Thursday 10pm HITLER’S JURASSIC MONSTERS Documentary
The untold story that brings to light the Third Reich’s confounding plan to recreate the primeval forests of Germanic folklore, complete with breeds of long-extinct beasts.
As part of their crazed dream to create a thousand-year Reich they developed detailed blueprints for Aryan settlements and vast hunting parks for ‘Aryan’ animals. Goering and Himmler employed Germany’s best scientists to launch a hugely ambitious program of genetic manipulation to change the course of nature itself, both in the wild and for domestic use. In a fascinating blend of politics and biology, Hitler's Jurassic Monsters is the true and astonishing story of how the Nazis tried to take control of nature and change the course of evolution.
Started as a private project between two zoologist brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, the plot was embraced by the Nazi party after the two befriended Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring.
The two creatures they focused upon were auroch (a super-sized, wild and violent breed of cattle) and tarpan (the wild and aggressive ancestor of the modern horse). The area the Nazis earmarked for this project was the Bialowieza forest in Poland, which was home to packs of wolves, the elusive Eurasian Lynx, the European moose, and some of the last surviving European bison. How close they were to completing their plan still remains a bit of a mystery to this day.
