Operation Munchkin: Bizarre Nazi plan to breed giant Angora rabbits in concentration camps for fur-lined clothes for Hitler's men



Starving inmates of concentration camps were forced to grow fresh vegetables to feed the animals

Some were even executed by the SS for not showing the animals the proper respect

The brain child of Heinrich Himmler rabbit breeding programmes existed at 31 death camps

He wanted their fur for lined coats for the Luftwaffe pilots, cosy socks for U-Boat personnel and warm underwear for the infantry

Animals given heated hutches and 'plenty of space' often just yards from where prisoners lived in squalid, over-crowded and freezing blocks



Details of a bizarre Nazi plan to breed giant Angora rabbits in concentration camps to provide fur-lined clothing for Hitler's armed forces has been unearthed in a German archive.



'Operation Munchkin', as it was known, was the brainchild of sinister S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler who was had a career as a trained chicken farmer before he became the architect of the Holocaust.

He ordered a breeding programme for the rabbits and specified that they were to be raised in luxury just yards away from the where the most terrible crime against humanity was taking place.



Bleak: French prisoners at Nazi concentration camp Dachau, near Munich, which was the first camp to have a rabbit breeding station

While prisoners were starved, beaten and tortured to death in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau, the rabbit hutches in these and 27 other camps camps were spacious and heated.



The furry residents were also given a daily supply of fresh vegetables -probably more than the human inmates who were forced to tend them saw in a month.



The idea was for the rabbits to produce enough fur to make lined coats for Luftwaffe pilots, cosy socks for U-Boat personnel and warm undergarments for the infantry in winter accord i ng to the Germ an newspaper Der Spiegel .



The plans were detailed the 'Angora book' which was discovered hidden at his home on the fringes of the Tegernsee lake in Bavaria in 1945.



Keeping cosy: Himmler's dream was to collect the rabbit fur in order to provide warm coats for Luftwaffe pilots and even socks for U-boat personnel

Valuable: The Nazis treated their Angora rabbits very humanely and considered them a valuable resource in their plan to protect their troops from the harsh cold of winter

Apparently he deliberately hid it there for fear that it would fall into enemy hands.



It contains 150 photos of fluffy rabbits, some being cared for by concentration camp prisoners in their trademark striped 'pyjama' uniforms.

Some of these inmates were even executed if their S.S. overseers believed they were not treating their rabbit charges with enough respect.



Partners in crime: Himmler, notorious head of the Gestapo, stands with Hitler to observe a Nazi parade in 1940

The breeding programme began in 1941 shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.



Himmler got the idea for utilising rabbits for wool production after reading of a small-scale scheme that was started during the First World War.



He wrote at the time: 'T hroughout Europe it is my intention to establish breeding stations in concentration camps' and even decreed that they should be kept in pens where they had 'plenty of space.'

Often t heir hutches were just yards away from barrack huts designed for 200 where upwards of 800 prisoners lived.

In Dachau, the first such camp and the one which became a model for all that followed, he ordered the cultivation of peppers which were intended to feed the rabbits.



Himmler, who was also obsessed with creating the perfect blonde, blue-eyed 'Aryan' master race of Germans, immersed himself in every aspect of the plan.

But like many other Nazi ideologies Himmlers plans failed to match up to reality.

A chart in his book counted 6,500 rabbits by the end of 1941 and 25,000 by 1943.



But by that year, when the project finally stopped as the war began to turn disastrously against Germany, the total amount of wool collected amounted to less than five tons.



When the camps were liberated many empty hutches were found but the rabbits were long gone.



Jack DeWitt, one of the liberators of Dachau near Munich himself 'liberated' a fur-lined jacked which he found on a pile in a storeroom at the camp where 36,000 people were murdered between 1933 and 1945.

