The Heck Brothers, 1920-1945: Legend Becomes Reality

Ryon Allen, Western Carolina University

 

 A beast with the stature of the aurochs traverses times and makes even the mightiest men humbled. While traveling through Germania for the glory of Rome in 53 BCE, Gaius Julius Caesar became personally equated with an aurochs. Caesar, a man who solely expanded the Roman Republic, became fearful or humbled by the aurochs in an encounter with one. Caesar wrote that, “in appearance, color, and shape they are as bulls,” and later he explained their size was that of an elephant.1 The aurochs were held in high regard by Germans of this time based on the aurochs’ ability to “spare neither man or beast once sighted”.2 The aurochs’ ferocity paired with its size made this a creature of high stature and prestige among Germans. To slay one of these beasts, as Caesar wrote became a testimony to others of your ability and renown as a man. The horns were a trophy that could be used to show others of the feat of killing an aurochs.

Caesar explained: “Germans collect horns zealously to make drinking cups and encase the edges with silver,” to further show off ferocity as warriors.3 Caesar concluded through interactions with Germans and his own personal experiences that the aurochs was a beast that, “cannot be tamed or accustomed to human beings”.4

During the time of the Holy Roman Empire, Caesar’s statement continued to carry the same truth as before. Charlemagne, or Charles the Great encountered an aurochs with the same temperament described by Caesar in 53 BCE. Charlemagne, similar to Julius Caesar, was a man who sought prestige to prove himself which he did frequently through hunting. During one of Charlemagne’s hunting trips he and his Persian guests encountered an aurochs as described in the Two Lives of Charlemagne. The size and stature of the aurochs caused his guests to flee in fear however not Charles.5 To prove his courage and skill, Charles attempted to cut the aurochs head off with his sword but missed. The actions of the aurochs described by Notker the Stammerer, who traveled with Charlemagne and recorded his life, exemplify those told to Julius Caesar.

Notker wrote: “the monstrous beast ripped the boot and leggings of the emperor…slightly wounding his calf with the tip of its horn, making him limp slightly”.6 The attack on Charlemagne by the aurochs gained the aurochs’ prestige, proving that men should not tamper with the beasts. Encounters with Julius Caesar and Charlemagne gave the aurochs credibility. Men with such prestige and honor as Julius Caesar and Charlemagne elevate the story and presence of the aurochs throughout history.

The image and ferocity of the aurochs that once captivated Caesar and Charlemagne would not reemerge till 1938, hundreds of years since aurochs walked through Europe. Hermann Göring saw a live aurochs in 1938 through scientific works he supervised.7 The aurochs of 1938 presented Göring with a start to reviving a mythological German landscape described in old Germanic literature. A heroic poem called Nibelungenlied told the tale of heroic Teutonic knights hunting game like aurochs in primordial forests.8 Göring sought to have the aurochs to be his personal big game for hunting in order to become one of the Teutonic knights himself. The newly introduced aurochs provided Göring with support to his policies for conservation under the Nazi regime. In order to restore Germany back to its glory and German fauna was needed. The reintroduction of the aurochs in 1938 became the stepping stone for his politics to restore the heroic ecology of Germany.

The story of the aurochs is one of the attempted reintroduction of an extinct species. Two brothers, Lutz and Heinz Heck sought out this goal of reintroducing the world to an extinct species of cattle called the aurochs. Each brother had his own personal motivation to advance his own research by aligning with Nazis to attempt a feat such as rewilding the aurochs into Europe’s landscape. Is it to rewild Europe with extinct beasts in order to change cultural ideology on nature? Is it for the sole purpose of Nazi ideology and to be used as a stepping stone for greater purity in Germany and all of Europe? Lutz and Heinz Heck each found different reasoning behind the de-extinction of aurochs and saw their uses for future projects differently. Aurochs imagery and literature became fuel for Nazi environmental politics surrounding Göring and Lutz Heck. Göring, along with the support of the Nazi party saw the revival of aurochs as a key stepping stone in reviving German fauna and habitat to its German purity. The Heck brothers’ reintroduction of the aurochs was not possible without Göring and the Nazi parties’ environmental policies.

To understand the Nazi regimes’ intentions for environmental politics behind the rewilding of aurochs, one must understand what an aurochs is. The aurochs is a wild, herbivore cattle which once ranged all across Europe, Eurasia, India and parts of North Africa.9 The aurochs’ size rivaled all other herbivores on the European continent. Its diet consisted mainly of grazing grasses but with occasional forbs and shrubby browse which were essential during winter and in colder climates.10 In order to find food such as forbs and shrubby browse, aurochs mainly inhabited woodland areas and valleys. Adaptive dieting and migration became factors in the aurochs survival during the Ice Age.11 The aurochs’ long span in the history of Europe became one of the many reasons why Göring and the Heck brothers grew interested in the primeval beast.

To fit the Nazi ideology of fauna for Germany and Europe envisioned by Göring, the aurochs had to be a beast with incredible physical attributes. The size and weight of the aurochs alone were of tremendous proportions and captivated men like Julius Caesar in 53 BCE. An adult aurochs male or female could reach weights of one and a half to two tons and stand close to six feet tall at the withers, the area just above the shoulders.12 At such a large size this would have been used as a defensive measure against other animals who attacked it. With no true predator many of the attacks aurochs received were from other aurochs during rutting season, a time when males would collide with each other to show dominance and to win mates.13 However, the combination of these two factors, size and weight, made the aurochs monstrous animals. Similar to many cattle during the Nazi regime, aurochs were equipped with horns. Unlike modern domesticated cattle of the 1930’s, the size of an aurochs horn measured almost three feet in length and curved to a point similar to a spear.14 This feature provided a deadly offensive characteristic if threatened by other animals or humans. These physical attributes enticed men such as Göring and Lutz Heck and further drove Nazi interest into researching these beasts.

While the physical attributes of the aurochs made it a monstrous beast, its behavioral aspects made it the ideal creature for Göring and Lutz Heck. The goal of Lutz and Heinz Heck was not to reproduce a creature such as the aurochs without having similar if not the same behavior as those depicted in earlier text. Without these behavioral traits then their products would be nothing more than enlarged cattle. Lutz sought to preserve the “fire, agility and bravery” of the aurochs.15 It is the aggression depicted by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, the raw power which Lutz Heck intended to captivate. To fully coordinate his research with Göring’s visions, Heck strove to reproduce the “ferocious character” of the aurochs to fully symbolize the German fauna which Nazi environmental policies intended to recreate.16

The aurochs which fascinated the Heck brothers for research and in ideology, once symbolized far greater things than that of German purity. The size and ferocity of these animals elevated them to the highest of honor amongst warriors. Caesar and Notker the Stammerer reveal this in their interactions with Germanic tribes and first hand experiences. Aurochs symbolized the pinnacle of big game for hunters, which Göring and Lutz both fantasized about.17 Due to the high stature they brought to hunters, trophies became symbolic of a hunters’ power for killing the beast. Gifts comprising meats and leather from the animal inherently became prized possessions of wealth and honor. The trophies hunters would collect from killing an aurochs were the horns. The horns became a testimony to others of a hunters prestige, as interpreted by Caesar when observing Germanic tribes during 53 BCE.18 Through the symbolization of aurochs by hunters and heroic poems of Teutonic knights, the prestige of these beasts resonated with men like Göring and Heck.

The aurochs produced by Lutz and Heinz Heck in 1938 were not those seen by Caesar and Charlemagne hundreds of years earlier. The primeval aurochs of Europe came to extinction in Poland in the year 1627.19 The extinction of these animals came about in two stages and each was associated with an age of growing agricultural advances. Firstly, as populations of Europe continuously expanded, agriculture developed unevenly with growing popularity in farming and domestication of animals, specifically cattle.20 The expansion of agriculture created a need for farmers to possess higher quantities of land. As farmers began expanding further into valleys and deforesting woodland areas, the habitats aurochs relied on were vanishing. Competition for living space with farmers quickly caused a declension of the aurochs population, as resources of food and shelter were diminishing.21 The second reason for the aurochs’ extinction corresponded to the rise of domesticated livestock, specifically dairy cattle. As farmers began to keep domesticated cattle, those who were in close proximity to aurochs were fearful of the beasts.

This fear was not rooted in aggression from aurochs towards livestock but from possible mating with domesticated cattle. Once aurochs populations began to diminish the need and urge to mate was still present. Male aurochs turned to domesticated females for reproduction and created fear among farmers on the possibility of losing their female cattle during pregnancy or birth if the offspring were too large.22 In response to their fears farmers sought to hunt and kill the beasts themselves. These hunting of aurochs were not for the same prestige and honor as once practiced; instead the goal was to kill as many as possible. Evidence from bones of aurochs have indicated that they were bogged in mud and killed with arrows or axes. The combination of these two factors ultimately brought the aurochs to extinction. It was not until Lutz and Heinz Heck aligned their research with Nazi environmental politics that the possibility of their revival occurred.

Göring’s environmental policies for the Nazi party revolved around the focus of purifying the German landscape. His ideas of purification mirrored similar ideology of the parties’ plans to purify the nation of Jewish ethnicity. The ideal German landscape Göring’s policies aimed to provide were the same as the mythological landscape described in the heroic German poem, Nibelungenlied.23 This mythological landscape is inhabited by German fauna, respected and hunted like those of the Teutonic knights. Göring’s policies that are influenced by Germanic mythology aim to purify and preserve natural land in the name of the Nazi party. Much of the land used in his environmental policies came from eastern parts of the Nazi’s regime such as Prussia and Poland. This land once purified was turned into hunting reservations for the usage of Göring himself and other SS officers. The Rominten Heide hunting reserve in East Prussia is one of the examples of hunting reserves Göring fondly cared for in policies.24 Hunting on the reserves not only satisfied Göring’s obsession with the sport but gave him a place to begin repopulating German fauna.

Nazi environmental policies assumed that the repopulation of German fauna could only begin once the land had been purified from non-Aryan influences. To achieve the purity of the landscape which Göring sought, the influences of Slavic and Jewish individuals had to be eradicated. This was intended for the landscapes of Poland which Germany felt was rightfully theirs. Shortly after the invasion of Poland, Göring created new policies which were intended to begin the purification of the land by legalizing bandit hunting.25 These bandit hunts made any resistance or Jews, “legally killable like animals”.26 These new laws were deemed necessary by Göring and the Nazi party in order to begin the process of having a pure German landscape.

Without purifying the land to the ideals set forth by the poem Nibelungenlied, the revival of the aurochs would be pointless. The landscape that Göring intended to hunt the aurochs on needed to be that of the poem, one exterminated of non-Aryan influence. The legal action taken by the Nazi party to legalize bandit hunting became the first step for Göring to reintroducing German fauna to the landscape. In order to protect the reintroduced fauna, Göring thought it necessary to enact new animal protection laws to see that all German fauna could no longer be influenced by non- Aryans.

In order to successfully repopulate hunting reserves and all of Germany with German fauna such as aurochs, Göring believed it necessary to regulate hunting. Strict hunting laws were enacted through Göring in 1934 which shifted the practice of hunting to elites, specifically those in Berlin.27 No longer were men able to hunt during the appropriate season without authorization from elites in Berlin. Those who were given permission to hunt had to follow strict rules and guidelines that instructed them what they could hunt and where they could hunt. Göring’s creation of new hunting laws drastically shifted German understanding of maintenance for an ecosystem from a natural occurrence now to one that must be done through human management. Nazi conservation of fauna did not stop at the regulations of hunting and entered the personal lives of German individuals. As early as 1934, animal protection laws were put into place which would arguably become the strictest in the world.28 The laws put in place were not only for animal protection but also became backing for Göring to protect animals in many of the hunting reserves in Germany. The major animal protection laws that were enacted outlawed hunting with traps and buckshot, two things which Göring felt strongly ruined the art of hunting as practiced by the Teutonic knights. The other being outlawing of vivisections which is the practice of live operations upon animals for research purposes not medical ones.29 The animal protection laws of the Nazi regime shifted environmental politics to favor Göring. All of the laws created by Göring intended to change German thought on environment and became necessary in order to complete a pure German landscape.

Lutz Heck’s research to reintroduce aurochs into a pure German landscape heavily benefited from the help of Göring and the Nazi party but also predated the Nazis arrival to power in Germany. Heck’s research began in the late 1920s with the interest of reintroducing animals used for hunting by the ‘forefathers’.30 These are the Teutonic knights discussed in Nibelungenlied, and Heck strived to recreate the same beasts they themselves hunted, the aurochs. While Heck strived to recreate aurochs, his main focus was recreating the behavioral aspects similar to those in the heroic poem. He wanted to recreate aurochs “with its fire fully intact”, the same fire that hunters feared and took pride in and boasted about killing in an aurochs.31 The process to bring back aurochs from extinction would become the first of its kind and alter the world’s understanding of biology. Lutz Heck and his brother Heinz created the process of “back breeding” in a time before the discovery and understanding of DNA.32 This was the process of using cattle to breed backwards to the ancestral traits of the cattle to arrive at the final product of an aurochs. Heck designed his research to achieve an aurochs that would not only meet his standards of pure German fauna but eventually Göring’s as well. 

Lutz Heck’s project on the de-extinction of aurochs raised many questions in the terms of back breeding. The key to this process was finding different breeds of cattle that processed similar traits to that of an aurochs and to hopefully blend them all together. This in turn meant that not one single cattle had all the traits needed to successfully reintroduce the aurochs. Heck selected specific cattle that processed traits like horn size, aggression, agility, hair length, color, etc. Once all of these traits had been bred together the end goal was hopefully an aurochs. While mixing all of these cattle were important in creating an aurochs, Heck focused much of his breeding on traits like aggression, agility, and horn size. These three factors were intended to successfully produce the German fauna that Heck admired, hunters feared and boasted over.

To achieve the aggressive, primeval beast Heck wanted, the first cattle he focused on was the French fighting bull. The French fighting bulls Heck used to breed back the aurochs were located in the Southern regions of France, areas where bull fighting was influenced by similar practices done in Spain.33 Heck found French fighting bulls necessary because of their ability to move around the fighting ring. These bulls possessed the ability to gain speed at a high rate and were able to cut and move quickly. This agility in the French fighting bulls stemmed from their “blood lust”.34 The blood lust of the French fighting bulls was a key component of the aurochs. Without this behavioral trait, the aurochs Lutz was creating would have been considered oversized cattle. Lutz paired the blood lust from French fighting bulls with Spanish fighting bulls. Spanish fighting bulls posed different fighting spirits than those of French fighting bulls.

The Spanish fighting bulls that Heck decided to use in the breeding process of the aurochs were bred to fight and be aggressive. This created a fighting spirit in these bulls, one which Heck wanted and believed to exist in the aurochs. These were just two of the different cattle Heck used in his attempt at back breeding aurochs. Corsican cattle were used by Heck to get the hair and color of the aurochs.35 This combination of European cattle was all used to back breed the aurochs. Though Lutz Heck’s research began in the late 1920’s, it became clear quickly that in order to make aurochs a reality, outside support would be needed.

The Nazi regime came into power in 1933 and when this happened, Lutz and his research gained notable attention from Hermann Göring. While this attention could have been avoided, Lutz understood the pivotal role the Nazi regime played in German society and understood that in order to continue his research to its highest potential, he would need the support of the regime but more specifically Göring himself. Lutz Heck was able to get support from Göring due to his similar interest in mythic tale of Teutonic knights and hunting.36 Their relationship was mutually beneficial, each knew that they needed each other to legitimize their own agendas. Göring needed Heck to acquire his pure German fauna for hunting but to also add credibility to his environmental policies. Lutz Heck need Göring to help fund and legitimize his research in back breeding aurochs.37 To solidify his commitment to Göring and the Nazi regime, Lutz Heck joined the SS in May 1937.38 His research gained funding and legitimacy from Göring. To ensure Göring’s hunting reservations were stocked with animals, Heck was named head of the Nature Protection Authority within Göring’s Forest Service.39 This position allowed Göring to use Heck to keep his hunting reservations stocked with exotic animals for his hunting purposes. This also gave Heck the ability to keep animals like the cattle he was breeding in safe, open reservations without worrying about them being killed before his research could be concluded.

Lutz Heck used his position and relationship with the Nazi regime to propel his research in reintroducing aurochs to the German landscape and in 1938 he was successful.

Lutz Heck conducted his research in reintroducing aurochs into the German landscape for almost a decade and in 1938, the first aurochs of his research were released. Heck released seven aurochs into the Rominten Heide hunting reservation with Göring present, as to bear witness to the history he was making.40 The aurochs produced by Lutz Heck resembled exact replicas of what aurochs looked like. The new aurochs produced by Heck were slightly smaller than fossils of aurochs dating back 17,000 years but the phenotype of Heck’s new aurochs exactly resembled the aurochs described by Caesar and Charlemagne.41 Heck’s aurochs possessed all the traits that he believed resembled the primeval aurochs. These new aurochs were a positive step for both Göring and Heck towards repopulating the German landscape with pure German fauna. Though Heck succeeded in producing aurochs for the German landscape, this still did not stop his inclination in creating a German landscape Teutonic knights would inhabit.

The successful reintroduction of aurochs into the wild, provided Lutz Heck with the ability to continue expanding on his quest to reproduce pure German fauna of the era of the Teutonic knights. This success created new projects in back breeding horses to recreate the tarpan horse. Heck wanted to have a “hardy fighting horse” for men fighting on the Eastern front similar to those used by Teutonic knights.42 The intentions for these horses were practical as compared to that of the aurochs. Heck wanted these horses to be used not only to win the war on the Eastern front but to also be used after the war. He hoped that these horses would be used to develop the new German landscape, to work on German farms, and to be used by the Nazi regime in policing its borders.43 The research done by Lutz Heck with both the tarpan horses and the aurochs contributed to the rise of a pure German landscape. Lutz Heck’s research was not the only research done in back breeding aurochs, since his younger brother Heinz Heck also strove for the reintroduction of aurochs.

Heinz Heck took very different approaches to his research in the de-extinction of aurochs in Europe. Heck became interested in aurochs after studying and observing the extinction of different species of animals first hand. Heck observed quaggas in Africa and witnessed how the interbreeding of different subspecies altered the stripe patterns on these animals.44 Quaggas were being forced onto nature preserves due to expansion of humans which caused many different subspecies to lose their unique stripe patterns and breed new offspring that had a combination of their patterns, which led to zebras.45 These observations led Heck to see the “misdeeds” of mankind in letting animals go extinct and wanted to change this outcome or reverse it.46 Heinz Heck did not seek to restore the aurochs for the greater good of Germany and to reintroduce them for the purity of German fauna. Instead Heck’s own personal curiosity and his desire to educate society on nature and the fauna within it new and old, led him to pursue the task of back breeding aurochs.47 Heinz Heck bred these aurochs without the support of the Nazi party.

Heinz Heck sought to reintroduce aurochs to Europe by the same methods as his brother, through back breeding. Heck began his program of back breeding at the Munich zoo in 1921, a few years before Lutz Heck.48 Heinz Heck took a very different approach to back breeding as compared to his brother. Heck was not concerned with all of the behavioral traits of the aurochs like his brother but instead wanted his aurochs to resemble visually the primeval aurochs as much as possible. These distinct differences were determined in the cattle used by Heck. Heinz Heck used a mixture of Hungarian, Corsicans, and Scottish Highland cattle. He believed that all of these cattle possessed different phenotypes of an aurochs and needed to breed them together in order to have a final product that resembled a primeval aurochs, similar to the processes with the quaggas. The Hungarian cattle Heck used in his research possessed the closest height of modern European cattle to an aurochs. The Scottish Highland cattle had the horn size and curvature which resembled that of the aurochs. The Corsican cattle were used for their coloring and hair length. Heck combined all of these different traits in the hopes that their offspring would have a combination of them all. Heinz Heck believed that “what is hidden may be brought to light again” and hoped that it could be done in his creation of an aurochs.49 After years of breeding cattle to bring forth the hidden traits of the aurochs, in 1932, Heinz Heck finally achieved his goal.

The aurochs that Heinz Heck created in 1932 were replicas of the primeval one Heck had studied through painting and fossils. The aurochs that he bred possessed all the traits of the aurochs which he sought to bring out from the cattle he was breeding. Through Heck’s scientific curiosity, he was able to learn new information about aurochs that had not been documented in paintings or literature. When aurochs are calves they are brown and do not fully develop their color of black until they are sexually mature.50 Heck also able learned that through breeding all these different immune systems together, diseases that frequently affected cattle like foot and mouth and rheumatic fever did not affect the aurochs. Though Heck had achieved his goal of reproducing an aurochs, his research of the beast did not stop there and he felt the need to share his research. In order to share his research, Heck understood that he would have to align himself with the Nazi party and so he applied for a professorship with the Nazi party. This would allow Heck to publish his findings publicly and give lectures about aurochs and the process of back breeding he had used.51 By subjugating himself to the Nazi party for the professorship, Heinz’s character and past were put into question. Through questioning the party found many actions that Heck had taken that caused his character to be questioned. It was found that Heck was married to a Jewish woman during World War I and that before aligning himself with the Nazi party, he was a member of the Communist party. This led to his imprisonment at Dachau concentration camp in 1933, during which Lutz Heck was gaining patronage from Göring. Heinz Heck was not released from Dachau until 1937 where he continued his research on aurochs. Heinz Heck did not agree with the purification of German fauna or the violent expansion of the German landscape like his brother Lutz. He instead sought a “cosmopolitan” wildlife for Europe, one from which people could learn to see the “misdeed” in the extinction in different species of animals.52 The environmental purposes of aurochs for Heinz Heck were greatly different than those of Lutz Heck and Göring.

The Heck brothers saw the aurochs as key figures in differing environmental goals. Heinz Heck’s environmental goals were the tamer of the two. He sought to educate people who traveled to the Munich zoo on a diverse wildlife. The aurochs became the first step in expanding his idea of wildlife to extinct animals and bringing them back to life. Heinz Heck saw that the best way to change environmental policies was to educate people on the landscape and wildlife which many of these policies revolved around. By having aurochs at the Munich zoo, Heinz would be able to bring the natural history of Germany and the aurochs up close to people.53 Heinz also saw that aurochs had a practical purpose within European society. He believed that the aurochs would be able to regenerate domestic breeds of cattle across Europe and help with an increase in breeding productivity in domesticated cattle. The aurochs created by Heck would be able to pass on their immunity to disease like foot and mouth and rheumatic fever. These new aurochs would not only be able to help cattle breeds across Europe but also change the landscape, although far different than how Lutz Heck imagined they would. Heinz Heck saw that the aurochs could be used to graze and fill abandoned farmland and pastures across Europe, and he saw that the aurochs could be beneficial to all of Europe and not just Germany. 54

In contrast environmental purpose for the aurochs was to ultimately create a pure landscape for Germany by the standards of Lutz Heck. Lutz Heck saw the aurochs as a key for the radical expansion and purification of German landscape under Göring. Lutz Heck and Göring wanted a German landscape that would resemble that of the Teutonic knights and the aurochs made that possible. To Heck, aurochs did not fulfill a larger goal than that; their purpose was to begin the process of a pure German fauna for hunting on the purified German landscape that Göring provided. The aurochs were created and used as animals for hunting, hunting which Göring wanted to replicate based on the Teutonic knights. This meant replicating the world of the Teutonic knights through clothing, weapons like spears, the animals, and the landscape. Lutz Heck was questioned as to what purpose the aurochs served and he would respond with, “we undertook the back breeding of the aurochs out of the sheer pleasure of conducting such a novel experiment in heredity”.55 Though the aurochs did not serve any enriching environmental purposes to Lutz Heck, they did raise larger questions about breeding within the Nazi regime. Once Lutz Heck had successfully reproduced an aurochs many Nazi officials began to ask a larger question: if cattle can be bred to an ideal standard, could the same effect work on humans? The experiments conducted by Heck began to spark questions regarding eugenics within the Nazi regime. Many Nazi officials questioned that if animals could be bred to an “Aryan standard” then why not people as well? Eugenics programs created by Hitler were often mirrored by hunters, like Lutz and Göring, in the population control of wildlife and landscape.56 While eugenics was being practiced before the reintroduction of aurochs, once they were successfully produced many Nazi officials gained an “overenthusiastic eugenicist attitude” towards creating an Aryan race.57 Though Lutz Heck did not intend for it to happen, the aurochs became closely
linked with eugenics and “lit the flames for genocide”.58

As the war came to an end and the Nazis were being pushed back towards Berlin, the symbolic sanctity of the aurochs came to an end as well. The aurochs that Lutz Heck had used to populate many of Göring’s hunting reservations in Prussia and Western Poland were now being pushed closer to the war and the pending defeat of Germany and the Nazi party. Though defeat was on the horizon, Heck and Göring still held the aurochs in high regard as pure German fauna. Though with the Soviet army pushing towards Berlin, fear arose as to what would come of the aurochs. Göring and other German officers shot any aurochs they could find so that their symbol of pure German fauna would not become war trophies for the Soviets.59 As the war came to an end with the bombing of Berlin, the last of Lutz’s aurochs in the Berlin Zoo were killed. At the end of the war, none of the aurochs Lutz Heck produced were alive.60 Though all of Lutz’s aurochs were killed in the aftermath of the war, the outcome for Heinz’s aurochs was the opposite. The aurochs that Heinz Heck had at the Munich zoo were still alive and grew to approximately forty by the end of the war.61 At the end of the war public opinion of the aurochs was growing both positively and negatively as well. The new aurochs created by the Heck brothers were branded by public opinion with the image of the Nazis. While the aurochs of Munich were not directly associated with the Nazi party, this still affected public opinion around them and the Heck brothers. This negative public opinion also caused the name of these new aurochs to be changed. The reintroduced aurochs created by Heinz were renamed the Heck cattle.62 The “Heck cattle” remained at the Munich zoo until 1983 until they were relocated to a wildlife preserve. A group of thirty two Heck cattle were moved to a Dutch wildlife preserve in order to give the new cattle a safe space to graze and also to deter the brand created by Lutz Heck and Göring.

The reintroduction of the aurochs by the Heck brothers was the first of its kind in the rewilding of extinct animals. Heinz and Lutz Heck each saw different purposes for the aurochs in European and German society. Though each are fundamentally different from one another, the research done by both Heinz and Lutz Heck benefited from the environmental policies implemented by the Nazi regime. The creation of hunting reservations, animal protection laws, and hunting laws allowed for the Heck brothers to expand their research beyond an idea. These policies implemented by Göring gave Heinz and Lutz Heck the ability to research a “misdeed” by mankind and a primeval beast that advanced human understanding of genetics. The environmental policies that the Nazi party created allowed for the Heck brothers to take the legend of an aurochs and make it a reality in World War II era Europe.

 

1 Julius Caesar, Caesar: The Gallic War, trans. H.J. Edwards (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 353.

2 Caesar, 353.

3 Caesar, 355. See Appendix, Figure 1.

4 Caesar, 353.

5 Einhard and Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. David Ganz (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 93.

6 Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, 93.

7 Gary Bruce, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford, England, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 212.

8 Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca, Hitler’s Geographies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 140-141.

9 Brian Fagan, The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 71. See Appendix, Figure 2.

10 Terry O’Connor and Naomi Sykes, Extinctions and Invasions: A Social History of British Fauna

(Oxford: Windgather Press, 2010), 27.

11 Fagan, 71.

12 Douglas Campbell and Patrick Whittle, Resurrecting Extinct Species: Ethics and Authenticity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 30.

13 Heinz Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” Oryx 1, no. 3 (1951): 119.

14 Campbell and Whittle, 30.

15  Campbell and Whittle, 31.

16  Giaccaria and Minca, 140.

17 Lutz Heck, Animals, My Adventure, trans. E.W. Dickes (London: Methuen & Co., 1954), 139.

18 Caesar, 353.

19 Campbell and Whittle, 30.

20 Laurie Winn Carlson, Cattle: An Informal Social History (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 171.

21 O’Connor and Sykes, 35.

22 O’Connor and Sykes, 32-33.

23 Giaccaria and Minca, 139.

24 Giaccaria and Minca, 141. See Appendix, Figure 3.

25 Giaccaria and Minca, 149.

26  Giaccaria and Minca, 149.

27  Giaccaria and Minca, 143.

28 Bruce, 194.

29 Bruce, 195.

30 Heck, Animals, My Adventure, 139.

31  Campbell and Whittle, 35.

32  Campbell and Whittle, 30.

33  Heck, Animals, My Adventure, 142.

34  Heck, Animals, My Adventure, 142.

35 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 120.

36  Giaccaria and Minca, 140.

37  Giaccaria and Minca, 154.

38  Giaccaria and Minca, 139.

39 Kevin Prenger, War Zone Zoo: The Berlin Zoo and World War 2, trans. Arnold van Wulfften Palthe (Berlin, Germany: Contumax GmbH & Co., 2018), 31.

40 Giaccaria and Minca, 141.

41 Bruce Bower, “Cattle’s Call of the Wild,” Science News, May 13, 2006. See Appendix, Figure 4.

42 Giaccaria and Minca, 149. See Appendix, Figure 5.

43 Giaccaria and Minca, 149.

44 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 118.

45 See Appendix, Figure 6.

46 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 118.

47  Giaccaria and Minca, 151.

48  Giaccaria and Minca, 140.

49 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 119-120.

50 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 121-122. See Appendix, Figure 7.

51  Giaccaria and Minca, 150.

52  Giaccaria and Minca, 151.

53 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 122.

54 Campbell and Whittle, 32-33.

55 Bruce, 218.

56 Giaccaria and Minca, 146.

57  Carlson, 184.

58  Carlson, 194.

59 Bruce, 217.

60 Campbell and Whittle, 32.

61 Heck, “The Breeding-Back of the Aurochs,” 122.

62 Campbell and Whittle, 32.