What exactly did the Nazis hope to gain by recreating extinct species?
Nazism was born of a turn-of-the-century mystical cult. They believed that their ancestors were part of a strong, heroic race that lived in Atlantis, then spread to various parts of the world. They wanted to gather together the people who showed most physical characteristics of the ancient people so they could genetically produce the original heroic Aryans. They essentially tried to do the same thing with the tarpans and the forest bison and some other animals. So for decades leading up to World War II, German zoologists pursued the fantastic goal of resurrecting extinct species. Did the Nazis actually manage to recreate the tarpans and bison? Genetic engineering wouldn’t emerge until the 1970s, but Lutz Heck decided to use a traditional method of breeding animals to emphasize specific traits. Heck’s reasoning went like this: An animal inherits 50 percent of its genes from each parent, and even an extinct animal’s genes remain in the living gene pool. So if Heck concentrated the genes
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