Among the many tragic results of the Great War in east central Europe was the extinction of the wild European bison population living in Białowieża Forest, which was itself one of the last remaining stands of primeval European woodlands. Long the hunting lands of kings and tsars, Białowieża became during World War I the site of fighting and, by 1915, a zone of German occupation. After a frenzy of hunting, including by officers and invited guests, in 1917, German authorities sought to protect bison. In the last months of the war, however, as discipline collapsed, German soldiers gunned down many of the remaining charismatic megafauna for sport and for meat. The animals that had escaped the disintegrating army’s rifles shortly succumbed to poachers, and by spring 1919, wild Białowieża bison were extinct. A few bison remained on the manorial lands of Prince Hans Heinrich XV von Hochberg (1861–1938) in Pless/Pszczyna in Silesia, and by combining them with other stock taken from Białowieża before the war residing in zoos and game preserves throughout Europe, zoologists and hunters worked to reintroduce breeding bulls and cows to Białowieża.
This article grapples with the problem of the restoration of a Białowieża bison herd in the context of the resurrection of a Polish state after a catastrophically destructive war and its aftermath. How did Polish hunters, foresters, scientists, politicians, and the public react to this problem of death and resuscitation in the context of building a new nation-state that, for them, also represented the restoration of something that had been formally extinct? Using archival documents, hunting magazines, monographs, specialist publications, and the popular press, this article seeks to answer this question. Other writers have addressed the fascinating obsession of the Nazis, and in particular, Herman Göring and the Berlin zookeeper Lutz Heck, with the Białowieża bison and other megafauna as ur-European and thus “Aryan” species, particularly as that obsession continued into World War II.Footnote 1 This article joins a developing body of scholarship that looks at the problem primarily from the Polish-speaking perspective before WWII.Footnote 2 As an example of the New Environmental history, it will also attempt to historicize European bison by demonstrating not only the ways that bison shared biological and historical intimacy with humankind by living and dying in the context of war and revolution, but also by exploring how predominant attitudes about the preeminence of group identification, whether figured as “the nation” or “the species,” affected the ways that humans conceptualized the bison’s place in the Second Polish Republic.Footnote 3
In their desire to take precedence in the international effort to restore European bison, Polish elites were concerned about demonstrating their civilized status, both as capable stewards of the resuscitated species and as masters of the forest to which it should return. Their efforts to rewild Białowieża involved a great deal of intervention, including civilizing and Polonizing its population to avoid the poaching and disarray that had caused the animal’s extirpation there after the war. Much as they tried to modernize and nationalize the largely illiterate and nationally indifferent sawyers and other laborers of the forest, they also sought to make the bison modern and cultured, insisting on their genetic purity, hygiene, and health, before they could be trusted to return to a wilderness configured for scientific purposes and national glory.Footnote 4 From the perspective of the elite Poles involved in their restoration, the bison were a relic of Poland’s royal past, a national treasure that must be restored to their “fatherland.” Their restoration would mark an end of the instability of war and revolution, a restoration of order, and the placement of things into their proper place. As Raf de Bont has observed regarding the international effort to restore European bison, the rewilding of the species thus involved a romanticized vision of the past abetted by explicitly modern interventions in the present.Footnote 5 Polish experts and policymakers saw the problem of reintroduction in eugenic terms, seeking to create a new herd only from purebred stock of animals descended from the Białowieża line, while the bison themselves became a highly managed, almost domesticated species, existing in the Białowieża Forest largely for patriotic show.Footnote 6
The Extirpation of Bison bonasus
The genus Bison includes massive ungulate mammals that once roamed the North American and European continents. The European bison (Bison bonasus) has a lower body mass than its better-known North American relative, the plains bison (Bison bison bison), but tends to be taller at the shoulder, with longer legs, horns, and tail. Given its preferred ecosystem of forests and meadows, the European bison’s skeletal structure positions its head in a more upright position than the plains bison, befitting an animal that gets a quarter of its sustenance from browsing underbrush, in addition to grazing on meadow grasses. In pre- and early historic times, bison were once much more widespread throughout the temperate forests of Europe from the Massif Central in the west to the Volga River and Caucasus Mountains in the east but disappeared as humans cleared the forests and hunted them to the remotest areas. By the time the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus classified the animal in 1758, the last remaining pockets of wild wisents (from the German Wisent) were in eastern Prussia and the Białowieża Forest, the Carpathian Mountains and Transylvania, and the northwestern parts of the Caucasian mountain chain, in the valleys of a few tributaries of the Kuban River.Footnote 7 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, only the herds in the Caucasus and Białowieża remained, and in 1927 the last wild European bison died in the Caucasus.
Even though the near extinction of the American bison was more obvious, with heaps of corpses and bones littering the Great Plains in the 1870s, the near extinction of the European bison half a century later was more complete. All surviving wisents today descend from just twelve of the animals alive in the 1920s, which have been divided into two distinct groups: the Lowland line, which descended from just seven animals; and the Lowland-Caucasian line, which drew on all twelve, including the Caucasian bull, Kaukasus. Interestingly, this genetic bottleneck seems to have caused more negative effects from inbreeding among the Lowland-Caucasian line, than its strictly Lowland cousins.Footnote 8 By 1939, there were sixteen bison in an enclosure in the Białowieża National Park, of which seven were pure Lowland bison, and nine were of the Lowland-Caucasian line.Footnote 9
The lowlands for which the Lowland line is named refer to the Białowieża Forest, a 1500km2 stretch of hemiboreal, mixed conifer and hornbeam-linden-oak forest intersected by numerous small rivers and bogs that now straddles the Polish and Belarusian border.Footnote 10 The forest and its large game, including the wisent, owed their survival to royal privilege, namely the exclusive hunting rights maintained first by Polish-Lithuanian kings and then by Russian tsars. Polish-Lithuanian kings established the forest as a reserve, so that they could hunt bison, roe deer, and wild boar there. As the preponderance of fallen timber and dark bogs could make much of the forest impenetrable to privileged hunters on horseback, local foresters would serve as beaters, whose job it was to encircle the game into a small area where the king, queen, and other guests could shoot at them with ease.Footnote 11 When in 1795 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist due to partitioning by its imperial neighbors Russia, Prussia, and Austria, Białowieża found itself under Russian dominion. Tsar Paul I abolished protections for the forest and turned the local foresters into serfs, assigning them to Russian aristocrats and generals. Without protection from hunters, the number of bison plummeted by more than half in fifteen years, from approximately 500 to 200, even though Alexander I reinstituted some protections after Paul’s brief five-year reign. A dictate from Tsar Alexander II in 1860 ordered the elimination of large predators, while declaring that poachers who killed a bison would be sent to Siberia and charged the cost to rear a new bison.Footnote 12
If the voraciousness of the modern market economy was the most significant variable contributing to the near eradication of plains bison in North America, as Andrew Isenberg demonstrates, for the bison of Białowieża, the major nemesis was clearly war and political instability.Footnote 13 Białowieża was not immune to economic inroads, which included a modest timber industry, and the extraction of potash, pelts, and other forest products.Footnote 14 Throughout the nineteenth century bison numbers in the Białowieża Forest typically ranged from 500 to 800, peaking at 1,898 in 1857, before rapidly collapsing by half in 1863, coincident with the Polish Uprising of that year.Footnote 15 An epidemic thinned the herd from 700 to about half that by 1905 before it rebounded to 730 in 1910, two years before Tsar Nicholas II’s last hunt there.Footnote 16 Thus, despite the relatively minor incursions of forest industry and the more significant effects of epizootic disease, before 1914 bison numbers had depended most on the whims of kings and tsars, who treated the forest as a private hunting ground, thereby protecting it from major settlement or incursions. The destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a state in 1795, the fickle attitudes of some tsars, and the instability of the Napoleonic wars and Polish Uprising of 1863 proved detrimental to the bison of the forest. Disruptive events like these also serve as an eerie precursor to the destruction precipitated by the collapse of those partitioning empires and the creation of a new Polish state in the early twentieth century.
The precarious relationship between bison and humans fighting for control of their territory was never more evident than during the explosion of violence that rocked east central Europe, and indeed the world, from August 1914 until the early 1920s. Fighting on the Eastern Front was more mobile than the stereotypical trench warfare English-speakers tend to associate with WWI. Advancing armies destroyed crops and natural resources, requisitioned or plundered food from the locals, and fomented ethnic violence in a region characterized by its multilingual and multidenominational diversity. Warfare in east central Europe did not cease after the Armistice in November 1918, as paramilitaries fought in what historian Jochen Boehler has characterized as the Central European Civil War.Footnote 17 The events that we now call WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the Polish-Soviet War were together with the ravages of malnutrition, influenza, typhoid and other disease outbreaks the cause for the loss of “12 percent, or 3.7 million people, of the population of the territory that would become the Second Polish Republic, from 1914 to 1918” and perhaps a million more people thereafter.Footnote 18
Bison, too, experienced a calamitous decline due to the near decade of warfare and state collapse in east central Europe. At the beginning of the war, there were 737 bison in the Białowieża Forest reserve; by April 1919 there were none.Footnote 19 Paweł Bark (1896-?), a self-described forester from the Białowieża intelligentsia commissioned to lead a small militia to defend the bison in the chaotic months after the armistice, attributed the “murder” of bison to “criminal instinct,” committed by individuals “inoculated” to violence by the Bolshevik Revolution.Footnote 20 In early spring 1919, Bark found the remains of what he attested was the last Białowieża bison, secreted in the shed of a local peasant, who had hidden a barrel of meat, the fresh hide, and skull behind a floor-to-ceiling stack of firewood. “The libraries of the world are full of books,” he wrote, “whose authors strive to convey as vividly as possible the cataclysm of war and horror of revolutions, in which thousands of people perish in horrible deaths, victim to the hatred and animal instincts of other people.”Footnote 21 Bark bemoaned the loss of human life “due to the bestiality of the revolutionary mob,” but felt that animals may have suffered more:
I have yet to see, not even in the hunting literature, descriptions of the atrocities that our game animals had to survive in those times. People were killing each other, after all, in the throes of patriotism or fanaticism. Yet animals, subject only to God, were defenselessly slaughtered in masses by numerous bands of poachers. Humanity has long since come to terms with its losses. The animals on our Eastern Borderlands have yet to recover from these blows.Footnote 22
Bark’s language here, published in the preeminent Polish hunting magazine twenty years after his failure to stop the slaughter of the last bison, warrants attention. Beyond his attribution of bestiality to humans while arguing that animal suffering was greater than what humans experienced during one of the region’s most destructive periods ever or his argument that humans had mostly recovered while animals had not, we should note his use of the first-person possessive plural in referring to the bison and their homeland. In claiming the bison and eastern borderland woodlands as “ours,” Bark was making a nationalistic and class-based argument about the bison as a Polish loss and like many of his generation, he saw their restoration as a particularly Polish responsibility.
Professor Władysław Szafer (1886–1970), a botanist-naturalist who was among the most important advocates in creating a national park with a strict nature preserve in Białowieża, also went to the forest in early 1919, and, like Bark, he saw the restoration of bison as a matter of national patrimony. Szafer and his team failed to find any bison, but he began generating plans for the forest’s national and scientific use in the hope that bison might be restored to a novel kind of preserve; not for kings, but for the sake of nature and the nation. Szafer was canny about using the German lumber infrastructure there to exploit some perimeter parts of the forest for the cash-poor state, while also advocating for a strictly protected nature reserve that would allow study for biologists, entomologists, dendrologists, and botanists like himself.Footnote 23 The restoration of the bison, as a charismatic species, would help to make this vision for the forest more likely.
In October 1920, writing as the director of the State Commission for the Protection of Nature (Państwowa Komisja Ochrony Przyrody [PKOP], which later became The State Council for the Protection of Nature, [Państwowa Rada Ochrony Przyrody or PROP]), Szafer pleaded to his representative in the Sejm (parliament) to extend state protection to the bison in Silesian Pszczyna on the Hochberg estate, so that they could eventually be restored to “their fatherland, namely the Białowieża Primeval Forest, and there find requisite protection.”Footnote 24 Pszczyna, located in the violently-contested territory of Upper Silesia, had been part of Germany before the war and was under German administration and police control at the time of Szafer’s letter, pending the results of a League of Nations mandated plebiscite. Using deliberately nationalistic language in appealing to the representative “as a person who had given his whole soul in the service of the Fatherland,” Szafer called for him to intervene with the coalition now ruling over Silesia to keep the Pszczyna bison alive. All Polish naturalists and scientists, he claimed, would be incomparably grateful for his assistance in “rescuing the last of this royal animal.”Footnote 25 Szafer’s patriotic language here thus laid claim to the bison on the Hochberg estate as remnants of a much older royal herd belonging to Polish kings, which ought to be under Polish protection to ensure the species’ survival and returned to the “fatherland,” just as Silesia was to be “restored” to Polish administration.
The herd on the Pszczyna Castle Estate were the only semi-wild bison in what could be constituted as Polish territory. In 1865, Tsar Alexander II had given four bison from the Białowieża Forest to the Prince of Pless. By the beginning of the war, the herd had grown to fifty-six. Privileged hunting continued during the war, while the estate was managed by the German military—the aristocratic war ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen shot a bison there in late May 1917, less than a year before being shot himself over France—but was less frequent and the herd grew.Footnote 26 By the end of the war, there were seventy-four bison on the estate. As in Białowieża, poaching and lack of governmental control led to a precipitous decline in the following five years. During the instability of what locals called “the Plebiscite,” as nationalists fought for dominance accompanying the vote to determine whether Upper Silesia would belong to Poland, poachers and even a local “Food Commission” dramatically thinned the herd, reducing it to just three animals by the end of 1922.Footnote 27 Prince Hochberg had supported the creation of an independent Silesian republic, before adamantly supporting the German side after the uprisings of 1920, no doubt helping local Polish nationalists to justify the consumption of some of his bison. As in Białowieża, postwar instability proved catastrophically detrimental to the bison population in Pszczyna. While the Polish state lacked control in either area during the most destructive periods, there was no disputing the fact that in the five years after the declaration of statehood, the fate of bison in its newly-claimed territory had only gotten worse.
Poland’s Role in the International Effort to Save European Bison
In 1923, international efforts to save European bison began in earnest. The Polish zoologist, ornithologist, and hunter Jan Sztolcman (1854–1928) sought to collaborate with international experts in this endeavor, though he saw the task in a particularly Polish light that underscored the relationship between patriotism, conservatism, and conservation. Just as a Polish state had arisen after 123 years of non-existence, so too, Sztolcman and his Polish contemporaries hoped, could its most unique species, the European Lowland bison, arise from the ashes in a restored fatherland. As he wrote in 1924: “Everyone who loves nature feels the tragedy of the bison with sorrow; yet it is inscribed a hundred times deeper into the hearts of those Poles, who see in these majestic inhabitants of the forest one of the few links that connect these present, highly materialistic times with the heroic epoch of our famous kings.”Footnote 28
A hunter and naturalist, Sztolcman had founded Łowiec Polski (Polish Hunter) in 1889 and was its editor.Footnote 29 As the authors of a recent study of the magazine’s coverage of bison point out, its mere existence was a patriotic act. In creating a publication called “Polish Hunter” that included readers from across the three partitions, the magazine laid claim to a national brand of hunting and conservation. Unsurprisingly, given Sztolcman’s romantic language about the “heroic epoch of our famous kings” (and his dismissal of his own “materialistic” age) in the quotation above, the magazine included numerous articles, both before and after the war, about the hunting exploits of Polish kings and other figures from Polish history, cultivating “the myth of a golden age of Polish hunting.”Footnote 30 When Łowiec Polski returned to publication in 1924, after a decade-long hiatus due to the war, Sztolcman immediately took up the matter of restoring the Białowieża bison. He published the story cited above about the bison’s past and future that spring, and excerpts of his monograph, Żubr, jego historia, obyczaje i przyszłość (The Bison: Its History, Behaviors, and Future), appeared in 1926, the year of its publication.
In late May 1923, with Szafer’s blessing, Sztolcman attended the First International Congress for the Protection of Flora and Fauna, Natural Spaces, and Memorials in Paris, where, on June 1, he introduced a Polish project for the preservation of the species based on the strategies of the League for the Protection of the American Bison. The proposal called upon French, English, and American delegates, especially William Temple Hornaday, the director of the New York Zoological Society and founder of the American Bison Society in 1905, for assistance in setting up an international society for the protection of European bison. Shortly after the conference, in private communication with specialists in Poland, Sztolcman laid out a case to collaborate with the London Society for the Protection of Animals, because the English possessed sufficient financial resources and there was a collection of ten bison on the Woburn Abbey Estate of Lord Bedford, Herbrand Russell. He also acknowledged the importance of including Germans, whose country’s zoos and menageries had more bison than any other state, in any international organization for the protection of European bison.Footnote 31 Several months later, in late August, Kurt Priemel, the director of the Frankfurt am Main Zoo, along with his wife, Anna, and other experts created an organization to restore European bison, the “Internationale Gesellschaft zur Erhaltung des Wisents” in Berlin. Władysław Janta-Połczyński (1854–1946), a hunter from Poznań from a wealthy noble family, attended as an unofficial Polish delegate. Germans had been persona non grata at the Congress in Paris, which invited only participants from Allied countries, but Priemel had since gotten the support of Hornaday and the English, thus preempting plans from the Parisian Congress for the Protection of Flora and Fauna to create an international society for the protection of wisents.Footnote 32
Within a few months, the German-led organization had become the preeminent institution in bison restoration, with delegates from Germany, Poland, Sweden, England, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. These delegates included not only nearly all major European zoos, but also the owners of aristocratic estates from Germany, England, Sweden, and other countries who had collections of Lowland bison.Footnote 33 Under the leadership of Kurt Priemel and Dr. Theodor Ahrens, an American naturalist residing in Berlin, the First International Congress for the Preservation of European Bison took place in Berlin in autumn 1925. Sztolcman attended the congress as the lone Polish representative, and despite his weak proficiency in German, felt that his hosts treated him well.Footnote 34 According to his official report, much of the discussion centered around assessing the numbers of extant wisents and discussing their care and feeding. As of January 1, 1925, there were some sixty-six European bison in zoos and private collections; one third of the total bison, twenty-two of them, were in Germany. There were eleven each in England and Sweden, and six in Poland, between the Pszczyna estate and the Poznań zoo.Footnote 35 Sztolcman concluded his report of the Congress optimistically, but with an injunction for Poland to do more. “We can be at peace that the future of bison as a species is assured,” he determined. “The only thing is that Poles, mindful of the centuries-old traditions associated with the existence of this royal animal in our country, should not be left behind in the present day and should abundantly support the institution established to save those remnants that have survived the storm of war.”Footnote 36
Yet a year later, the Polish government had still not joined the international effort in earnest. In his official report “On the matter of Polish participation in the International League for the Preservation of European Bison,” from the Second Congress, which took place in Vienna in 1926, Sztolcman enumerated the Society’s goals, which included registering all living bison in a breeding registry, establishing yearly congresses to track the bison’s movement, assessing finances, and discussing such matters as feeding, diseases, reasons for infertility, and maintenance of the purity of the species. Sztolcman politely noted that thus far, the Polish government had withheld its full support for the organization out of respect for “their friends, the French” but urged that they get fully behind this “apolitical institution” and seize the opportunity to take a leading role in determining the future location of bison restoration in Poland.Footnote 37 Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s coup d’etat in May of that year could have contributed to the government’s inaction, but, regardless of the reasons, Poles were not at the forefront of bison restoration in 1926.
Two years later, Polish participation in the International League for the Preservation of European Bison (ILPEB) was still anemic. In 1928, the year of Sztolcman’s death, the hunter and journalist Kazimierz Świderski complained in Łowiec Polski that not enough Poles had joined the ILPEB. Whole areas of Poland lacked representation. “For example,” the article pointed out, “nary a hunter from Eastern Little Poland can be found on the member list.” It is worth noting that this region had formerly been part of Austrian Galicia and had a high population of Ukrainians and Jews, who were far less likely to see themselves as “Polish” hunters or naturalists. In language that stressed Polish patrimony of the bison, while trying to stitch its post-imperial regions together as a united nation-state, Świderski harangued Polish hunters to get more involved in the cause of bison restoration: “All the remaining bison in Europe come from our Białowieża Forest. Only we Poles can feel free to believe that because we possess Białowieża, we can, and we must have bison in the wild. And yet we have allowed ourselves to completely neglect this matter.”Footnote 38 Despite such pessimism, Polish participation in the organization was eventually quite pronounced.Footnote 39 Historian Rafał Stolarz argues that it probably was precisely because of activism on the part of Świderski, Janta-Połczyński, and Kazimierz Szczerkowski, the Director of the Poznań Zoo, where one of the remaining Białowieża bison lived, that more Poles got involved by joining and donating to the League.Footnote 40 The 1929 Congress took place in Poznań, at the same time as a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Polish Republic. A report in Łowiec Polski in 1930 triumphantly noted that with 304 members, there were more Poles than any other nationality, with Germans in second place with 234.Footnote 41
Back to Białowieża?
Among the major debates in the late 1920s was the question of when to restore bison to Białowieża Forest. While nearly all major stakeholders agreed that the bison should eventually return to their ancestral forest, there was near unanimity among Polish academics, hunters, and zoologists that this process should be deliberate and delayed. For scientific reasons, the problem of introducing essentially domesticated animals from various zoos and menageries into forest enclosures where they could spread diseases, fail to get along with each other, or struggle with new diets presented a challenge.Footnote 42 Even more prevalent in their arguments was the sense that locals in Białowieża could not be trusted, an argument that they claimed came from recent experience of poaching after the war, but which was also inflected with a class- and ethnic-based mistrust of the nationally-indifferent Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish population whose local dialect blended Polish and Belarusian elements. The forest, which they praised for its wildness, was, in terms of its human occupants, insufficiently civilized. The infamous interwar divide between “Poland A” and “Poland B,” which arose from contemporary economists’ acknowledgement of clear disparities of wealth, literacy, and modernization between the cities and western parts of the country (Poland A) in comparison to the rural areas, especially in the eastern and more ethnically mixed parts (Poland B) was manifest in the debate over bison restoration, too.Footnote 43 Wealthy hunters from the nobility, smarting from their inability to establish a preserve there on their own terms, and zoologists and other elites in Poznań, who wanted to keep the animals in their zoo and on the Hochberg estate in Pszczyna for longer, disparaged the locals in Białowieża as untrustworthy, even while they revered their forest home.Footnote 44
In July 1924, the Management of the Zoological Garden in Poznań, composed of the mayor, vice-mayor, two bank directors, two city councilors, a military veterinarian, a professor, the director of the city slaughterhouse, and Władysław Janta-Połczyński (who was referred to simply as a “great hunter”), wrote to the Minister of Agriculture and State Holdings to protest the Ministry’s rejection of their request for a subvention to purchase a pair of bison from a private estate in Germany, in favor of sending the animals to Białowieża.Footnote 45 Stressing how important it was for Poland to lead the way in bison restoration, the signatories urged the government to slow down its plans to reintroduce the animals to Białowieża. They agreed that the bison should go to the forest “at some time, but not now, when neither the safety nor the economic status of Białowieża inspires trust.”Footnote 46 The signatories stated that they had reason to doubt the competence and honesty of foresters in Białowieża, citing a recent article in Przegląd Myśliwski i Łowiectwo Polskie (Hunting Review and Polish Huntsmanship) that lamented the loss of wildlife there since 1913 and the lack of resources and initiative to deal with rampant poaching.Footnote 47 The signatories noted that the standard of “forest management, as well as the cultural conditions of the population there, together with the location of the territory (the Eastern Borderlands) offered no guarantee that the catastrophe that befell the bison in 1918–20 would not repeat itself.”Footnote 48 They regretted the agricultural minister’s lack of communication with them and reaffirmed that his plan to rush animals to the forest was in error. The Eastern Borderlands were insufficiently cultured or controlled to manage the return of the bison.
The Ministry of Agriculture’s efforts to purchase bison and to introduce them to an enclosure in Białowieża arose from a desire to show both the Polish public and the international community that the Polish state was doing something meaningful. Government officials were embarrassed that Białowieża bison had been exterminated, not when the Germans still had control of the forest, but afterwards, when it was ostensibly under Polish control. Partisans and peasants had poached the last of the wild wisents, and despite efforts by some Polish authorities to paint the German army as the perpetrators in the bison’s demise, informed government officials, scientists, and others knew otherwise. Poles were sensitive to their depiction in international scientific circles. To their chagrin, Ahrens had published articles in English that blamed Poland for allowing the species to be eliminated in the wild, while underplaying the role of the German army in seriously reducing the Białowieża herd.Footnote 49 Juljan Ejsmond (1890–1930), who followed Sztolcman as editor of Łowiec Polski and was close to several government officials, argued that the Ministry of Agriculture’s success in locating four bison into a large “virgin forest” enclosure in October 1929 would “put to rest” the “countless anti-Polish statements at various international congresses” that had blamed Poland for allowing “the extinction of this magnificent animal and not giving it sufficient protection.”Footnote 50
The day after Ejsmond’s article appeared in Łowiec Polski, a scion of one of Poland’s most powerful aristocratic families, the hunter and automobile enthusiast Maurycy Potocki (1894–1949), published a self-referential response to it in the popular Varsovian newspaper Kurjer Warszawski. Claiming that Ejsmond’s “colorful” and “literary” celebration of the event warranted a dose of hard facts, Potocki expressed major reservations about Białowieża as a safe place for Poland’s “royal beast.” As an official visitor to the region in 1922 to set up Białowieża as a hunting preserve for the President of Poland, he witnessed the anarchy that had led to the bison’s demise. Asserting it was not the war nor the Germans that had caused the extinction, but rather the chaos afterwards, Potocki stressed that the Germans left about 150 bison before a free-for-all in the forest, including the participation of some former foresters in the slaughter, wiped out the large game. His interactions with local citizens, officials, and foresters did not inspire confidence.Footnote 51 In a follow-up article responding to criticism from Ejsmond and others, Potocki doubled down on his sense that their purportedly triumphant return was overblown and fraught with danger. One could hardly call the placement of a couple of bison in a thirty-square-hectare enclosure a return to the wilderness, he pointed out, while releasing them in anything larger than that would be unsafe for them.Footnote 52
A month later, Poznań University ornithology professor Janusz Domaniewski (1891–1954) stressed in his article in Łowiec Polski, “On the Future of Bison in Poland,” that Poland had to be careful and deliberate in taking on the responsibility of creating a herd in Białowieża. If it “ended in catastrophe, it would be an irretrievable loss, and Poland would be accused of having contributed, due to negligence or reckless treatment of the matter, to the further reduction of living bison.”Footnote 53 Domaniewski called for the creation of a special committee for the reintroduction of bison, under the administration of the Ministry for Agriculture and Ministry of Education, noting that the matter might be of interest to the Ministry of External Affairs, as well. Of particular importance for Domaniewski was the inclusion of scientific specialists and trained zoologists. In his opinion, Białowieża remained an “inappropriate location” for the young herd. “We must recall that [Białowieża] is where the bison died out. There it is game, and there the tradition of poaching is still too fresh.” The privately held Pszczyna bison, from whom the Białowieża herd would in part be created, would be safer from poachers and more comfortable in their known habitat if they stayed in the Pszczyna forest. If a new location had to be found, a committee of experts should choose it. “The bison should return to Białowieża,” he agreed. “May it happen as soon as possible! But for now, I consider that forest too risky a prospect.”Footnote 54
The matter of returning bison to Białowieża was of great political and propagandistic importance to the Polish government. In restoring bison, bears, and moose to Białowieża while also introducing sturdy Przewalski’s horses there, Poland sought to assert its modernity by functioning as a “nature state.”Footnote 55 Taking the establishment of Yellowstone and the protection of American bison as models, Szafer and Sztolcman had explicitly sought to enhance Polish prestige by creating analogous national parks, such as the preserve at Białowieża, and organizations to preserve nature on the national and international level, including PROP and a European equivalent to the American Bison Society. Domaniewski’s shrewd inclusion of multiple ministries in the desired creation of a committee for the matter of reintroduction, including the Ministry of External Affairs, made clear that he understood the importance of linking the return of the bison to Białowieża to governmental prestige. He wanted to be sure that the herd was large and strong enough to be able to endure a few losses before returning it to the primeval forest, and once it went to Białowieża, he was clear that it should be in an enclosed menagerie before allowing it to roam the forest.
In returning bison to Białowieża in 1929, the government obviously violated the desires of numerous experts, but it seems to have taken their arguments about epizootic disease, poaching, and to a lesser extent, the purity of the species, seriously. Only one of the four bison released into the enclosure was of the purebred Lowland line, while the rest were Lowland-Caucasian hybrids. Officials made no effort to inform the public that they were looking at hybrid animals, and according to their plan, after a year the non-purebreds would be sent away, leaving purebreds to grow the herd. The idea was merely to see whether bison could suitably live in Białowieża. In 1930, the Ministry of Agriculture established a veterinary microbiological laboratory in Białowieża to research the health of megafauna in the forest.Footnote 56 In March 1938, the Ministry of Agriculture in Warsaw responded to a regional epizootic outbreak by ordering the branch in Białowieża to close menageries of bison, hybrids, and American bison to the public, limit access to the territory of menageries, require disinfection of shoes and wagon carts with “1–4% sodium lye,” require workers to change into uniforms and rubber boots before entering, and institute special oversight in sourcing all food for the animals in the reserve.Footnote 57 Politics and optics had outweighed the caution experts and other stakeholders called for in restoring bison to Białowieża in 1929, but the government took their fears of poaching and disease seriously.
While the timing of the government’s restoration of bison to Białowieża was against the wishes of experts, there was no disagreement about the need to civilize the population living and working in the forest where those bison would live. As Kathryn Ciancia, Timothy Snyder, and other scholars have shown, during the 1920s and 30s Polish authorities treated the Eastern Borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie) as the site of a great civilizing mission, where ethnic Poles sought to turn Belarusians and Ukrainians into loyal Polish citizens.Footnote 58 The Organizational and Social Department for Cultural and Educational Matters responsible for the region around Białowieża advocated for lending libraries and elementary schools (and by the late 1930s, radio transmitters for those schools), while organizing numerous lectures, readings, literacy classes, choral groups, and film screenings with the explicit goal of promoting patriotism.Footnote 59 Among the twenty-one listed cultural enlightenment lecture topics for workers and their families at the sawmill in Grudki, at least two-thirds were related to Polish history, the Polish economy, Poland’s geographic situation, or the like; three addressed concepts such as culture, folk culture, and national culture; and two had to do with hygiene and self-improvement.Footnote 60 Many of these cultural outreach efforts appear to have been popular: a cultural worker in Jeziory recorded a total of 3,478 attendees at twenty-eight lectures and discussions in his May 1939 report, while two films for sawmill workers in Hajnówka, accompanied by “chats” and “monologs” about work insurance and social welfare assistance, averaged 1,100 viewers apiece and one for children had 2,000.Footnote 61 Of course, government archives mainly reveal what the cultural workers wanted their bosses to see. Still, the underlined section of another report acknowledged that workers quickly veered from the topic of the lectures to complain about “their pains,” including “pay [and] political matters,” or to express “a negative attitude toward the Forest Service.” Seeking to paint these reactions in a positive light, the cultural worker wrote he was grateful he was there to address such concerns immediately by placing them in their “wider context.”Footnote 62
Managing Bison: Breeding and Weeding the Herd
The ability of forest laborers to exercise agency by talking back at state-sponsored events or by using the state’s initiatives for their own purposes, as surely happened when they attended films or checked out books from lending libraries, offers an intriguing comparison to the limited agency of bison in Poland. In their attempt to restore the Białowieża herd, state officials treated the animals as subjects whose lives were up to them. Their efforts to re-create something wild, to restore the animals to their proper place, required civilizing the beasts by feeding them, dictating their breeding partners, logging their pedigree in studbooks, removing unruly or infertile animals from their herds, and at times even killing them. They valued certain bison, fertile bulls, over others, obsessed as they were with the salvation of the species itself. Debates about the rectitude of killing and breeding bison predominated in the 1930s, as zoologists, hunters, owners of the bison, and the public advocated differing ideals in this process.
In late February 1931, a scandal threatened to derail the gains that Polish authorities felt they had made by restoring a few bison to Białowieża when news broke that Prince Hochberg of Pszczyna had permitted Margrave Alfred Wielopolski (1879–1955) from Warsaw to shoot two of his bison. The two bison felled by Wielopolski’s shots and arrayed in front of him and Prince Hochberg and attendants in traditional hunting attire for a commemorative photograph, a sickly 35-year-old cow and a 13-year-old bull that was lame in one leg and infertile, were no longer valuable for restoring the Lowland line. (Figure 1). Yet the Prince’s tone-deafness in reverting to a prewar attitude toward bison as game for aristocrats “caused a storm of protests throughout society, and above all among those who love nature and would like to protect it,” as the popular newsweekly Światowid (Worldview) put it.Footnote 63
Prince Hans Heinrich XV von Hochberg of Pless/Pszczyna (center, with binoculars), Margrave Alfred Wielopolski (between Hochberg and the priest), and retinue behind the two bison Wielopolski shot in February 1931. Hochberg’s decision to allow Wielopolski to shoot two of his infertile bison sparked intense controversy. (NAC 1-G-2720, From the Collection of the National Digital Archive, Poland).
Figure 1 Long description
A group of men stand behind two bison lying on the ground. Prince Hans Heinrich XV von Hochberg of Pless/Pszczyna is in the center with binoculars. Margrave Alfred Wielopolski is standing between Prince Hans Heinrich XV von Hochberg of Pless/Pszczyna and the priest. The men are wearing hats and coats. The bison are lying on their sides in the snow.
Numerous scholars, student groups, and politicians denounced the trophy hunt, framing it as a breach of culture and an embarrassment to the Polish nation. A statement from the rector of Jagiellonian University and signed by ninety professors denounced the act before the Sejm.Footnote 64 The Nature Conservation League called it a “freely chosen criminal act that discredited the Polish Republic before the entire civilized world.”Footnote 65 Dr. Adam Wodiczko (1887–1948), a professor of botany at the University of Poznań, wrote to his colleague Władysław Szafer as the director of PROP, noting that the “killing of two bison, from among the 59 full-blooded bison in the world, of which 12 are in Poland” was a loss not only to scientists, who could have examined the animals, but also to Poland’s reputation, “as the Germans have blamed us publicly for the extinction of the animals in Białowieża in 1919, and will now have more to blame us for.”Footnote 66 The esteemed zoologist and former rector of the University of Poznań Jan Gabriel Grochmalicki (1883–1936) observed, “in a time when the entire cultured world is expending its strength to rescue this vanishing species at all costs,” the killing of two bison as trophies seemed particularly tasteless.Footnote 67 More than 100 students of nature at Jagiellonian University signed a handwritten document to Szafer at PROP protesting the action, while the Student Naturalists’ Circle at the University of Warsaw sent Szafer a note calling for him to take the “most energetic steps possible to clear this matter in the public opinion.” Like others, the Warsaw students deplored the killing of “two royal animals … due to the whim and caprice of a man who calls himself cultured.” They also called out Prince Hochberg, “known for his anti-Polish beliefs,” for causing “irreparable damage to Polish science and violat[ing] the opinion of the Republic of Poland in the eyes of the entire cultural world.” As aspiring scientists, they viewed “the deliberate destruction of animal remains because they were not properly prepared” as “the worst sort of vandalism.”Footnote 68
Hunting, forestry, and animal rights organizations tended to be less bombastic in registering their opposition than academics and politicians but condemned the hunt all the same.Footnote 69 The Silesian Hunting Association in Katowice referred to the matter as “murder” even as it conceded that it was possible that the animals possessed no value for breeding.Footnote 70 The Society for the Preservation of Animals in Poznań noted that if it were true that the animals were, as attested, old and sick, they should have been euthanized by a veterinarian and not killed by hunters. And the ugly matter of trophies, they averred, did not look good.Footnote 71
Based on these protests and others, PROP sent a statement to the editors of seventy-three newspapers around the country, while Szafer found himself responding to numerous international queries, including from the Italian consulate and The Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the [British] Empire, in an effort at damage control. The secretary of the latter organization, whose official patron was “H.R.H. The Prince of Wales,” diplomatically enquired “as a matter of scientific interest,” whether the slain bison were “really a relic from the old indigenous herds which existed in Poland from before the Great War” or were “animals imported from elsewhere as is the case with those which your Government is so carefully preserving in the Białowieża National Park.” Szafer wrote back that they were pure Białowieża bison from a line introduced in 1865.Footnote 72
As tempers cooled and the need for moralizing lessened, two of the most public figures in bison restoration, Janta-Połczyński and Professor Szafer, disagreed with each other about the appropriate response, yet each used the incident to stress the state’s control of the animals, whether alive or dead, on its territory. In an article Łowiec Polski, Janta-Połczyński defended the hunt, calling Prof. Szafer’s calls for legal action baseless, while reminding his readers that Prince Hochberg, a German member of the International Society for the Preservation of European Bison, had the right to grant Margrave Wielopolski, a Pole, the opportunity to kill two infertile members of his herd. The scandal was hardly a matter of Polish negligence. Janta-Połczyński further justified the killing by asserting a different kind of possession, namely national patrimony. The government knew that the Prince had offered the trophy of the cow to a natural history museum in Silesia and that of the young bull to Margrave Wielopolski, thus keeping the animals in the country.Footnote 73 Szafer, in his letter to the seventy-three editors, clearly condemned the hunt, but acknowledged that the killing of the old cow and the donation of her body to the museum was understandable. Wielopolski’s decision to shoot the bull and keep him as a trophy, however, was unacceptable. Now that the deed was done, the bull should “absolutely” go to “a Polish museum.”Footnote 74 Szafer clearly had no sympathy for the rights of aristocrats to continue shooting bison. Meanwhile, he and his superiors in the government used the scandal to argue for state control of the Pszczyna herd, arguing that the killing of a bison, when severely maimed or sick, should be done only with the permission of the Minister of Agriculture.Footnote 75
Further state interest in the Pszczyna herd fixated on the fate of its breeding bulls, whose lives often depended on their utility in the effort to restore bison to Białowieża. In November and December 1933, the herd lost two young bulls when one gored the other and then injured himself attempting to leap a fence. The Silesian Provincial Authority kept the Ministry of Agriculture and PROP in Kraków informed of the situation, asking the former for permission to put the younger bull down after an operation failed to repair the open wound in his side, from which the contents of his stomach leaked out. The Provincial Authority noted that the oldest bull had gotten considerably thinner in the last year and was not a good candidate for breeding. The next bull had injured his sex organ. The third oldest bull, born in 1930, was supposed to be sold to Białowieża. The youngest had been injured by the second-oldest bull. By late December, the second-oldest bull, the one who had attacked a younger rival, had died “from gangrene to his infected sex-organ.” The Silesian Provincial Authority worried that it might be a venereal disease that could spread to the rest of the herd.Footnote 76 An article entitled “The Bison are dying out!” published in December 1933 in Światowid detailed the vicissitudes of the Pszczyna herd, albeit without mentioning the request to shoot the gored youngster or his assailant’s gangrenous penis, attributing his death to injuries sustained in a failed effort to leap a fence. Despite its alarming headline, the article stressed the government’s competence. “The bison, the royal beast that used to inhabit Polish forests,” the text began, “is now, despite the care given it by the Polish government, facing extinction.” Thanks to the two bulls’ deaths, “1933 has been an unlucky one for the Pszczyna bison,” the article concluded. “Now there are only nine of them.” Footnote 77
Over the next several years, questions of breeding and weeding the Pszczyna herd preoccupied Szafer and his colleague, Jan Żabiński (1897–1974), the director of the Warsaw Zoo and president of the Polish Branch of the International Society for the Preservation of European Bison. In response to a request from Pszczyna in 1935 to shoot Plebejer, the oldest bull, Żabiński argued that there was no need to kill him, as he did not present a threat to the younger bulls and could remain with the cows a few more years. “As bison are no longer game animals in Poland,” he declared, “to shoot one would bring not glory, but dishonor.”Footnote 78 If indeed the Silesian Museum wanted his skeleton and hide, there was no reason to kill the animal now, as those things could be harvested when he died of natural causes. There might be an opportunity to raise some money for bison preservation by allowing a hunter to shoot him for a fee, he acknowledged, but the moral costs were too high.Footnote 79
Over the next two years, Szafer, Żabiński, and Dr. Jan Zieleniewski, the director of Pszczyna Estate, tried to work out how and when to put Plebejer down. A group of local and national authorities met in December 1936 to discuss his fate, noting that wounds from the period of the Plebiscite and old age were making it difficult for him to control his hindquarters and keep up with the herd.Footnote 80 Żabiński wrote Szafer on June 26, 1937, observing that the now twenty-year-old bull had no value but that for propagandistic reasons alone, he remained against shooting him. If there were to be a shooting, he insisted, it should be performed by naturalists and the remains carefully preserved for museum and scholarly work.Footnote 81 In September 1937, Zieleniewski wrote to Szafer, now a rector at the university, to inform him that the Prince of Pszczyna had given permission to put down the old bull.Footnote 82 Two years after the first request, Plebejer was finally killed without publicity. The Silesian Museum insisted on keeping his head but offered the skeleton of the two-and-half-year-old bull Planorbis, who had died earlier that year of unknown causes, to the University in Kraków “for an appropriate fee.”Footnote 83 Leaders in the movement to restore bison in Poland had forestalled and then relented to Plebejer’s killing in a scientific manner. He was not to be a trophy, as bison had been before the war, and his remains were to be used for national scientific and educational purposes. Meanwhile, his grandson, Plisch, born in Pszczyna in June 1933 and brought to Białowieża in April 1937, mere months before Plebejer’s death, was vital in reestablishing the Białowieża herd, and through him, Plebejer remains the sole sire of the pure Lowland line.Footnote 84 (Figure 2) No longer useful for breeding, the grandfather of all pure Lowland bison was put down like a horse or a pet, two years after humans decided he was feeble..
The bull Plisch in the Białowieża Primeval Forest, from a photograph by Dr. J. J. Karpiński. Plisch, born in Pless/Pszczyna in 1933, was the grandson of Plebejer. All “pure” Lowland bison today descend from Plebejer. (Łowiec Polski 5, 1 March 1939, p. 148).
Figure 2 Long description
The image shows a bison named Plisch standing in a forest setting, partially obscured by a tree in the foreground. Plisch is positioned to the left side of the image. In the background, there are several trees and a fallen bison lying on the ground. The forest appears dense with a variety of trees, creating a natural habitat for the bison. The photograph is credited to Dr. J. J. Karpiński, as indicated in the bottom right corner.
Conclusion: For Nation and Species—The Parameters of Bison Restoration in Interwar Poland
The population of European bison in Poland lived or died based primarily on human perceptions of possession. Kings and tsars had protected them for their royal pleasure, so that they could impress the guests of their hunting parties that such magnificent beasts existed on their lands and could be felled by their royal shots. In a fortunate fluke, the gift of one tsar to a prince established a separate branch of the Lowland line, a collection of beasts that could roam in a different forest, but for the same purpose of prestige hunting, a purpose that lasted into the 1930s. In times of warfare, regime change, instability, and hunger, less privileged humans shot bison for sport, bloodlust, and above all, for meat. Nationalist hunters and naturalists disapproved of such irrational killing of the bison, and not without cause: in Białowieża, poachers shot the animals to extinction and in Pszczyna, just three remained by the end of the violence and instability that followed the Great War. Paweł Bark and Jan Sztolcman saw the destruction of the bison as outcomes of a violent, revolutionary, and materialist age, and Bark even mused that the outcome of these events had been worse for animals like the bison than for humans, who had since adapted and recuperated.
Part of that sense of recuperation arose from the fact that the people most involved in bison restoration in Poland tended to be Polish patriots, who saw the return of the bison as a national project, a worthy goal for a state that had also returned from extinction. For them, the metonymic relationship between the martyred bison, which should be restored to their “fatherland” (the Białowieża Forest) and the martyred Poland, the “Fatherland” which had since emerged from partition, warfare, and a Bolshevik threat proved compelling. Sztolcman, the founder of the “rational hunting” movement and the Polish instigator of the international effort to rescue European Lowland bison, along with Władysław Janta-Połczyński, Maurycy Potocki, and Paweł Bark, were conservative hunters who saw the national worth of European bison in the international effort to keep the species alive. They valued the wildness of Białowieża and wished to see the “royal animal” returned to its “fatherland,” but doubted the civilization of the region’s inhabitants, who had hunted the bison to extinction after the war. Like many Polish government officials at the time, they were insecure about their depiction in the west while seeking to civilize the inhabitants of the wilderness they revered in the Eastern Borderlands.
Figures like Władysław Szafer and Jan Żabiński also saw the bison through the lens of Polish patrimony, though for them, the traditional attitude toward bison had to shift from being a beast whose survival depended on the largesse of privileged hunters to one that survived or thrived based on the application of scientific principles. But they still viewed the animals as objects they sought to manage and control for the benefit of two superseding collectives, the species and the nation. While Żabiński declared the days of bison as a game animal over, he still agreed to shooting them when they were of no benefit to the established breeding regimen, a perspective he maintained after WWII when he and other experts advocated shooting a hybrid bull that had survived the war in Białowieża, “due to his absolute lack of breeding value” and the threat he posed to “all future European bison offspring.”Footnote 85 In a period in which nationalistic thinking encouraged individual sacrifice for the good of the nation while, in its more extreme forms, seeking to police the purity of “the race,” it was easy to think of animals in similar terms, as members of a herd whose collective strength and purity took precedence.Footnote 86 Given the desire to restore bison, as a reconstituted species, to their proper “fatherland,” Żabiński and Szafer fixated on healthy bulls that could propagate the eventual Białowieża herd.
Ultimately, the animals from which the surviving Białowieża herd was created in the 1930s rarely got to exercise their agency as independent beings. Humans destroyed their ability to choose their mates, and then rigorously controlled the mating of “purebred” animals to each other, scrupulously separating or culling the hybrid animals they had created once the purebred line seemed to have a fighting chance of persisting. Bison handlers named and numbered animals such as Plebejer, Plisch, and Planorbis as individuals, but measured their value primarily as contributors to the perpetuation of the species or the reputation of the Polish state. When a young bull bullied a rival to death and then died on a human fence, his exercise of independence nearly cost the species its existence. Such were the limits of self-determination for bison in interwar Poland.
Epilogue
It was not until 1952 that the first pair of bison was released from their enclosure into the forest, and by then, under the auspices of the new People’s Republic of Poland, the rhetoric of restoration had changed, too. In a state that had removed the crown from the head of the eagle on its crest, hunter-naturalists no longer spoke of restoring the “royal animal” to its “fatherland.” In 1947, just one year after he had recommended killing a “bastard” bull to prevent miscegenation of the species, Żabiński published Walka o Żubra (The Fight for the Bison), a book for high school pupils that characterized the pre-war history of bison as “the preserve of the rich” and took pot shots at the wealthy, from nineteenth-century lords and tsars to Hochberg and the “magnate” he invited to cull the herd, while squarely blaming WWI for the animals’ destruction in the wild. Poaching peasants deluded by Bolshevism were nowhere to be found in his account. The otherwise scientifically-informed book, which was published by the state educational publishing house, assisted the public’s perception of bison as an animal of the people, rather than as game for elites.Footnote 87 Bison could remain a symbol of Polish pride, but they were no longer the preserve of gentlemen hunters. Over time, with human interventions largely limited to medical examinations and putting out feed during harsh winters, the Białowieża bison could choose their diet and mates, crossing freely between national parks in Poland and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The erection of a border wall in 2022–23 to keep human refugees from entering the Schengen Zone via Belarus is now keeping most of the Białowieża herd, which has averaged about 1000 animals over the past two years, in Poland.Footnote 88 Politics, conflict, and human perceptions of possession continue to shape the bison’s destiny.
Nathaniel D. Wood is Associate Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses on modern eastern Europe, WWI, nationalism, urban history, and the history of technology. He is the author of Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow and is currently writing a monograph about cycling, motoring, and aviation in the Polish lands from 1885 to 1939. This is his first work of environmental history.
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