Hitler's Animal Obsession: Purebred Horses, German Dogs & Killer Cows | Nazi History Documentary

Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, three of the highest Nazi dignitaries, also three of the key men responsible for the final solution, the genocide of six million Jews during the Second World War. But these men, like many Nazi officers, shared another secret, a side that is less well-known and particularly disconcerting, their fascination for the animal kingdom, even going as far as turning them into instruments to serve the Nazi regime. In the Nazi imagination, love of animals was a very real thing. What Himmler was saying was, we shall treat animals better than Jews. Why would these criminals, who massacred millions of human beings, show such a fondness for animals? What experiments would the Third Reich carry out to transform them into regime-serving instruments of terror, sometimes even genetically modifying them? How would this unhealthy obsession for the animal kingdom go on to be one of the major components of Hitler's racial ideology, even using it to justify the Holocaust? The Nazis would certainly see themselves as the predatory animal. We discover how the Nazis tried to control and purify the animal kingdom, and at the same time attempted to revive a species that had become extinct, the aurochs, one of the most aggressive beasts ever known to man. Between fascination and manipulation of the animal kingdom, the story of how Hitler used real creatures for the unthinkable is one of the lesser-known stories of the Third Reich. To understand the Nazis' strange interest in animals, we must go back to March 1933. Hitler had been in power for less than two months. In 1933, animal well-being was not the greatest priority in the world. In France and England, abuse in public was punishable by law, but animals were not highly regarded. In Germany, Hitler passed the first law to ban all animal cruelty. Only 80 days after his nomination as chancellor, the Führer became an animal-rights pioneer. Just is not what you expect, but the Nazi laws of 1933 were the most extensive animal protection laws in the world at the time. The law of the 21st of April, 1933, was so far ahead of its time that many of its articles remained in force until the 1970s. From that moment on, animals had rights in Germany. The animal itself had a right to be treated in a decent way. That was a watershed moment in animal protection law. In the United States, a company in 1934 delivered a medal to Hitler because of the laws that had been passed in 1933. We got hold of the texts of the laws approved by Hitler. They state that making an animal suffer unnecessarily is forbidden, but the texts go much further. Hitler reviews all of the practices that are now prohibited in extreme detail. Article 11, it is forbidden to force-feed poultry. Article 9, it is forbidden to perform operations without anesthesia. Article 5, it is forbidden to abandon your pet. Even more surprising, in a Germany that is modernizing at breakneck speed, vivisection is prohibited, even for medical research. Goering, the regime's second-in-command, appears as the savior of laboratory rabbits and mice. The punishment set out for offenders has a terrible irony. Goering said in a speech, I will send to a concentration camp anybody who torments animals in laboratories. Ten years later, prisoners in camps became human guinea pigs. The comparison is terrifying, but far from surprising. It's tempting to take, I think, a simplistic line and cast the Nazis as the first environmentally conscious group in society. The difficulty comes, of course, in that I don't think you can isolate these measures. They're part of this wider conception of the world, which also had these horribly brutal and cruel aspects. What's behind this strange obsession with the animal kingdom? How, against all expectations, did this interest for animals accompany and sometimes even inspire the most heinous cruelties of the regime? Animals and Nazi leaders seem to have very different backstories. However, their destinies were intimately entwined. To understand how, we must delve into the private lives of the Nazis, starting with their leader, Adolf Hitler. The Führer always had a very special relationship with his dogs. Hitler constantly had himself photographed with dogs. He spread the idea that he was a great trainer of dogs, that he had even a kind of mystical bond with them. The most famous animal of the Third Reich is Blondie, the Führer's dog. These images of Hitler in private were taken by Eva Braun, who would later become his wife. Here we are in the summer residence of the Reich Chancellor in Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. Hitler's well-known love for his dogs has been widely discussed. Many historians see it as a manifestation of the dictator's solitary and anti-social personality. The dog is more faithful than man. Man is a born traitor. The dog will not betray. April 1945, Berlin. Hitler is hidden away in the bunker where he'll eventually take his own life. During his last days, the Führer is overcome by paranoia. He only trusts Blondie and one of her puppies, Wolfie. He would reportedly risk his life every day to take his dog for a walk. He was sorry. He wasn't sorry that six million Jews had been murdered. But he was sorry that his brave German shepherd dog had to believe in it now. Adolf Hitler would coldly exterminate millions of people and at the same time, he would shed a tear for his dog, who was buried with him in a bunker. But the dictator's relationship with his German shepherds was not always perfect, as his private secretary later testified. The attitude towards animals, and especially towards dogs, is very much discussed. Some witnesses say that after seeing Hitler push his dog and kick it, there is no representation of that. Were the Nazis simply pretending to like nature and animals? Why go to such lengths to protect animals? One reason stands out, propaganda. The Nazis quickly saw the interest in becoming friends of animals. Treating animals gently reflects on the character of people, so this is a very important propaganda tool, making Nazi leaders appear human, trustworthy. Who could imagine that the man feeding a fawn on this 1933 postcard would one day become one of the greatest criminals in history? But the Nazis go much further. They also exploit animals to serve their sinister ideology, above all, their ultra-nationalism. They came to idealize the countryside, the farm, the forest, as areas where true Germanic Aryan, Nordic people, stood in a close organic relationship with the soil, with the landscape and with animals. Behind this fantasy of an idealized nature was a much darker aspect. The true German, the Aryan, loved animals, unlike the Jew, who was seen as someone who massacred them. The target was kosher slaughter, a ritual in which the animal is bled. The Jewish tradition, considered to be unbelievably cruel by the Nazis, is forbidden under the law of April 21st, 1933. The law says kosher butchering is illegal, period. This is one of the many little laws that pushed Jews outside of civil society, and banning this is one of the first steps in a long road that then actually ends in Auschwitz. The same law that protected animals from all evils carried with it the mark of Nazism, anti-Semitism. Were the animals being protected or simply manipulated? The zoo in Berlin can help us understand the deep relationship the Nazis had with animals. This zoo was unlike any other. It underwent a full transformation when Hitler came to power. Here, typically German animals were honored to assert the supremacy of the Germans. The role of the zoo is even more important because at the time, it was a key place in Germany. It was the zoo in the world that had the most diverse representation of the animal kingdom, and the Berliners were very proud. I think it's fair to say that the Berlin Zoo was a focal point of society, the high society. The zoo was an unmissable place for the upper classes in the 1930s. It also quickly became the privileged venue for the regime's big celebrations. Already in May 1933, the staff of the zoo would march to the Nazi propaganda May Day celebrations in uniforms. So I could say the zoo was adapting to the new regime very, very quickly. Today, the zoo confronts its Nazi past by clearly exposing it. At the time, the director of the zoo had a large part in this responsibility. His name was Lutz Heck. He was an ambitious zoologist who supported the Nazis' rise to power. In 1937, he became a member of the party. Later, when he became a member of the SS, he got closer to Hitler. The Nazis rewarded his good and loyal service with these distinctions and with good reason. On his own initiative, Lutz Heck effectively created a privileged area inside the Berlin Zoo that was dedicated exclusively to German species. Lutz Heck then put into reality his idea of a place where only so-called German animals were displayed. The problem with the German zoo is that it was from the beginning meant as a part of the national propaganda. In just a few years, the zoo became a powerful propaganda tool for Nazi ideology. It showed hundreds of thousands of German children that the German race was superior, leagues above the rest. Whether a creature was German or not was more significant than the distinction of species. It reflected that the Nazis were fond of animals, but only their animals. Lutz Heck went even further by using German animals to represent Nazism. Eyewitnesses told us that the cages of the so-called German zoo were marked with a swastika. So by only marking the animals native in one's own country, you do make a statement. You somehow transfer them into patriotic animals. For the Nazis, not all animals had the same rank or role. The German shepherd in particular was one of the most patriotic. Hitler and his friends glorified dogs. They even threw huge parties in their honor. How would they go about devising strategies to make them more aggressive, using them to terrorize the enemy in the camps? The German shepherd was around long before Hitler, but from its creation, it was destined to become the ultimate Aryan dog. At the end of the 19th century, Max von Stephanitz modified the breeds of sheep dogs to create the perfect dog, strong, intelligent, tough, and above all, obedient. A fervent nationalist, the breeder modeled it on what he believed to be the virtues of the German people. I'm not German, but I'm loyal. And then, above all, in terms of appearance, he said the German sheepdog would look like the dogs of the old Germans. The Nazis resurfaced this heritage by putting the German shepherd in the spotlight. In the new Reich, a full day every year was dedicated to them. The Nazis did have a day of the dog where they tried to recognize and celebrate the dogs and their importance in Germanic culture. Bright and obedient, German shepherds quickly became the Wehrmacht's finest war dog. In 1938, preparing for war, they built the biggest canine training center in Europe in Kummersdorf in the south of Berlin. There, the German army trained 200,000 military dogs. During the conflict, they were very effective accompanying soldiers on patrol or helping the injured. They also carried supplies, messages, and even carrier pigeons. The Nazis also trained their dogs to terrorize the enemy, far from the front line in concentration camps. Himmler was a former chicken breeder. He wanted to train dogs to herd prisoners essentially the same way that they would herd livestock. In Ravensbrück, a women's camp, some of the guards trained their dogs to bite the prisoners' genitals. A survivor tells her story. We were forced to stand for hours in the cold, and if anyone collapsed, they would release the dogs. Many didn't survive the bite wounds. Kurt Franz, the commander of the Treblinka concentration camp, would sometimes order his dogs to attack prisoners by saying, man, bite the dog. In other words, the dogs, from his point of view, were just about human, and the prisoners were not. In the Buchenwald kennels, the SS carried out experiments to terrorize the prisoners even more. The SS had a terrible secret. To make the dogs even more aggressive, they starved them on orders from Berlin. We found this internal memo in the German National Archives. It was sent by Kripo, the criminal police of the Reich, the subject feeding the service dogs. It says the daily rations must be limited to 150 grams of dry food, the equivalent of a soup spoon per day. For better or worse, the dog found itself at the heart of the Third Reich. Even if they were highly regarded, for the Nazis, they were still pets for the use of humans. The ferocity of the untamed world was of much more interest to Hitler. We discover how, by watching the behavior of these predators, the Führer created the model of his ideal society. Hitler finds a vile justification for his racial ideology, one that seems to make the Holocaust appear perfectly natural. That sense of a fundamental distinction between humans in general and animals, the whole scale of values, which I think had been developed in Europe since the Enlightenment, they simply rejected that. In 1925, Hitler publishes Mein Kampf, My Struggle, the book that would become his manifesto. He already compares the Reich that he wants to build to a nation of cruel predators. He says that he wants to become a wild animal. That is, the instinct, the brutality, he even goes so far as to say that the cruelty of the wild animal must be found in the young German that I want to train. To shape his new Germany, Hitler doesn't take inspiration from any wild animal. He turns to the dog's ancestor, the wolf. For the Nazis, the wolf was a totem animal. It was an animal that they identified with a sort of primeval fierceness, but also with a loyalty to the pack, the qualities that they wanted to promote. Hitler had been obsessed with wolves for a long time. According to the testimonies of those around him, the Führer constantly compared himself to a wolf in both his public and private life. So Hitler, as well as calling his own dog Wolf, he liked to be called Wolf as a kind of pseudonym by his cronies. His secret headquarters in East Prussia was, of course, the Wolfschanze, the Wolf's Lair. In his conquests and amongst his generals, the Führer declared himself to be the alpha male. His pack was the whole of Germany. But Hitler went much further. According to him, human society should obey the same laws of nature. That's to say, the survival of the fittest. They believed without hesitation that all animal and human species were in a constant struggle in which the strongest would survive and the weakest would disappear. Hitler once said, referring to the Nazis and Jews, who is to blame, the cat or the mouse, if the cat eats up the mouse? What he meant was that driving for domination as a people was natural. To help him convince the German people of his racist doctrine, his propaganda referred to a well-known scientist who had studied nature in detail, Charles Darwin and his theories of evolution and natural selection. But the Nazis made a huge mistake. Darwin meant that the animal best adapted to the challenges of the environment would survive. But the survival of the fittest doesn't mean the strongest. The Nazis misinterpreted Charles Darwin's theories totally. Against all scientific reason, the Nazis incorrectly seized upon Darwin's theories, applying them to mankind. Hitler declared the Aryan race to be superior to all others. Their domination over the world became perfectly logical in their eyes. He tried to justify the extermination of the weakest with the laws of nature. They would have regarded predatory animals as operating to purify, to cleanse the natural world. So they saw their own role with people and with the larger environment. The Nazis applied themselves to widely spreading these ideas, and from a very young age. In biology lessons, German children learned how man and animals obey the same laws. This is a biology textbook from Nazi Germany in the 30s. It's about humans, but it starts with animals. The argument is that there is no difference. So the way rabbits reproduce is the way we reproduce. If you want to have a super rabbit, you should, as a breeder, be aware of certain rules. And then it goes on to humans, and how you should look like and how you should not look like. If humans and animals worked in the same way, the Nazis could legitimately use methods of breeding for human beings. To develop a purer Aryan society, the Nazis were openly inspired by methods used by breeders who, for centuries, had been selecting the best horses or sheep. What does the breeder do? He selects the superior, supposedly superior, and excludes the supposedly inferior. It was in the thinking of the Nazi ideology, which is based on biology, which is based on selection, exclusion, selection, exclusion. The Nazis would do the same thing with humans. On 14th July 1933, they started a programme of sterilisation of the disabled. The selection of the superior Aryan race also started. They sought in their control of population to breed as many children as possible and to try to encourage the German population to breed strong, healthy children who would be fit, athletic, ready either as young men for soldiering as young women for more childbearing. For those who did not fit the criteria of the Aryan race, the only possible outcome was elimination. The same idea of selection is applied to breeds of animals. In their mad quest for perfection, the Nazis went to extreme lengths to improve race to suit their fantasies. Well, the Nazis were obsessed with breeding animals. They tried to do this in a systematic way. How would the Nazis try to mould animals to perfection? How would they try to reinvent the animal kingdom? In the middle of the Second World War, at the moment when 3 million human beings were being exterminated in concentration camps, a secret project was being carried out in annexed Czechoslovakia. Its aim was to create the perfect horse. April 1945. In the quiet, calm little village of Hostow, located on the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia, hides one of Hitler's last treasures. It was like a safe haven for horses. One of the biggest concentrations ever of racially pure, well-bred horses. On Hostow's stud farm are 300 splendid, thoroughbred horses. There are also a dozen foals that are bizarrely marked with the letter H. Hubert Rudowski, a colonel in the Wehrmacht, was in charge of the stud farm. A few days before the fall of the Reich, the colonel did everything he could to save his precious horses. He agreed to give them to the American army out of fear that the Soviets would get to them first. It had happened before that the Red Army wasn't interested in the horses, but only in the meat. It was food for the soldiers. Why such a detailed plan to save horses when men were dying elsewhere? What type of experiments were the Germans carrying out in this stud farm, hidden away in the Bohemian hills? Just like with humans, the answer lies in the breed of horse. In Hostow, we find some of the last examples of one of the most prestigious lines of thoroughbreds. The Lipitzans, the symbol of the ancient Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Lipitzaner horse is the imperial horse of the Austrian court. The story goes back 400 years. When the emperor was crowned, coronated, he was sitting on a Lipitzaner horse in Budapest. Before the war, 500 Lipitzans were distributed between stud farms in Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans. Throughout 1942, Hitler secretly ordered them all to be collected, by force if necessary. They were all gathered in one place, Hostow. What Hitler tried to do was to collect the Lipitzaner breed, actually the complete breed, and possess it, own it. This was because, I think, they embodied racial purity. White, Austrian, the imperial jewel. The Lipitzan represented the superior race in Hitler's eyes. The very image of the Aryan he had always pictured. For the pleasure of the high-rank dignitaries of the Third Reich, horse parades were organized in Hostow during the Second World War, far from the centers of death that had been built in Poland. But the Nazis' projects didn't stop there. They tried to create a superior breed of horse to be better on the battlefield. This animal was an essential element in the war. Despite the image of a highly mechanized Second World War, the Wehrmacht used twice as many horses as they did during the Great War, primarily for transporting supplies and ammunition. There were about 2.7 million horses that were used by the Germans in World War II. Very few of them survived. It was under very rough conditions. Some were killed in battle, some starved. The survival rate was not very high at all. Faced with this slaughter, the chief horseman of the regime, Gustav Rau, was charged with selecting the best horses and replacing those who died in battle. He had to resupply the army with 6,000 horses a month, and he wanted to resupply them with what he called the das ideale Soldatenpferd. During the war, Hitler himself gave free rein to Gustav Rau to achieve his dream of the perfect horse. In Hostow, as in other Stadtfarms of the Reich, the chief horseman carried out experiments with other, more resistant lines. He wanted to create a new breed of horse that was perfectly adapted to the infernal rhythm of war. He looked for a strong, extremely strong, enduring, loyal animal. On a diet of only grass or hay, the horse should be able to survive long journeys. In the Stadtfarm, around 100 foals were born each year. They were marked with the letter H for Hostow. But with no real genetic knowledge and not enough time, Gustav Rau did not manage to accomplish his dream. Each time you need a year to see the results of a new crossbreeding. He wanted to create that, but he had only 2 or 3 years during the Second World War to try, and it was too short a time, actually. The Lippertan story at Hostow finished for the man just as it did for the animals. This wasn't the case for all of the other dark experiments that the Nazis carried out on animals. One of these experiments even went as far as causing the deportation and death of thousands of Poles, a real massacre involving the regime's second-in-command, Hermann Göring. Göring was the maybe more popular face of National Socialism. The drug-addicted, fat, funny face of the Nazis. But at the same time, he was as much a criminal as the rest of them. The chief commander of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, had always liked to be different in the Nazi regime. Göring considered animals to be prey. He was absolutely passionate about hunting. He was indeed appointed as Reich Jägermeister, the chief hunter of the Reich. Hitler and Himmler claimed to be disgusted by hunting. The future mastermind of the Final Solution said one day of hunters, how can you take pleasure in shooting poor, innocent animals by surprise while they are peacefully grazing at the edge of a wood? When you look at it, it's murder, pure and simple. Göring had a completely different view of his favourite pastime. His position as Reich Jägermeister gave him extensive powers to be fairly draconian about this, creating large areas which were then reserved for animals. Göring wasn't the only one to like hunting. He shared this passion with Lutz Heck, director of the Berlin Zoo and member of the SS, who had transformed his zoo into a propaganda tool for the Nazi ideology. The two men went on many hunts together, in different nature reserves that Göring created in Germany. Lutz Heck and Hermann Göring developed strong bonds between them that both found beneficial. Lutz Heck would provide Hermann Göring with small lion cubs bred at the German zoos, at the Berlin Zoo. Once they grew too old and grew too dangerous, Lutz Heck would take them again into his zoo and provide a new small lion cub. During one of their hunts, Lutz Heck persuaded Göring to think bigger. He tells him about research that he has already started and which could revolutionise the animal kingdom. He had an idea that you could recreate an ideal nature in which an ideal human being would live an ideal life. The two men discovered a common goal. A few years later, they would attempt to make it a reality at the cost of a huge massacre. The 22nd of June, 1941. Hitler decided to launch a surprise attack on the USSR. In a few days, the Reich annexed everything that was left of Poland. But at the border of what is now Belarus, the German army were waiting in the Bialowieza forest. All around, the Polish villages had been burned down to force the inhabitants to leave. The ones who hid away in the woods met an even worse fate. For months, the Germans went through the Bialowieza forest to rid the area of all human presence. Those remaining were forcibly deported or even killed. The displacement of the Polish people was executed in a level of brutality that cost the life of thousands of people. Many people in the region, Jews who ventured into the forest, would be massacred by the Einsatzgruppen. These were special execution squads who would kill over 1.5 million people on the Eastern Front. What's very striking to me is how one of the very first areas for this activity, which we can see now as the start of what we know as the Holocaust or the Shoah, was in the Bialowieza forest. Why such a brutality to evacuate the Bialowieza forest? Why would the Nazis take over this unusual place to carry out one of their most shocking acts of madness? Bringing back to life a very aggressive prehistoric species which embodied Nazi strength, the Orochs. Two men supervised the whole operation, Hermann Göring and Lutz Heck. This forest is the place they had been dreaming of to carry out their joint project. It is unique in Europe. Bialowieza forest is still and was back then the only original jungle left in Central Europe. This was a huge area of primeval forest which had not been managed or cultivated and had a whole number of animal species which in the rest of Europe had disappeared. The Bialowieza forest was home to the last bison in Europe, lynxes and of course wolves, animals worshipped by the Nazis. In autumn 1941, all human presence had been eradicated and Bialowieza finally appeared to Göring just as it was thousands of years ago. Now restored to its original purity, it was in this forest that Hermann Göring could go back to the original roots of the Aryan identity, the first Germanic hunters. Some ideologues of the Nazi movement claimed that the Germanic people or the German people were a forest dwelling people. They were idealized as hunters and their companions were seen as the animals which had inhabited the North European forests back in primeval times. For Göring, hunting was a way of getting back to his Aryan roots in the purest Nazi ideology. It was a noble combat which demanded an exceptional opponent and an animal that was worthy of fighting him. With his brother Heinz, Lutzheck worked on the issue from the middle of the 1920s. He wanted this animal to be the aurochs, a prehistoric ox that men had painted in the Lascaux caves, an animal with unparalleled aggressiveness. The aurochs would not be a cattle which you would milk for milk in a dairy factory. It would be an animal that had imaginative characteristics of the wild or an ideal of nature. We have Julius Caesar talking about them and he describes them as bulls as big as elephants in the forests of Herculanea. So it was an animal that always made a huge impression on the people who saw it. The Nazi's mythical animal, the aurochs, disappeared over three centuries ago. Lutzheck and his brother Heinz, director of the Munich Zoo, would try to reinvent it. In their laboratory in Berlin Zoo, they studied every source available. They compared their scant information with modern cows. They argued that the genes of the wild animal must be in its domestic descendants, cattle, and what they did was they picked breeds that maybe looked like aurochs superficially. From our vantage point today, this appears as pseudoscience, but by the late 1930s, Lutzheck believed that he was close to his goal of recreating this extinct species. One characteristic in particular interested the researchers, aggressiveness. Above all, they wanted to create the ultimate animal, a new symbol for Nazism. What the Heck brothers wanted to create was an animal that was truly dangerous. So, I mean, they were selecting animals that were fierce. So the animals that they produced were extremely aggressive. Delighted by the project, Goering gave the Heck brothers a practically unlimited budget to select the best descendants of the aurochs from all over the world. Lutzheck, supported by the Nazi Party, travelled around Europe, went to South America, cast his eyes everywhere, looking for living cows which individually had some of the qualities that he had imagined in the aurochs. From Corsican bulls to American bison, the most interesting specimens were brought back to Berlin Zoo. In 1938, after 12 years of experiments and crossbreeding, Lutzheck was finally ready to present the revived aurochs to Goering. The two men enthusiastically released the beast into the wild land where their Aryan ancestors may have lived, the Bialowieza forest, soon to be empty of all human beings. At the end of 1941, around 50 of these monsters were let loose into the wild. Germany began to be defeated in 1942, so Goering did not have time to enjoy his new playground. Nobody knows what happened for sure to the Bialowieza aurochs, but the rumours are rather gruesome. I don't think it's hard to understand why, when the war finished, nobody wanted those animals there anymore. They were a symbol of oppression. So they'd be a symbol of oppression, but also they'd be killed, just because they were big animals, you could eat them, and people were starving, so I guess that's your explanation. The rare specimens that were kept at Munich Zoo went on to produce offspring. In 2009, as part of a species conservation programme, the breeder Derek Gau acquired 13 of them. At first view, the revived aurochs doesn't look much different to a cow, yet they have the ferocity so cherished by the Nazis. They were really very aggressive, so you could not walk through the fields with these animals, and indeed some of them, if you walked up to the gate at the entrance to the field, some of the cows would come across and try to kill you. So we don't have those ones anymore. The Nazis tried to reinvent a violent and ferocious beast that matched their fantasies. Once again, rather than protect animals, they manipulated them to serve their sinister ideology. We shouldn't mistake their attitude towards the animal kingdom as something kind of universally benign or sympathetic. They were, again, in this pseudo-scientific way, quite prepared to intervene ruthlessly to try to shape, to control the animal world. The Nazis' fascination for the animal kingdom was real. Animals had a special place, much more respected than those they considered subhuman. But the Nazis only loved animals when they could control them. The 1933 laws to protect them didn't seem to apply to the war effort. The Nazis used animals to create an aggressive world, dominated by their obsessive drive for racial purity. A principle they would try to apply to all of humanity.