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European farmers know them as “Nazi cows”: Large, shaggy, big-horned cattle with a notorious temper.

“They would come right over and try and kill you; that’s how aggressive they were,” British farmer Derek Gow told the BBC.

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The name isn’t derogatory. Known as “Heck cattle,” they’re the remnants of a twisted Nazi plan to restore prehistoric animals to a conquered and ethnically cleansed Europe.

And it’s a plan in which Canada unwittingly played a role.

“We were only too pleased to be able to supply some of these animals and would gladly let him have more at any time,” then Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary after a 1937 meeting with top Nazi Hermann Goering.

The animals in question were Canadian bison, and Goering had opened their meeting by effusively thanking Canada for shipping some to Germany, where they were being used as part of a plan to restore European bison herds.

The same year he met King, Goering presided over the International Hunting Exposition in Berlin. A photograph from the event shows him looking at a map of Poland’s famous Białowieża Forest, where German conservationists planned to bolster game herds.