HOW CANADA HELPED IN A NAZI JURASSIC PARK
BISON PART OF TWISTED PLAN
European farmers know them as “Nazi cows”: Large, shaggy, bighorned cattle with a notorious temper.
“They would come right over and try and kill you; that’s how aggressive they were,” British farmer Derek Gow told the BBC.
The name isn’t derogatory. Known as “Heck cattle,” they’re the remnants of a twisted Nazi plan to restore prehistoric animals to a conquered and ethnically cleansed Europe.
And it’s a plan in which Canada unwittingly played a role.
“We were only too pleased to be able to supply some of these animals and would gladly let him have more at any time,” then prime minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary after a 1937 meeting with top Nazi Hermann Goering.
The animals in question were Canadian bison, and Goering had opened their meeting by effusively thanking Canada for shipping some to Germany, where they were being used as part of a plan to restore European bison herds.
The same year he met King, Goering presided over the International Hunting Exposition in Berlin. A photograph from the event shows him looking at a map of Poland’s famous Białowieza Forest, where German conservationists planned to bolster game herds.
Left unsaid was that much of this would be done once the forest was under Nazi control — and once death squads had cleared the area of its human residents.
Just as the Nazis intended to “purify” the humanity of Europe, they similarly intended to impose their own vision of nature on the European wilderness.
“The reshaping of this dull and strange landscape into a German one must be our most important goal,” zoologist Lutz Heck wrote in 1942 after seeing the recently conquered lands of Eastern Europe from outside a train window.
With the full support of Goering, Heck devised a grand scheme to mould Europe’s environment into an “Aryan” ideal by resurrecting extinct prehistoric animals that the Nazis admired for their prominent role in German folklore.
Heck took as his inspiration the Nibelungenlied, the Medieval German epic poem about the exploits of the hunter Siegfried.
Adolf Hitler had a vision of annexing Eastern Europe, murdering its native population and using the land to establish a Thousand-Year German Reich. Within it, vast national parks would run wild with prehistoric animals that, like Siegfried, the vacationing Aryan man could hunt in order to prove his mettle.
This Nazi fantasy of a “pure, unspoiled” European wilderness is still preserved in a 1934 sculpture of a bison outside Berlin built to celebrate the opening of a small game preserve to house Heck’s creations.
“Once, primeval big game roamed Germany’s forests. Its hunting was a trial of courage for our German ancestors,” reads an inscription alongside a passage from the Nibelungenlied.
The primeval animals to be brought back would include the aurochs, a type of wild cow that had gone extinct in the 17th century; the tarpan, a wild horse that had died out in the 1800s; and the European bison, which was still alive but critically endangered.
Heck planned to resurrect the aurochs and the tarpan through what he called “backbreeding”; selectively breeding modern cows and horses until their “wild” genetic characteristics were brought to the surface.
Bison, meanwhile, would be strengthened through crossbreeding with Canadian imports, which Heck believed were endowed with “immense reproductive energy.”
Canada would have known that the Nazis were using their animals to resurrect European herds. Mackenzie King met Lutz Heck on his visit to Berlin and even invited Goering to Canada in order to hunt bison in their natural habitat.
“He spoke about being very busy, but I said: Busy men need a change,” King wrote later.
Goering and Heck did not invent the concept of “rewilding,” of course. To this day, the practice is commonly seen in Canada with engineered re-introductions of wolves, sea otters and bison, among others.
Just outside Edmonton, in fact, Parks Canada still maintains a fenced bison reserve whose animals are used to rewild wilderness areas across Canada and the United States.
But the Nazi plan was different. Heck wouldn’t merely be reintroducing native species; he would be unleashing herds of artificial chimera.
The Nazi conquest of Europe gave the zoologist a blank cheque to loot the continent’s zoos for specimens. But backbreeding, like most Nazi theories, was pseudoscience.
Heck’s creations may have superficially resembled aurochs and tarpans, but genetically they were nothing like the extinct megafauna.
Most sinister of all, though, was that Goering’s plans to rewild the Białowieza Forest would require the deaths of scores of people.
Once the forest was in German hands following the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Goering quickly ordered the forest to be expanded and cleared of “Jews and partisans.”
German units ruthlessly razed villages, deported thousands and conducted on-the-spot massacres of Jewish populations.
As the war progressed, German foresters dispatched to Białowieza were armed and given orders to shoot anyone who fell under the wide definition of a “bandit.” Special Hunting Commando units were sent into the forest with orders to use hunting techniques in order to execute Jews who had escaped from forced labour camps.
Back in the Reich, meanwhile, this vicious creation of “non-human Lebensraum (living space)” was sanitized as a win for conservation.
“The swift victory over Poland has brought a welcome return of pure-blooded wisents (bison) to Germany,” said a propaganda film from the era commissioned by Goering.
Ultimately, many of Heck’s creations would meet the same fate as the state that had created them.
Specimens of aurochs, tarpan and bison held at the Berlin Zoo were subjected to repeated Allied bombings followed by an all-out Soviet assault on the site during the 1945 Battle of Berlin.
In the chaos of the war’s final days, escaped zoo animals roamed a ruined German capital, their bodies set upon by starving locals once killed by errant shells or bullets. Reportedly, Lutz Heck’s own son was forced to machine gun packs of panicked, stampeding aurochs after an air raid set them loose.
Troops stationed in Białowieza were ordered to shoot as many as Heck’s animals as they could before retreating ahead of the Soviet advance. Goering, too, would personally shoot his own private collection of bison before abandoning his country estate. Yet some of Heck’s breeds survive, preserved at European zoos and boutique farms.
Heck himself lived until the 1980s, remaining unrepentant for the role he played in one of history’s most brutal acts of ecological engineering.
Heck’s attitude is probably best summed up in a passage from his 1952 autobiography. Much of Europe was still in ruins, Poland was recovering from the trauma of losing one-fifth of its population and the world now knew of the millions gassed, starved, hanged and shot by Nazi Germany in their bid for Lebensraum.
And yet, to Heck, none of this seemed to hold a candle to the disappearance of the American bison.
“One of the most shocking chapters in the history of our day is that concerned with the almost complete destruction ... of a whole great species, full of vitality, simply through human folly and greed, ambition and blind destructiveness,” he wrote.