their large, crooked noses.’22 The tragic culmination of Nazi race policies was the assistance given by the RFA in East Prussia to supply timber for the construction of the Stutthof concentration camp in 1941.23
Long before the Nazis came to power, the hunt had departed from the natural science classifications of the renaissance to the rigid social Darwinism of the Nineteenth Century.24 In post-colonial Weimar Germany, the hunt spun fantastical and exotic accounts of the ancient and extinct game. Under the Nazis, the recreation of the Germanic game became part of a racialised zoology, game and habitat research. The science of hunting began to follow many research trajectories. In 1936 Göring founded an institute of hunting science in Hannover, which later transferred to the University of Göttingen. The Heck brothers, Lutz (1892–1983), and Heinz (1894–1982) had also been experimenting with their breeding back programme to restore the long-extinct Aurochs. Their work involved the mass observation of European cattle breeds to isolate what they believed was the special characteristics of the Aurochs. The first breeding experiments led to a breakthrough in 1934 when they sired a bull later called ‘Heck cattle’. Lutz declared the research funded by Göring was the greatest value to science and a ‘the symbol of German power and courage.’ From 1938 Rominten’s game population was re-engineered. Wild boar and five Heck Cattle were released under Göring’s orders. Eventually, five lynxes were released, the precise number recommended for game management purposes.25 Leopold described the prevailing conditions of the hunt in Germany, ‘Every acre of forestland in Germany, whether state or privately owned, is cropped for game.’26 He blamed this on the German obsession for hunting deer, which outweighed the damage herds caused the habitat. He believed there would be long-term consequences, especially among game birds. He was deeply critical of foresters who ‘sprinkled’ hardwood trees among pine forests to achieve mixed forests but were unable to create a balance in-game management.27 Leopold and other foreign either overlooked or ignored the prevailing Nazi racialism—both the game stock and the people were being Aryanised.
The long-term implications of decisions to the national ecology were a constant theme of discussion. Leopold learned of the German appreciation for predators in preventing the degeneration of game, and the status of the wolf as the noble animal of the wilderness. Decades later he claimed this idea for himself.28 However, not all predators and aggressive game were appreciated. A postwar rumour circulated that Göring had a morbid fear of snakes. His senior hunter disclosed this secret to explain Göring’s absence from hunting in wild forests and his preference for high stands. During a visit to Darss, a nature protection park, Göring was shocked and petrified to learn it was the habitat for poisonous Adders. An unnamed forester informed Göring that hedgehogs killed snakes. He immediately called Lutz Heck and ordered 300 hedgehogs brought to Darss. He was persuaded there was no veracity in the story that hedgehogs killed snakes. Göring immediately departed from Darss never to return.29 If Göring had a morbid fear of snakes, it represents an important insight about his fears, but also points to his enthusiasm for eradicating all Jews as vermin.
In 1938 Lutz Heck was promoted chief of nature protection and natural monuments within the RFA.30 He set about a building programme of national parks and game reservations. Heck wanted the people to observe native animals and the habitat to comprehend how the Nazi culture social Darwinism functioned to the greater benefit of German society. Mass public education through micro-models of game habitats was conceived as a means to concentrate the people’s ‘organic gaze’ on the biological values of everyday existence. These early forms of bio-zone were predicted to elevate social Darwinism as the normal natural order of life. Heck believed he was fulfilling the national will because Hitler’s genius was his understanding of nature and its centrality to nation-building. The national parks were put to service in the Nazis’ policies for national recovery.31 The ambition to restore the Germanic game was the mirror of the Aryan being. The Aryan man and Germanic game co-existed in the timeless myth of antiquity. Heck’s ambitions were not limited to Göring, he accepted honorary membership to the SS (June 1933) unusually before joining the Nazi Party (May 1937). He served Himmler’s SS-Ahnenerbe (society for Ancestral heritage) founded in 1935. This SS institute advanced research into racial theories and championed Aryan primacy. Among this group of Nazis, the plans for Białowieźa were conceived.
The ideological lynchpin necessary to complete Göring’s corporatism and institutionalisation was some form of honour code. In 1936 Scherping, under Göring’s orders, instructed Walter Frevert (1897–1962) a state forester and hunter, to write a book about Nazi-German hunting customs. The Jagdliches Brauchtum (1936) drowned the reader in völkisch claptrap but proved to be an instant political and public success. Scherping’s foreword to the book was opaque, ‘The German people are grateful to the Führer for restoring and awakening old and beautiful customs.’ The success of the book led to Frevert’s elevation to Göring’s inner circle and later as a Leibjäger, a personal hunter and confidante, an important position in the hunt hierarchy. Frevert was born in Hamm (Westphalia), his father was a dentist; but, after a distinguished war record as a young volunteer, and a period in the Freikorps, he chose to become a state forester specialising in the hunt. His first forestry rank was Forstassessor and was promoted in 1928 to Forstmeister while serving in Battenberg. Frevert had joined veterans’ associations but in May 1933 became a member of the Nazi Party, and in the summer joined the SA. Frevert’s Nazi membership initially looked like career opportunism, but his subsequent behaviour singled him out as a racist zealot.32
The Jagdliches Brauchtum was an orchestrated departure from the traditions set down by Ferdinand von Raesfeld in 1914. Frevert dispensed with historical accuracy, ignored quips about pompous hunters, and revelled in any applicable German sources. He adapted a poem by Ernest de Bunsen (1819–1903) to express his sentimentality of the hunt: ‘The origin of the hunter is in the long past close to paradise. There were no trade people, no soldiers, no doctors, no priests, no lawyers but there were already hunters.’33 However, a serious shortfall in sources about German hunt customs and even fewer German methods led him to invent material for his book. The final version of Jagdliches Brauchtum was a Nazi fantasy composed of made-up stories, plagiarised ideas and foreign rituals. He confessed his reasons were for a good cause, but nobody cared because the book met the approval of all things völkisch prevailing at the time.34
The climax of the inventions was the Bruchzeichen, a centrepiece of ritual and a ceremony of ‘breaking’ the dead game. Once the animal was killed and retrieved, the Bruch was started. The ceremony opened with a tune from a hunting horn to the dead animal. The hunter then placed a sprig in the animal’s mouth representing its Letzter Bissen (the last meal). The sprigs were taken from oak, spruce, fir, alder or pine trees. The hunter then placed a sprig over the beast’s heart and another covering its nether regions. The hunter’s companion then dipped a sprig of leaves into the animal’s blood, drew his dagger with his left hand, placed the sprig on the blade, and presented it to the hunter. The hunter then took the sprig with his left hand, uttered the words Weidmann’s Dank (the hunter’s thanks), and fixed the blood-soaked sprig to the left side of his hat. If a bloodhound had participated in the kill, it also received a twig placed in its collar. Once the first part of the ceremony was completed the hunter opened up the carcass and removed the entrails.
