The Herd Reich

0:00 The headlines were screaming. Hitler's prehistoric zoo. The Herd Reich. And Hitler's Jurassic monsters. One story recounted, breathlessly, how creatures that were, quote, brought back to life in crazed experiments ordered by Hitler have done what he never could and invaded England. And what were these fearsome creatures? Cows. Okay, so maybe the British tabloids were exaggerating. Go figure. But those headlines were based on truth. Hitler's minions really did try to bring prehistoric cows back to life, using some fascinating science. And however bizarre, this story echoes modern attempts to revive dire wolves and woolly mammoths in uncomfortable ways.

1:02 This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast where footnotes become the real story. As mentioned last week, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck grew up in the Berlin Zoo, where their father was zookeeper. Heinz took over the Munich Zoo in 1927. There, he built the first zoo where animals lived in natural settings.

1:37 Lutz succeeded his father as head zookeeper in Berlin in 1932. This was an era of intense interest in animal breeding. Scientists then were conjuring up ligers and tigons and other chimera. But the Heck brothers were more interested in resurrecting extinct creatures, in particular, aurochs. Oryx were the wild ancestors of modern cattle.

2:02 They were the largest animals in Europe once. Cows today stand about four feet tall at the shoulder. Oryx stood six feet there, 50% taller. They had bigger muscles, too, and could weigh 3,000 pounds. Most Oryx were black, with a six-inch-wide white stripe down their spine. Each horn was a yard long. They ate herbs and grass, but don't let that gentle diet fool you. They were far more aggressive than the placid cows you've probably seen in barns.

2:34 If provoked, aurochs killed. Something about them struck a deep chord in people, and they appear often in fairy tales and other ancient literature. Julius Caesar took a page from the British tabloids and swore that aurochs were only a little smaller than elephants. but he genuinely marveled over brave German warriors who hunted these beasts down. Oryx appeared in the Nibelunglied too, the epic poem that inspired Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle operas. The Heck brothers were fascinated with the poem's hero Siegfried, who stalked and killed fearsome Oryx in the dark forests. Oryx thrived in Europe for millions of years, but a booming human population led to the overhunting of them.

3:21 and competition from domesticated cattle destroyed their feeding grounds. The last Oryx died near Warsaw in 1627, shot down to make leather girdles for high society maidens. But the creatures lived on in the imaginations of people like the Hex. Each brother fantasized about reviving them, although for different reasons.

3:43 Heinz wanted to right a wrong, He reasoned that if human beings drove aurochs into extinction, then we had a moral obligation to bring them back. Lutz simply wanted to see the beasts running wild again, and to hunt them like Siegfried did. In short, he was using science to bring German fairy tales to life. Each brother started his resurrection experiments independently, without the other one knowing. Heinz in 1921, Lutz a few years later. They called their approach backbreeding.

4:17 It worked like this. Certain modern cows retained individual traits from aurochs. Some are the right size or color. Some have giant horns or feisty temperaments. By crossbreeding those cows over multiple generations, the hacks hoped to combine all those traits into one aurochs-like beast. Biologically speaking, they hoped that the genes for color and big horns and such would eventually end up together in one beast. Let's use the metaphor of a mosaic, where each tile was a gene.

4:50 Backbreeding would bring the full mosaic back together. To understand what aurochs looked like, they studied fossils in museums and cave paintings of aurochs. Behavioral accounts appeared in myths and ancient encyclopedias. Lutz thought that Spanish bullfighting cows seemed especially promising as starting material, since they were so ornery. Philosophically, backbreeding raises interesting questions. If all the genes for aurochs still exist in modern cows, have aurochs truly gone extinct?

5:23 It depends on whether you think genes are the essence of a species. Some scientists argue that even Neanderthals are not truly extinct, since most, if not all, of their genes survive scattered among modern humans. So maybe aurochs and Neanderthals are only half extinct, if that makes sense. A separate question is whether backbreeding would actually work for the Heck brothers. Back then, people knew almost nothing about DNA.

5:52 And given modern knowledge about DNA, backbreeding seems a little dubious. The Hex assumed that because aurochs were vigorous and robust, that auroch genes would also be vigorous and robust. In particular, they assumed auroch genes would dominate modern cow genes and overpower them. But genes don't work like that. A gene that promotes beefy muscles or huge horns might be recessive.

6:18 Physical dominance does not equal genetic dominance. Also, while Lutz's metaphor of piecing a mosaic back together is poetic, it makes things seem too easy. Offspring inherit a random mix of their parents' chromosomes, and during the production of sperms and eggs, chromosomes cross over and swap genetic material. So the mosaic is constantly getting scrambled, and the tiles even fracture into pieces sometimes. It's much more chaotic biologically than just assembling a puzzle. To be fair, though, the Hex did not believe they needed to assemble every last Oryx gene in order to resurrect the creature. They were more flexible.

7:00 They wanted Oryx with the right size, color, shape, and behavior. They also wanted their Oryx to fulfill the same ecological roles. Oryx did things like dig pits with their horns and hooves. This turned over soil, which helped small animals and certain plants. In roaming widely, aurochs also dispersed seeds. So as long as their aurochs looked kind of right and behaved kind of right, the Hex were content to say that they had resurrected them. They did not insist on genetic purity.

7:33 Which is pretty striking given the era. Because a certain political party was coming into power in Germany then that made a big deal indeed about biological purity. The Nazis. and Lutz Heck soon got chummy with the most despicable Nazis of all. Let's address the brothers' politics. Heinz sometimes accepted research funds from slimy Nazi organizations that does not reflect well on him. Overall, though, the Nazis disliked Heinz.

8:04 His first wife was Jewish. His second wife had Jewish friends and was foreign and allegedly non-Aryan. Rumors also swirl that Heinz was a secret communist, and some accounts say that he spent time in the Dachau concentration camp as punishment. Shockingly, when one Nazi official bought a lion and donated it to the Munich Zoo, Heinz took a gun and shot it, which seems cruel to the lion. But Heinz did not want to be in that official's pocket. Perhaps most telling, whenever Heinz talked about crossbreeding cows from different species, he gleefully called the offspring bastards. That was a loaded term in Germany. In Mein Kampf, Hitler demanded that Germans stop marrying people of other races and producing so-called bastard stock.

8:56 Halting bastardness was central to the Nazi vision. So in calling his experimental cows bastards, Heinz was poking the Nazis in the eye. His brother Lutz was different. Historians don't think Lutz was personally anti-Semitic. He certainly was not publishing screeds about Jews or anything. But he did consent to laws that discriminated against Jews, by banning them from the Berlin Zoo, for instance. And he was clearly comfortable around anti-Semites.

9:25 For political reasons, he even joined the Nazi secret police, the SS. Lutz also gifted animals to Joseph Goebbels and palled around with Heinrich Himmler. But it was in Hermann Goering where Heinz found a true kindred spirit. Goering was a true weirdo with contradictory traits. He ran the most technologically advanced air force in the world. On the other hand, he spent his free time dressing up in traditional Germanic clothing and fantasizing about being Siegfried. He often tramped about the woods carefree. giant spears, like theater props. Goering eventually bullied his way into becoming Germany's chief forester, largely to preserve German wilderness. Can you imagine the equivalent today? Like

10:14 the Air Force chief of staff also running the U.S. Forestry Service, just so he could dress up like fictional characters and toss spears around? Even Adolf Hitler rolled his eyes at Goering's cuckoo fantasyland. Nevertheless, as Goering rose to power, Lutz Heck started kissing up to him. The two men bonded over their love of hunting and mythology. Lutz even gave Goering two lion cubs as a gift. The pair also spent hours babbling about saving old-growth forests and populating them with aurochs to hunt. Unfortunately for them, most of Europe's last old-growth forests lay east of Germany, outside the Third Reich. But the conquest of World War II suddenly gave them a chance to make their fantasies a reality.

11:07 By the start of World War II, the Heck brothers had backbred over 100 cattle, and each one claimed, independently, to have resurrected aurochs. That's debatable. They got the color and horn shape right, and the animals were aggressive, but their aurochs were smaller than historical ones. And again, whether they were true aurochs depends on your perspective. Regardless, they had bred something new. Heinz confined his bastards to the Munich Zoo, but not Lutz. When Germany conquered Poland in 1939, he decided to release his into the wild. As head of Reich Forestry, Hermann Göring began turning conquered Polish forests into nature reserves, 32,000 acres worth. In theory, as government parks, these reserves belonged to the German people. In practice, Goering

11:59 used them as private hunting grounds, and Lutz was right there with him. Lutz saw these reserves as the perfect place to reintroduce aurochs. He also wanted to populate them with bears, lynx, moose, bison, and other creatures driven out long ago by humans. Unfortunately, making room for animals meant evicting the people who lived in the forests, mostly Jews and Slavs. Goering's henchmen achieved this by burning down their villages.

12:30 Anyone who resisted was shot as a so-called bandit or poacher. One Nazi thug reported, I am shooting bandits dead as if on a conveyor belt. Forestry management was handmaiden to ethnic cleansing. The most important reserve was the Białowieża Forest in Poland. It was one of the last pristine forests in Europe, essentially unchanged since the last ice age. When Lutz released his Oryx there, they became the first wild bulls in Europe in three centuries. Lutz and Goering felt the Oryx needed a few years to establish themselves, but the duo could not wait to dress up in costumes and hunt them as soon as Germany won the war.

13:14 That did not happen, of course. Nazi Germany overextended itself, attacking the Soviet Union. Then the United States entered the war, and the Allies ground the Third Reich down from both sides. Not that Goering let this setback interfere with his fantasies. Indeed, he spent so much time hunting in the early 1940s that subordinates accused him of treason in neglecting his war duties.

13:39 Flutz's Oryx met a sad end. Again, most were released into the B. O. Oviesa forest, while others lived in a reserve north of Berlin. But some stayed back at the Berlin Zoo, for breeding, in case the others died. When the Allies bombed Berlin in January 1944, the zoo got hammered. Bombs obliterated cages, with flying shrapnel killing hundreds of animals, and they were the lucky ones. By that point, the Allies had developed firebombs, pellets with flammable materials inside.

14:13 They sounded like hard peas clattering onto a tin roof as they fell. The Allies could drop them anywhere, even on foggy nights, and they would start massive fires, including at the zoo. Many animals were caught behind bars when the fires broke out. Some died from inhaling toxic fumes, their lungs searing. Others were roasted alive and died screaming in their cages. Several animals from last episode that Lutz had snagged in Africa were killed. This included Matoto, the once-baby rhinoceros whose mother was shot. Now Matoto was dead, too.

14:52 The oryx at the zoo managed to bust out of their pens in panic, but Lutz Heck was waiting for them. Rather than let them rampage through the city, he shot them down in cold blood. Goering pulled something similar with the wild aurochs. When the Soviets overran the B.O. Oviesa forest, Goering ordered his bodyguards to shoot as many aurochs as possible.

15:16 He could not stand the thought of them falling into enemy hands. Some aurochs remained at the Second Reserve north of Berlin. Goering tried deploying his personal platoon of fighter planes there to protect them from Soviet troops. But a furious Hitler overruled him and summoned the Plains to protect Berlin instead. It's not clear what happened to those Oryx, but the Soviets likely shot and ate them. Now, it turns out Goering's bodyguards missed some of the Oryx in the Białowieza forest, so some survived the war. But the post-war political landscape doomed them. The Białowieza area was divided between Poland and Soviet Belarus. And while Polish foresters wanted to help save the aurochs, they had trouble rounding them up.

16:05 They could only watch helplessly as the beasts escaped into the Soviet Union. The Soviets had no interest in Nazi cows and never tried to save them. All the stragglers died. Heinzhex aurochs in the Munich Zoo fared better. Munich never got pummeled with bombs, so those aurochs emerged unscathed. And believe it or not, descendants of those cows still exist.

16:31 Farmers in multiple countries have even imported the Oryx to raise them, including to England. Hence the hysterical headlines about Nazi cows invading Britain. But maybe the tabloids were right to raise alarms. The English farmer who imported the quasi-Oryx eventually slaughtered half of them because they kept attacking farmhands.

16:52 He turned them into sausages. Now, oryx were not the only extinct animal the hex resurrected. They also revived wild horses. I've put together a bonus episode about this at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. You'll also learn why the Soviets tried executing Lutz Heck as a war criminal for his actions at the Warsaw Zoo. Actions that also saved the only wild horses still in existence today. Check it out at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. I will finish with this. You might have heard about a company called Colossal Biosciences. They are using genetic engineering to resurrect extinct animals. They claim to have revived a dire wolf, and they're currently working on reviving dodos, passenger pigeons, and woolly mammoths. So far, Colossal

17:46 has produced more hype than science. The supposed dire wolves were really just regular wolves with a handful of tweaks, but their work overall is pretty incredible, and they have a good shot at succeeding. But in researching the Heck brothers, I have been struck by close parallels between their work and Colossal Bioscience's work. Recall that the Heck brothers did not care about genetic purity with aurochs. As long as their creatures looked kind of right, behaved right, and fulfilled the same ecological role, then they believed they had functionally revived aurochs. Scientists at Colossal say the same thing about their projects. It's an uncanny echo. Now, don't get me wrong.

18:30 I'm not claiming that Colossal has some sort of crypto-Nazi agenda here. They're motivated by environmental reasons, and by the moral reasoning that the non-Nazi Heinzeck cited. righting a wrong, and reviving animals that humans killed off. And if Colossal succeeds in resurrecting dodos and mammoths, who knows, maybe aurochs will be next. We could bring these mythological beasts back to life at last, and do so this time without the taint of the Nazis. This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast.

19:11 If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out Samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event.

19:42 This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Kean. Thanks for listening.