[i]The excerpt below is adapted from The Perfect Horse, by Elizabeth Letts. The book describes an American colonel’s quixotic mission in the waning days of World War II: to rescue Europe’s purebred horses from a secret Nazi stud farm mere hours before the starving Soviet army arrived and likely slaughtered the animals for food. In this excerpt, Letts explains the origins of the Nazis’ secret horse breeding project. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.
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As head of the Polish stud farm administration, Rau had modernized the production of horses, increasing the number of stallions, mares, and foals born in Poland year upon year, and feeding the voracious pipeline of horses to the war. Yet horses—living, breathing animals that require fodder, exercise, nurture, and care—could not be fabricated like nuts and bolts in a factory.
As the war continued to escalate, Rau pedaled ever more furiously, trying to produce a perfect standardized horse. He believed that with aggressive inbreeding, he could rapidly expand the number of Lipizzaner without sacrificing anything in quality; in fact, he believed that the Lipizzaner could be enhanced and changed, elongating the back, increasing the height of the withers, and changing the slope of the shoulder. He had predicted that he could completely change the breed in just three years. Perhaps Rau envisioned hundreds of thousands of purebred Lipizzaner fanning out in formation across the German empire, each as reliable and identical as Germany’s BMW automobiles— even better, as they would require neither scarce rubber nor costly gasoline.[/i]
