Hitler’s Jurassic Monsters (Discovery Media, National Geographic, Quickfire Media, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On March 31 KPBS showed a much-ballyhooed program that turned out to be an “oldie” made in 2014 called Hitler’s Jurassic Monsters, though later reissues have used titles like Hitler’s Jurassic Park and Hitler’s Jurassic Zoo. The use of the word “Jurassic” is a big-time misnomer because it suggests the Nazis were trying to revivify dinosaurs by recovering their DNA à la Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and all the movies spawned from it, when during the Nazis’ time the significance of DNA was virtually unknown and even attempting such a project would have been scientifically inconceivable (though that didn’t stop Ira Levin, in his novel The Boys from Brazil, from positing that Dr. Josef Mengele had figured out how to do cloning and used that knowledge to create 94 genetic copies of Adolf Hitler).

The central figures in this bizarre (even by Nazi standards!) program were Hermann Goering, one of Hitler’s top lieutenants in the Nazi government (a lot of times he’s referred to as “Hitler’s second-in-command,” but one of Hitler’s strategies as a leader was to give a lot of his close associates the idea that they were his second-in-command so he could play them off against each other) and who, besides running the Luftwaffe and the Gestapo, was a dedicated hunter and wangled from Hitler the title of Master of the Reich’s Hunt; Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who ran the concentration camps and the extermination centers where most of the Holocaust took place and also had the idea of creating a new “Aryan religion” that would supplant Christianity and revive an altered form of the old Norse religion of Odin and Thor (a program even Hitler thought was crazy); and zoologists Ludwig “Lutz” Heck and his brother Heinz Heck. The Hecks had been the directors of Berlin’s and Munich’s zoos, respectively – their dad, Ludwig Heck, had run the Berlin Zoo until Lutz took over the family business after dad’s death in 1931 — and both Hecks joined the Nazi Party in 1932, a year before Hitler took power.

What particularly attracted them to the Nazis were the enormous sums of money they wanted to spend on zoological research, and in particular on breeding now-extinct wild animals like the auroch (a huge animal, standing as tall as a human, that eventually was the basis for modern domesticated cattle) and an extinct equine that became one of the evolutionary bases for the modern horse. When the Nazis took over Germany Goering green-lighted a breeding program to restore the original breeds that had presumably existed in ancient Germany, including some for which there is actual documentary evidence (Julius Caesar wrote about aurochs and the blond, blue-eyed, bearskin-clad German warriors who hunted them) as well as extant fossils, by taking the most ferocious of modern cattle (including the bulls bred for bullfights in Spain as well as the modern-day wild cattle of the Camargue in southern France) and selectively breeding them for aggression and size.

The Nazis’ breeding program had one ironic success: by reintroducing wolves into the genetic mix of modern-day dogs to create the German shepherd, which became not only an internationally recognized breed but a status symbol for the Nazi elite (virtually all the top Nazis, including Hitler himself, had at least one) and the chosen guard dogs for the concentration camps because they had the qualities the Nazis prized above all else, ferociousness and loyalty. Director Jeremy Bristow and narrator Russel Boulter (no writer is credited on imdb.com, which makes it likely Boulter wrote his own commentary) delicately make the parallel between the Nazis’ breeding of animals and the Nazis’ breeding of humans, both in their determination to exterminate those individuals they considered “substandard” because of allegedly “inferior” racial heritage and their determination to breed examples of the species they would consider “superior.”

What they ignore is that the idea of eugenics the Nazis were pursuing was a mainstream idea worldwide in the 1920’s and had generated an enormous amount of literature about “culling” the human species, letting “inferior” members die off or sterilizing them to keep them from reproducing, while at the same time encouraging people with allegedly “superior” genes to pair up and have children. (Himmler took this so far he encouraged the SS elite troops to have sex with as many women as they could so long as both parties were what the Nazis considered racialliy top-notch, essentially telling both German men and women it was the moral duty of the racially “superior” to have as many children as biologically possible to increase the population of Aryan super-people and crowd out the allegedly “inferior.”) Eugenics was given the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in a case called Buck v. Bell, in which by an 8-1 vote the Court ruled that it was constitutional for a state government to order the sterilization of a woman they considered “feeble-minded.” The Court’s opinion was written by the ordinarily progressive Oliver Wendell Holmes, who flatly endorsed not only Carrie Buck’s forced sterilization but eugenics in general by writing, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” Eugenics only got a bad name after World War II because the Nazis had openly practiced it (and indeed had justified the Holocaust largely on the basis that the Jews were “subhuman” and the human race would be better off without them). But it’s important to remember that, like a lot of other horrible ideas the Nazis advanced, eugenics was one a lot of people on both sides of World War II believed and were trying to put in practice.