Steak - Mark Schatzker [33]
When it came to cattle, the Nazis knew just what the problem was: domestication. It had “weakened” the bloodline. Just as interbreeding with Jews and gypsies was ruining the Aryan race, so millennia of selecting dairy cattle with big udders and beef cattle with fleshy hindquarters and docile temperaments had brought about a species-wide decline. Modern cattle, in their view, were pallid beasts compared to their mighty forebears.
The Nazis wanted to undo the damage. Their goal: to repopulate der Vaterland with the mighty, heroic, and noble—but also extinct—aurochs. Two Nazi brothers believed they knew how to do it.
Heinz and Lutz Heck were zookeepers. Of the two, Lutz was more fully in the grip of the aurochs obsession, imagining herds of the dark, rippling beasts galloping through German forests and dewy meadows. Lutz Heck also happened to be one of history’s most well-connected zookeepers, counting among his friends Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Göring—who, among his many titles, held that of Reichmaster of the Forest and Hunt. For a man whose job it was to keep animals, Lutz Heck took surprising joy in killing them. A photo shows him hunting alongside Göring on Heck’s private estate the year before he joined the Nazi Party.
The Heck brothers were quite aware that aurochs had been extinct for a very long time, but they believed that the species’ vital elements existed still. Lutz explained it thus: “No creature is extinct if the elements of its heritable constitution are still to be found in living descendants.” Traces of the aurochs, they were convinced, were scattered among the genes of domestic cattle. Just as weakness was bred into cattle, so it could be bred out: it was a simple matter of putting the right cows together with the right bulls and letting nature—glorious nature—take its course.
Heinz Heck appears to have been the lazier brother, if his aurochs resurrection program is anything to judge by. For genetic stock, he looked no farther than his own herd, a hodgepodge of breeds he inherited from his father (also a zookeeper). Brother Lutz had grander ideas. Believing that the purest, wildest cattle traits would be found among Europe’s most ancient breeds, he set off across the continent on a mission to find and bring home primitive-looking cattle.
He happened upon his first specimen by chance in Corsica, where a one-eyed guide from a remote mountain village—“savage-looking but likeable”—was leading him on a search for a rare and wild sheep called a mouflon. They wandered into a river valley, and Heck spotted a reddish brown cow standing near some bushes. As he made a move toward her, the cow lifted her head and eyed him the way a wild African buffalo might. Heck crouched down and began stalking the creature, which silently slipped into the mountain wilderness and vanished. Lutz Heck bought three calves and took them to Berlin.
Next, he set out to procure the genes for enormousness. Aurochs were legendarily large, fast, and agile. A six-foot human would not be able to see over the shoulders of a big male aurochs without a step stool. Heck located the genes he was looking for in the Camargue, a chunk of French terrain between the Rhône delta and the Mediterranean that is home to a strain of cattle that had been saved from extinction by a flamboyant nobleman called Marquis de Baroncelli. For centuries, the French had used Camargue cattle for their bullfights, during which Frenchmen proved themselves by capturing woolen tassels hung from the forehead of a big bull. (Unlike the Spanish, Frenchmen have no need to prove themselves by slowly stabbing a bull to death in front of a paying audience.) Heck tracked down the marquis, and together the two men rode into the wilderness