian Rominter Heide and in the Schorfheide near Berlin so that he could hunt them from then on. What still pained him was the fact that both areas did not really represent a primeval forest, as Göring, who also bore the title “Reichsforstmeister” among other things, imagined.
But the “Fuhrer” knew a remedy. Adolf Hitler, who had millions of people killed but rejected animal hunting, is known to have big plans: he wanted to create Germanic “living space” in Eastern Europe and in the vastness of the Soviet Union. It was Goering himself who prepared the implementation of this project as “Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan”. His anticipation grew because the Bialowieza Forest also belonged to this “habitat”. This area, about 250 kilometers east of Warsaw, is a real primeval forest, just as Göring imagined the Germanic primeval wilderness. Bisons still live here in the wild today.
The fact that the area belonged to Poland was of course not an obstacle for Goering. This shows a photo from the International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin, on which Göring can be seen with Lutz Heck, among others. In front of them is a kind of map table, on which aurochs are distributed instead of tank armies. The area is the Bialowieza Forest. The photo from 1937 publicly referred to the Nazis’ plans for conquest, which they were soon to put into practice.
Four years later the time had come: after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Göring had to be patient because eastern Poland fell to the Soviet Union in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But in the eyes of the Nazis, treaties were made so that they could be broken later, and when the Wehrmacht stormed large areas after the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Bialowieza in Poland was among them.
There was still a bit of tedious work to be done, because people lived in the area instead of aurochs. Therefore, only a few days after the attack on the Red Army, Goering gave the order to clear the forest. In July 1941, Battalion 322 of the German Order Police deployed and the “perfectly normal men”, as historian Christopher Browning called them, conscientiously carried out the work assigned to them. They expelled the 20,000 residents within three days. 116 villages were evacuated and the houses were burned down. People had 30 minutes to evacuate and those who resisted were shot. 900 men were killed and at least 7000 women and children were taken to a Jewish ghetto.
Finally the forest was free for the fake aurochs – Göring’s dream could be realized. A number of the newly bred animals were released. The aim was a “Germanic” forest in which there should only be “Germanic” animals – a kind of Jurassic Park.
But the Reichsfeldmarschall could never go hunting in peace, because there were partisans in the area who stubbornly resisted with great losses and did not let themselves be defeated. Goering’s people went manhunting instead of hunting aurochs. Within three years, however, they did not succeed in “cleaning up” the forest. Then the Red Army came and drove out the Germans.
So that his oxen would not fall into the hands of the Russians, Göring is said to have started shooting the animals himself shortly before the withdrawal. Another story says that in the post-war period locals killed the last cattle. Heck cattle are not completely extinct. A British farmer and animal rights activist by the name of Derek Blow wanted to continue breeding them in 2009. But he soon realized that the Nazi cow was too aggressive.
“As soon as we got near them, they would stick their horns through the fence and try to kill us,” Glow reported. English media warned of the monster cows, which terrified English farmers. Glow had to slaughter the most aggressive.
The British historian Toby Thacker saw another reason for the breeding attempt besides Göring’s passion for hunting. The Nazis would have tried to use the Urs to present themselves as part of a culture that was thousands of years old.” Be that as it may: Just as they were unsuccessful in creating the new “superhuman”, they were just as unsuccessful in reviving the Ur as a Germanic Überkuh allow.
