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THE MASTER OF ALL HORSES
NEW YORK, 1938
On May 8, 1938, two months after Hitler’s Reich annexed Austria, Gustav Rau docked at New York Harbor on the German luxury liner Bremen. Rau’s lofty new title, chief equerry of Germany and master of the horse, barely fit in the small space allotted for “profession” on the ship’s log. Ever since his triumph in Berlin in ’36, the fifty-eight-year-old Rau had assumed the manner of the powerful and influential man he had become. Despite his generally jovial air, he was quick to spot weakness in both men and horses. Where he saw flaws in horses, he bred around them; when he saw them in humans, he administered verbal jabs like a stinging whip to a horse’s flank. Accompanying Rau was his wife, Helga, herself an accomplished horsewoman, along with more than a dozen of Germany’s most prominent horse lovers. Among the group was General Curt Freiherr von Gienanth, recently retired from the cavalry after a distinguished career that included the directorship of the German Cavalry School (although he was to be pressed back into service for the Third Reich the following year). The New York Times trumpeted the group’s arrival with the headline “Reich Equestrians Arrive for Shows.”
Just three years later, the two countries would be at war, but in May 1938 there was no sign of tension as the Bremen tied up at the busy New York Harbor and the privileged, well-dressed German men and women preened down the gangplank, ready to commence an itinerary packed with festivities. The group checked into the sumptuous Hotel Biltmore in Manhattan, home base for their eighteen-day equestrian sightseeing tour of America.
GUSTAV RAU KNEW HORSES, but he was a particular expert on breeding. He had started his career as a journalist, and one of his early assignments was to cover the first Olympic equestrian events in 1912 in Stockholm, Sweden. Germany had made a poor showing in the world’s inaugural international riding competition. Since then, Rau had developed an obsession: He wanted the German horse to be the best in the world, a goal he meant to accomplish by utilizing the still poorly understood principles of genetic inheritance.
Rau had begun developing his theories in the 1920s, when his greatest hope was to revitalize Germany’s horse-breeding industry by promoting an interest in horseback riding. After World War I, several factors combined to almost destroy horse breeding and equestrian sports in Germany. The numbers of equine casualties were so high during the war that the horse population declined by half. 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. So, Rau’s goal to increase the demand for horses by promoting the popularity of equestrian sports in rural Germany was an excellent idea.
As the National Socialist Party came into power, Rau found that the Nazis shared his enthusiasm for this goal. Hitler’s National Socialists were eager to establish themselves with the prestige of international military competitions, and soon the SS riders, known as “the Blacks,” were fielding teams to compete with the German Army teams, known as “the Grays.” German equestrians increasingly made their mark in international competitions. In 1930 the German Army team won the prestigious international jumping competition at the National Horse Show in New York, and their triumph was touted in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. As the decade continued, these two top-notch military teams brought international prestige to Germany at a time when the country was struggling to recover from its devastating defeat in World War I.
On the cover of its April 3, 1933, issue, Germany’s most influential horse magazine featured Hitler’s portrait, captioned: “The Man Who Put Germany Back in the Saddle.” That same season, the German riders won the prestigious Italian Mussolini Gold Cup for the third time, snatching it away from the Italian hosts, who had long dominated the contest. On May 24, 1933, the winning rider wrote a letter to Hitler offering him his champion horse, Wotan the “wonder horse,” as a gift. The following day, before an audience of more than a thousand horsemen gathered for a large horse show in Berlin, Gustav Rau read Hitler’s telegraphed acceptance aloud. A photograph of the event shows the small man wearing a white suit, his bald head shining in the spring sunshine, his right arm raised in the Hitler salute, the führer’s telegram clutched in his other hand.
BREEDING HORSES FOR SPECIFIC purposes had been pursued avidly in Europe for several hundred years. Human and equine life were deeply intertwined, since human enterprise required equestrian help for almost every task, from transportation to heavy work to engaging in warfare. Through trial and error, men had managed to make significant modifications in their equestrian companions. Riding horses need speed and good temperaments, plow horses need brute strength, military horses are best if they have hearty constitutions and don’t require much food. Breeders used observation and trial and error to perfect horses to type, but the science was poorly understood. At the time of Gustav Rau’s visit to America, many still believed that a breed’s traits were related to the environment in which it was bred—climate, elevation, and type of feed—and that a change in environment might cause a breed to lose its characteristic features.
GUSTAV RAU EXPLAINS THE FINE POINTS OF BREEDING AND CONFORMATION.
Rau’s horse-breeding expertise was entirely self-taught, his theories a hodgepodge of seat-of-the-pants observation, established traditions, and pseudo-science. He believed that breeding closely related horses was the surest way to the best-quality progeny with a high degree of uniformity, aiming to create “a whole race comparatively fast and so even and identical that one horse looks like another.”
Rau’s horse-breeding theories soon caught the eye of Richard Walther Darré, one of the primary architects of the Nazi ideology known as Blut und Boden, or blood and land, which mythologized the “purity” of the German rural people and folkways. As minister of food and agriculture, Darré appointed Rau to be the chief equerry of the German state of Prussia in 1934. More than any other Nazi theorist, Darré provided the ideological background for the Nazi policy of expansion, known as Lebensraum (living space), which purported that strong, healthy “Nordic-type” people needed more territory in which to expand and grow, hence justifying their wars of aggression and occupation. Darré’s theories strongly influenced Himmler, Reich leader of the SS, providing an ideological framework to bolster Himmler’s desire to create a German nation based on a purely Nordic or Aryan race.
Rau seemed only too happy to associate himself with these powerful allies. In 1934, he published a book entitled Horsebreeding in the National Socialist State. Reaching beyond its title, the book expanded his breeding theories to include beliefs about the racial purity of people, declaring that only farmers whose family trees had “unmixed blood” would “have the sense to breed pureblooded horses.” The English were renowned for their Thoroughbreds; Poland bred the world’s finest Arabian horses; Rau’s dream was that the German nation would produce the greatest military horse.
BY MAY 1938, WHEN RAU and his party arrived in New York, events in Nazi Germany were taking an ominous turn. In March, Germany had invaded Austria; by the following September, Hitler would have annexed large portions of Czechoslovakia, and by signing the Munich Agreement, France, Great Britain, and Italy would let him get away with it. By November 1938, the persecution of Jews could be hidden no more as crazed mobs stormed the streets of Berlin and other large cities, burning synagogues and smashing Jewish-owned store windows during the night of broken glass known as Kristallnacht.
But in America, the atmosphere was finally lightening a bit after years of severe economic woes. Howard Hughes set an airspeed record, flying his H-1 Racer around the world in just ninety-one hours. The federal minimum wage was established, providing unprecedented protection for American workers, and Walt Disney released his first short cartoon that featured Donald Duck. But amid this brightening landscape, an urgent debate was growing. Many declared that Americans should take a stand against Hitler’s aggressive aims; an equally vocal group took a strict isolationist stance.
THE FIRST EVENT on the Reich equestrians’ American tour was a motor trip to nearby Elmont, New York, for a visit to the iconic Gilded Age racetrack Belmont Park. This elegant venue attracted members of the American aristocracy who had long been passionate about horses, as well as the new-moneyed industrial titans who aped these patricians to improve their social standing. “The sport of kings” was an ostentatious way for the country’s nouveau riche to flaunt their wealth, and Belmont was built in 1906 to be their own private playground. According to track historian Paul Moran, “From concept to completion in its original form, the new racecourse that would be named Belmont Park in honor of the first August Belmont, was a project by, of, and for the American aristocracy, which was defined strictly by wealth, position and lineage.” In truth, Belmont’s Jockey Club, the organization that controlled Thoroughbred racing in America, was founded by a mix of people. Some were blue-blooded Americans who traced their ancestry to Mayflower voyagers and Puritan founding fathers, and others were nouveau riche industrialists who wished to ally themselves—through marriages to aristocrats, membership in the Episcopal Church, and associations with the elite sport of horse racing—to the American upper crust.
At Belmont Park, the races were run clockwise, known as “English-style,” so that the well-heeled spectators could see the finish line from their vantage point in the posh clubhouse. Rau and his guests settled into the covered clubhouse, eager to see American Thoroughbred horseracing on display. The Thoroughbred was originally an English breed, and to this day, all so-named horses trace their lineage back to three stallions imported into England from the Middle East in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When bred to the heavier English draft horse, the result was a lighter, faster, more hot-blooded horse that proved adept at racing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Thoroughbred horses could reach sixteen hands, a full four inches taller than the size of the foundational sires: Selective breeding had produced a bigger, speedier horse, and one so highly strung and sensitive that it wanted to break out fast and keep on going. Perhaps nowhere more than in the field of horse racing had the concepts of selective breeding been so assiduously applied. To create the highest-quality animals, breeders relied on two principles, superior bloodlines and demonstrated performance, to get the swiftest possible horses. A seasoned horse could be evaluated on his track record, but each time an untested two-year-old pranced out onto the racetrack, everyone from the owners to the breeders to the ordinary folk who wagered on the outcomes turned into an amateur scientist in the inheritance of genetic traits. In many ways, the trial-and-error successes of horse breeding had surpassed the state of the science. Prior to the discovery of DNA, scientists did not know exactly how traits were transmitted from parent to offspring, but the refinement of the Thoroughbred horse had demonstrated that both basic qualities, such as size and color, and more complex qualities, like heart and temperament, seemed heritable through judicious choices in breeding.
Belmont Park was not the only place on Long Island where people were taking an interest in the results of selective breeding. Twenty-five miles away, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Mary Harriman, widow of railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, had donated the funds to found a brand-new “scientific” research center: the Eugenics Record Office. The director, Charles B. Davenport, a Harvard-trained professor of zoology, held the zealous belief that principles of breeding developed for livestock could be applied to humankind. The goal of the ERO was to train “eugenic field-workers” who would create pedigree records for American families to replicate the kind of breeding records that already existed for horses, with the aim of identifying both strong bloodlines and weak ones. The proximity of the two endeavors, the racetrack and the Eugenics Record Office, was more than coincidental. A conservative upper-class faction, many of whom kept baronial estates on Long Island, shared both a keen interest in horse breeding and a desire to improve American human bloodstock by applying the racist and pseudo-scientific concepts of eugenics.
Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, first coined the term “eugenics” in his 1883 book Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton was a statistician who, among other endeavors, developed formulas that helped to predict the outcome of horse races. Galton theorized that just as the natural world benefited from the process of natural selection, so would human society benefit from weeding out weaker elements: Eugenicists believed that just as horse breeders could breed a bigger, swifter, better racehorse, scientists could eventually eliminate from the human population those considered “undesirables”—which he defined with fuzzy terms such as “feeble-minded” (which could run the gamut from the severely developmentally delayed, to epileptics, to unwed mothers) and “degenerate” (from drunks, to petty thieves, to the unemployed). Galton and his followers imagined a future in which society had become homogenized and social ills had been quite simply bred out of the population.
In 1930, Alfred Frank Tredgold, a physician at London University Hospital, referred to Britain’s most important horse race—the Grand National—in his address to the British Eugenics Society on Racial Fitness: “It is safe to say that if the principles of eugenics had not been applied to horses there would have been no Grand National at all.” Charles B. Davenport once remarked to a prospective donor that the most “progressive revolution in human history” would be attained “if human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as those of horse-breeding.”
The notion that mankind could be improved by using similar principles to those that had created the Thoroughbred horse was enjoying an intellectual vogue, and in the United States, the idea had gained favor with some of the very plutocrats who would have been sitting in the stands hobnobbing with the German visitors in 1938.
The Reich visitors would have been familiar already with the concept of a human pedigree. In order to be accepted as a member of the Nazi Party, an individual needed to be able to demonstrate that he or she had “pure blood” that went back at least four generations. Aspiring civil servants, especially those who came from German-speaking regions of Slavic countries, were required to carry a document to prove their Aryan ancestry.
THE SECOND DAY OF the Reich equestrians’ visit was spent away from horses, touring the metropolis of New York City, a glittering testament to modern industrial power. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building rose sparkling above the skyline, each under a decade old. From its bustling harbor to its coin-operated Automat restaurants, New York seemed to the Old World European visitors to burst with novelty.
And here, in America’s largest and most modern city, the science of eugenics had its own temple. The American Museum of Natural History filled most of Manhattan Square, its Victorian Gothic visage glowering over Central Park like a disapproving schoolmarm. The grand new entrance on Central Park West was a memorial to the famous naturalist and statesman Theodore Roosevelt, and was home to one of the most impressive collections of natural artifacts in the world. Effectively a shrine to the principles of evolution, housing a dinosaur collection that was arguably the finest in the world, the museum was also the display place for the skeleton of the American racehorse Sysonby, famed for winning fourteen of fifteen starts. (His groom later admitted to being bribed to ensure the stallion’s single loss by drugging him before the race.) Sysonby’s scientific contribution was to furnish “the most perfect example of the bony frame of the modern racehorse in existence as he was a horse of perfect conformation and size, aside from his superior qualities as a racehorse.”
From 1908 to 1933, the museum’s director was Henry Fairfield Osborn, whose significant contribution to the study of dinosaurs was marred by his devotion to eugenics and his admiration for Hitler. In 1921, to great fanfare, the museum opened the director’s brainchild, an exhibit called Osborn’s Hall of the Age of Man, which purported to show the evolution of the “human races” from “primitive” to “advanced” expressions of humanity. The entire show was based upon flawed science—in particular, Osborn’s embrace of “the Piltdown Man,” bits of fossilized bone fragments that were popularly believed to provide the “missing link” between apes and humans. While other contemporary scientists questioned the validity of the findings (which were later proved to be a deliberate hoax—an ape’s mandible fused to a human skull), Osborn attested that the skull proved the primeval ancestor of modern man was not an African or Asian but an Anglo-Saxon. In August 1932, the Museum of Natural History had played host to the Third International Congress on Eugenics, at which Elmont’s E. H. Harriman was the keynote speaker. Among the scheduled events, alongside lectures on the dangers of race mixing and the benefits of involuntary sterilization, was a presentation about horse racing. Here again, the science of breeding a better horse was deeply intertwined with the parallel push to understand and improve the human race.
SYSONBY’S SKELETON ON DISPLAY AT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, 1908.
After a day of sightseeing in Manhattan, the German equestrians’ next stop on the tour was a visit north to Goshen, New York, to see a famous stable of American trotting horses bred by another Harriman—E. Roland Harriman, the late E. H. Harriman’s brother. Throughout the nineteenth century, harness racing was one of America’s favorite homegrown sports. Popular in agrarian towns, harness racing started to decline as the country industrialized. One of the country’s biggest promoters of trotting races was E. Roland Harriman, who invested in the breeding of trotters and served as president of the American Trotting Horse Association, thus almost single-handedly keeping interest alive in this quintessentially Yankee sport. Seated in the grandstand donated in 1911 by his sister-in-law Mary Harriman, the same philanthropist who had donated the funds to found the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, the Reich equestrians would have the opportunity to see modern breeding at its most refined level.
The American Standardbred differs in important ways from his more storied racing brother, the Thoroughbred. The Standardbred is judged not by his noble ancestry but by his ability to perform a specific task: to trot the distance of one mile in less than two minutes and thirty seconds. The differences between the Thoroughbred and Standardbred are evident in the names of the breeds: “Thoroughbred,” denoting purity of blood; “Standardbred,” denoting a close match to a breed standard. Standardbred racing, perhaps not surprisingly, had a particular popularity among American industrialists who seemed drawn to the idea of horses being produced for reliability and standardization, like factory output. Unlike the principle of pure bloodlines underlying Thoroughbred horse breeding, the line of reasoning for breeders of Standardbreds was somewhat different: To breed a standardized horse with uniform skills, they selected horses that most closely met their target criteria. This practice would have been of much interest to Rau, whose dream was to create a breed of German military horses that would be as closely matched as industrially produced machines.
From Goshen, Rau’s group headed to the Devon Horse Show on Philadelphia’s tony Main Line, then continued to Baltimore. Off Reisterstown Road in the Worthington Valley north of Baltimore, Alfred Vanderbilt’s Sagamore Farms spread out over more than five hundred acres. The farm had more than eighteen miles of white fences, and its distinctive red-roofed training stable had ninety stalls and a quarter-mile indoor track. There was a good bit of cross-pollination between European and American Thoroughbreds at that time, as wealthy breeders from the United States attended the best Thoroughbred horse auctions on the Continent. Vanderbilt, who received the farm as a twenty-first-birthday gift from his mother, had acquired from the Aga Khan the breeding rights to one of Europe’s finest Thoroughbreds, the English Triple Crown winner Bahram. After they surveyed the grandeur of Vanderbilt’s farm, the equestrians’ next stop was the bluegrass of Lexington, Kentucky, heart of American Thoroughbred breeding. At each stop on the tour, the Germans toured stables, watched displays of fine horsemanship, and discussed the finer points of breeding and training.
When Rau’s group reached their final destination, the cavalry base at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, they stepped off the train into a landscape so different from Germany’s that their senses must have been reeling. An enormous blue sky arched over the wide-open expanses surrounding the rural town where they would tour one of the U.S. Army’s impressive western cavalry schools. In his notes on the 1936 Olympic competition, Rau was proud to note how many contenders from other countries rode German-bred mounts. Not so the Americans, who brought their own U.S. Army–bred chargers to Berlin. At Fort Leavenworth, Rau could observe firsthand the Americans’ breeding program, which operated on a principle quite different from the models that stressed the “pure-bloodedness” so prized by Rau. The Americans had started their program in 1918, inspired, just as Rau was, by seeing the world’s horses gathered together at the 1912 Olympics. But the Americans adopted a completely different approach with the establishment of the army’s Remount Division in 1918, which sought out stallions with desirable characteristics such as hardiness, good temperament, soundness, and medium stature. The breeds varied, and included Thoroughbreds, Morgans, Quarter Horses, and Arabians. These stallions were disbursed throughout the country—on loan to ranchers, especially in the Western Plains, where most of the nation’s horses were raised. Any local could breed a mare to one of the army’s stallions for a nominal stud fee, as long as the mare was considered fit for breeding. At Rau’s Olympics, one of these mixed-blood remount horses, Jenny Camp, had captured the silver medal after a brilliant performance in the grueling three-day competition. This little mare had proven that a range-bred horse, the product of a Thoroughbred sire and dam of unknown breeding, could compete against the world’s most rarefied purebreds.
In the United States and Britain, the vogue for applying principles of selective horse breeding to human society would never fully take hold, thankfully; while the interest lingered among the more conservative elements of the American upper class, by the mid-1930s the ideas had begun to generally fall from favor. The exhibits in Osborn’s Hall of the Age of Man would be taken down and the “science” behind them discredited. But in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, these ideas would take hold and thrive, with disastrous results for both people and horses.
AS RAU STEAMED BACK across the Atlantic with his entourage, he hoped to bring some of these modern American ideas to Germany, tempered with his own belief in the superiority of the European (particularly German) horses. Soon history would give him the opportunity to put his theories to work on an unprecedented scale.
By the time the Reich equestrians docked in Bremerhaven, they had seen most of what America’s finest horse breeders had to offer. The group had returned to a Germany that was teetering on the brink of a modern war in which the breeding of horses would nonetheless play a central role in the Reich’s logistical planning. The German Army was known for its technological prowess, yet it still relied heavily on horses for the transport of heavy artillery and supplies. The military needed to rapidly increase the number of horses at the army’s disposal. In 1938, the peacetime German Army possessed only 183,000 horses (including donkeys). By 1945, the Germans would employ 2.7 million horses in the war effort, more than double the number used in World War I. Just back from his American reconnaissance trip, Rau was in an ideal position to put his horse-breeding skills to work for the German military machine.
Hitler would invade Poland in just six months. In the blueprint forged for its occupation, a plan was put into place for the “rebuilding of Poland’s horse-breeding industry” for the “interest of the German nation.” To head up that program, the German Army High Command chose Gustav Rau.