In a rare instance, you will learn something about somebody that you respect, that will change forever your perception of them and their motives

For years leading up to World War II, German zoologists pursued a fantastic goal: the resurrection of extinct species. Genetic technologies wouldn't emerge until the 1970s (and in any event remain insufficient for this purpose), but one such zoologist, Lutz Heck, decided to use a traditional method of breeding animals to emphasize specific traits. Heck's reasoning went like this: even an extinct animal's genes remain in the gene pool of closely related living species, so if he concentrated the genes by breeding animals that most resembled their extinct antecedents, in time he would re-create their ancestral forms. He was wrong—not all the genes survive, so extinct species cannot be revived through breeding—but the war gave him an excuse to loot East European zoos for the best specimens to mate with several wild strains, hoping to breed back to pure "Aryan" animals the fierce creatures painted in ocher on Cro-Magnon caves. What better totems for the Third Reich?

Before the war ended, Heck shipped back many of his back-bred, look-alike tarpans to idyllic Bialowieza, where he pictured Adolf Hitler's inner circle hunting in the new millennium. After the war, the care and breeding of the animals, and the stewardship of Poland's part of the forest, returned to Polish hands.

Ironically, the breeding experiments that thrived with Heck's ambitions helped to save scores of rare plants and endangered animals. But understand-ably bitter about Heck's Nazi ties and motives, Polish patriots were (and still are) quick to point out that these "tarpans" are technically counterfeits, like the descendants of the Heck-bred aurochsen, or wild oxen, on display elsewhere in Europe. Some zoologists, who prefer to speak of "near-tarpans" and "near-aurochsen," associate the animals with political agendas. They paint Heck as a con man who staged a colossal Nazi hoax by creating new breeds, not resurrecting extinct species. But Herman Reichenbach, in International Zoo News, envisions an important role for the pseudo-throwbacks: "They can still help preserve a natural environment of mixed forest and meadows.... And as a feral type of cattle, the aurochsen may also be able to enhance the gene pool of a domestic animal that has become impoverished genetically."

There are many forms of obsession, some diabolical, some fortuitous. Strolling through Bialowieza's mass of life, one would never guess its political dramas, including the role it played in Nazi ambitions. Smithsonian November 2007