German Dogs
In 1930, unbeknownst to their enemies, Germany's High Command and Army Headquarters began to rebuild their army of dogs. Shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power, the Germans established a central training school for the dogs at Grunheide, near Berlin. Another training camp for the animals was created near Frankfurt. Both of these training schools were able to comfortably accommodate two thousand dogs at once. These schools operated in secret, under the guise of training German civil and railroad policemen. In the ten-year period of training dogs leading up to World War II, the Germany military trained up to twenty thousand dogs. According to the Berlin dog paper Die Hunderwelt, Germany hosted a huge recruiting rally to motivate owners to allow their dogs to work for the military. This resulted in an influx of 15,993 Dobermans, Boxers, Airedales, and Shepherds coming to join Germany's military. In 1939, when Hitler launched his attack against Europe, their canine counterparts were there with them. At this time, the canine units of the Germany army primarily were trained to be scouts, guards, and messengers.
As the war progressed and Hitler occupied Poland, more and more dogs became guard dogs, tasked with policing the cities. As the war drew on even further, there would come to be an SS dog unit stationed at every concentration camp. The dogs at the concentration camps, trained to attack those within the camps, were an inmate's worst enemy. They gained a reputation for being trained to be as vicious and violent as possible. Heinrich Himmler said that the main purpose of these guard dogs at the camps was "to encircle prisoners like a flock of sheep and so prevent escape." These dogs also helped to guard the trains full of people heading to concentration camps.
German shepherds, known as "Deutscher Schäferhund" in German, were widely considered by the Nazis to be the most loyal and hardworking breed of dog. Germany employed the use of so many dogs to fight in World War II that there were hardly any dogs, especially German Shepherds, left in the country in the aftermath of the war.
