"It was a quirk of Nazi philosophy, so inhumane to humans, that animals were treated with the utmost care and kindness," Letts writes. These kidnapped horses were transported in style, placed in spacious train cars and taken to beautiful, well-kept farms in the countryside. To aid Rau's mission, German soldiers began stealing purebred Lipizzaner stallions from famed stud farms and riding schools across Europe. Rau believed he could create legions of identical, pure white military horses through aggressive inbreeding of Lipizzaners in just three years, writing, "We have to promote inbreeding of the best bloodlines." (Rau clearly did not understand the link between genetic defects and inbreeding.) To do so, Rau set his eyes on the famous Lipizzaner stallion, a beautiful and regal breed known for its dexterity and fairy-tale looks. (Letts writes that by 1938, their army was using more than 180,000 horses and donkeys-and Hitler was convinced that he needed even more.)įor the task of breeding this assembly line of horses-as well as for creating a perfectly pure "super breed"-Hitler chose Gustav Rau, a hippologist who had spent years tirelessly promoting Germany's horse-breeding industry. And despite the country's strong industrial output and recent advances in technology, German leaders genuinely believed they needed more horses for the war effort. To say the least, when Germany went to war two decades later, horses were very much on Hitler's mind. In addition, the inflationary conditions in Germany made the sale and upkeep of horses difficult, and to further complicate matters, Germany was required to export horses as part of the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles." The numbers of equine casualties were so high during the war that the horse population declined by half. "After World War I, several factors combined to almost destroy horse breeding and equestrian sports in Germany. As Elizabeth Letts writes in her fantastic book The Perfect Horse, Germany's equine industry took a shellacking during the so-called Great War, and Hitler wanted to return the country to its former glory: This decision was not some extracurricular pipe dream of the Führer, but a deliberate response to the country's poor fortunes during World War I. It's all because Hitler wanted to create a "super horse." Just as Nazi ideology peddled pseudo-science regarding breeding a human "master race," Hitler also believed he could selectively breed horses to create the finest, bravest, and "purest" warhorses in world military history. Lesser known, however, is the Nazi program to kidnap a treasure of a different kind: hundreds of the world's most prized horses. The attempts to recover those stolen treasures have been documented countless times (George Clooney's 2014 film The Monuments Men-and the 2009 book it was based on-among them). During World War II, the Nazis invaded foreign countries and stole millions of dollars' worth of priceless valuables, from jewelry to famous works of art.
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