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The Nazi Beeding Program That Resurrected An Extinct Species
An indelible characteristic of fascist ideology is the celebration of a mythic past, an over-the-top nostalgic fixation often accompanied by attempts to restore things to the way they used to be "back in the good ol' days". For the Nazis, this meant a return to Old Germania — the old Germany of the Nibelungenlied — a time of (supposed) unparalleled prosperity, happiness, and pride.
The Nazis, of course, took this imperative to extremes, including a little known attempt to restore its forests back to their original medieval splendor. But in order to do so, they would have to bring back an animal that went extinct in 1672 — a problem that two German zoologists tackled with a curious breeding program.
Writing in Cabinet Magazine, Michael Wangdescribes the lengths the Nazis went to to bring back the ancient auroch, a large oxen-like creature. Once found "everywhere in Germany," the absence of the species riled the Nazis who in turn recruited two scientists to help, Heinz and Lutz Heck. Undaunted by the challenge, the brothers set upon the task of "recreating" the auroch by interbreeding similar creatures from around the world. Wang describes the Nazi rationale behind the project:
This conflation of biological and aesthetic destiny coincided with a strain of Nazi thought that sought to apply pseudo-Darwinian theories in support of a racialized conception of the state. In this mode, the zoologist Konrad Lorenz identified parallels between the changes he observed in animals as the result of their domestication and what he saw as the deleterious genetic effects of civilization.
By referring to centuries-old accounts and preserved illustrations of the aurochs, the Heck brothers crossed several modern breeds of cattle, including Corsican breeds, Hungarian grey cattle, Scottish Highland cattle, and others. The end result was a creature that bore a startling resemblance to the auroch.
Read more here: http://io9.com/5924391/the-nazi-breeding-program-that-resurrected-an-extinct-species
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