Hitler's Jurassic Park
Poland's Bialowieza Forest is the last remaining tract of primeval woods that once covered all of Europe. With the Crazies now in charge, Poland wants to do some strip mining and logging in there. This continent-wide Urwald, or primeval forest, was destroyed by the Roman Empire and its successor states. They used up wood at an alarming rate. On the march, Roman armies built a wooden fort every night against enemies that excelled in night fighting and ambushes. In North Africa massive shipbuilding and architectural programs caused deforestation all the way from Egypt to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. This was once the habitat for the Asian elephant, a species now confined to India and Southeast Asia. Hannibal famously used them as mounted shock troops 2000 years ago. They are all long gone as deforestation changed a moderate North Africa climate into the desert we see today. In Europe, the alteration of the Urwald permanently transformed the structures and attitudes of its people. Hunter-gatherers became farmers. Two thousand years later in the conflict we call World War I, the German Army violated the last pocket of the Urwald. They hunted the European Bison (Bison bonasus) to extinction. They left only nine of them alive. The last one was killed in 1921 by poachers. Only 48 remained held by zoos. At the same time, the North America Bison (Bison bison) was down to 541 specimens.
In the 2nd phase of the war, one now called World War II; the German Army recaptured the place once again. Herman Goering, who was Minister of Forestry (Reichsforstamt) went about restoring the European Bison that had gone extinct in the wild.
Through captive breeding they were reintroduced and still thrive. The standard story is that Goering wanted a big hunting preserve for himself and his pals. What he really wanted was to re-create of the habitat that, according to Nordic legend, supported der Übermensch: the primeval Aryan.
The Aryan Creation Myth
Interestingly there are some similarities between the Nordic and Judeo-Christian creation legends. In both, there was a time in the remote past when people had super-human powers and were immortal. Adam and Eve, the legendary proto-humans; had all the powers of God except one physical/material limitation. They existed in a perfect world, warm and lush, one so friendly they didn't need clothes. And why would they? They were invulnerable. The proto-Aryan Higher Human (der Übermensch) lived in a harsh northern mountainous environment that hardened him through the struggle for existence. Then there was a fall from grace for both. For Adam and his silly wife, the descent was an unwillingness to obey God's law and resist the moral and spiritual temptations of materialism. Punished with mortality, their descendants could only find redemption through personal righteousness and the advent of the Messiah: The Redeemer. For der Übermensch, the fall was external through the intermixing of impure blood from der Untermensch; beings that looked human but weren't. Their true abode was deep within the darkness of the underground and not in the shining light of the Aryan race's mystical home among the cold white mountains of the north. For Aryan ideologues, deliverance was not on an individual level but could only come when the physical manifestation of the Aryan race, (der Volkskörper) was purified. Der Volkskörper was proposed as an actual living organism, the sum total of all its individual human parts. Its transformation would be species wide: when die Untermenschen were driven from Europe the Aryan race would be mystically, magically and instantly transformed as a single conscious sentient being. This is why Nazi Germany's political decisions often don't make sense to the rational mind.
Heck cattle & horses
Lutz Heck was the curator of the Berlin Zoo that once held native Africans in a caged exhibit. Herman Goering, who was Germany's Master of the Hunt (Huntmeister), wanted Heck to restore the Auroch (Bos primigenius); also called the Urus that once thrived in the entire Urwald out to Asia and North Africa.
It was a wild oxen species somewhat similar to the Texas Longhorn but bigger. Hunted to extinction by loss of habitat, the last recorded Urus died in 1627. Using Longhorns and other wild species, Heck recreated a creature that resembled the Urus called Heck cattle.
He also fashioned a breed of horses that looked a lot like the extinct Tarpan (Equus ferus ferus) that once roamed the Urwald. The last Tarpan died in Russian captivity in 1909.
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