The reintroduction of these two animals into the German landscape was part of a larger project of constructing a national identity based on mythic foundations. Germany under the Third Reich would be restored to the Germany of the Nibelungenlied. Göring, a modern Siegfried, would revive the ancient hunting campaigns for increasingly rare—or reconstructed—species. To realize this historical fantasy, however, required a series of spatial and temporal displacements. While Göring traveled east to Białowieża to seek Germany’s lost game, the Hecks arranged for the export of Białowieża’s bison west to Schorfheide, Göring’s reserve north of Berlin. There, they were integrated into ongoing efforts to cross European bison with Canadian wood bison in an attempt to strengthen the diminished European genetic stock. Subsequent breeding would then restore a more European phenotype, while carrying over the “robustness” of the American. The primary goal was increased fertility, which was necessary to populate Göring’s hunting grounds. The Nibelungenlied passage that Heck cites reappeared at the base of a monument—a charging bison in Meissen stoneware—erected to commemorate the success of the breeding program at Schorfheide. The inscription on the back of the sculpture, addressed to a future when Göring’s estate would have vanished from memory, eulogized the park as an “asylum” for bison, elk, deer, and (reconstructed) aurochs. These animals themselves would provide “living testimony” to a lost age when Germany was “not yet ruled by Man.”

In Białowieża, this dream of a wilderness untouched by human hands helped justify the murderous campaigns carried out under the banner of Germanization. To prepare the area for German settlement, the forest would be cleared of its non-Aryan occupants. Under Göring’s directives, mass deportations and executions targeted Białowieża’s Jewish inhabitants, Polish resistance fighters, and Soviet partisans. These campaigns of death were, however paradoxically, intimately tied to a particular nationalistic conception of life: the pursuit of “living space” (Lebensraum). Lebensraum mixed political, military, and economic objectives with the language and concepts of the life sciences. In Białowieża, the appropriation of land and natural resources for German use would assume the scientific guise of “forest management.” The Polish biologist Tadeusz Vetulani described this dual program—of human extermination and animal propagation—as the German “management” of Białowieża:

This “management,” which, during World War I, was marked by over-felling of trees and over-exploitation of wildlife—bison, elk and deer in particular—during World War II brought further, and even more gruesome and elaborate, exploitation not only of our natural resources and material goods but also of our blood—in the most literal sense—and religious heritage.

Like the Hecks, Vetulani had dedicated himself to the restoration of extinct European mammals. His work revolved around the Konik ponies, a Polish breed that traced its bloodline to Białowieża’s last wild tarpans—ancestor of the domestic horse. Vetulani had reintroduced selectively bred Koniks to Białowieża. His research, however, aligned with that of the Hecks too well. During the war, the Hecks rounded up these horses to supply their own tarpan breeding programs in Munich and Berlin. Vetulani’s anguish over the “exploitation” of Polish blood here takes on another literal meaning: even as German forces shot down partisans in Białowieża’s swamps, the Hecks drained Białowieża of its unique mammals, prized for the purity of their “primitive” blood. As with the bison program, the breeding of the Heck horse relied on this transfusion from east to west.

What the Hecks saw as the restoration of an ancient unity—the reconstruction of a lost “Germanic” species—was, for Vetulani, a “baffling” campaign of destruction. Bred from animals with eighteenth-century roots in the Białowieża forest, the Konik pony breeding program was, as Vetulani recounted, “meant to bring back to Białowieża her primeval inhabitant.” Lutz Heck’s decision to “uproot” the Koniks from Białowieża “thus brutally stopped the breeding experiment.”11

The Hecks’ back-breeding projects themselves would continue only a short while longer. When the Allied bombs rained down on Berlin for two nights in January 1944, what remained of the battered zoological gardens went up in flames. Animals succumbed to shrapnel wounds or burned to death in their cages. Dangerous species broke loose and were shot. Such was the fate of the Heck aurochs. Lutz Heck’s son gunned down the agitated and stampeding aurochs, together with warthogs and wild boar, after they had escaped their burning enclosures.

Ten months later, following the war, when the director of the Białowieża forest, Jan Jerzy Karpiński, was able to return safely to Poland, he was met with rumors of strange animals left behind by the retreating Germans. In a letter to the State Council for Nature Conservation, Karpiński reported:

At the end of October 1944, when I took charge of the Białowieża National Park again, I was informed that of the buffaloes let out by the Germans, 8 to 12 still remain in the forest. I was perfectly aware, of course, that these were not real buffaloes, but most probably regenerated aurochs from the Romincka Forest (which was later officially corroborated).

As the Hecks had envisioned, their regenerated aurochs persisted in a semi-wild state in the Białowieża forest. When Lutz Heck heard that some of the animals had survived the war, he proudly cited this fact as evidence of their suitability to the natural environs. To the Polish forestry service, however, the stray cattle were profoundly unnatural: they had no place in the forest as it had been known for hundreds of years. At Karpiński’s request, a provisional corral was built with the intention of capturing the Heck animals, which, forestry officials correctly assumed, would not survive on their own. The post–World War II revision of Poland’s borders hindered this task. Białowieża forest had been carved in two, with the eastern side under Soviet jurisdiction. By crossing the border into Belarus for increasingly long periods, the Heck aurochs evaded the Polish foresters, and most likely soon perished. “It seems that nothing can be done at this point,” Karpiński lamented, “to save the remaining animals from extinction.”13

The Heck aurochs did not altogether disappear. At the Munich zoo, Heinz Heck’s aurochs survived the war unharmed. Heck cattle—as the breed is known today—trace their lineage to these animals. There have even been recent attempts, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, to introduce the breed into state nature reserves as surrogates for the megafauna that once grazed on lowland grasses. But the Heck fantasy of the aurochs no longer clings to these animals, despite their atavistic features, and the aurochs itself, Bos primigenius, has lost much of its unique scientific status. Current nomenclature no longer distinguishes the aurochs as a species distinct from domestic cattle.

The realization of the Hecks’ wild ideal proved unsustainable. Their vision of biological reunification continually sought to expand its borders: from the regeneration of a single animal to the violent reshaping of an entire landscape. No curve of a horn, or shade of an eel-striped coat could satisfy this totalizing vision. Ultimately, the Hecks’ biological methods were inadequate to their task—for the aurochs was not a species, but a symbol.