Did Adolf Hitler ‘Put a Bounty Out on Belgian Laekenois Dogs’?

A reader recently wrote to me asking about a claim he’d read in the mainstream media that Adolf Hitler had put a bounty out on a specific breed of Belgian dog called the Laekenois which is a Belgian Shepherd and a cousin of the well-known Malinois.

The source for this particular claim appears to be the ‘American Kennel Club’ (hereafter the AKC) and… well… only them.

‘USA Today’ for example recycles this claim when it writes:

‘The Belgian Laekenois, deployed as a messenger dog in both World Wars, got its name from the Northwest suburb of Brussels, Laeken, where the breed originated. Adolf Hitler placed a bounty on the dogs during World War II, according to the AKC, which significantly decreased the breed's population.’ (1)

The problem is that aside from the fact that – like the better-known Malinois – the Laekenois was allegedly used as a messenger dog in both World War I and II; there is absolutely no evidence or even source for the AKC’s claim that Hitler ‘put a bounty out’ on them for some reason; presumably because of the idea that the ‘Belgian resistance used them as messenger dogs’.

The truth is very simple in that there is no evidence that Hitler put out a bounty on the Laekenois at all precisely because Hitler was well-known to be animal (and especially a dog) lover (2) and no one but the AKC appears to know about this. (3)

Indeed, one prominent writer in the dog world named Steven McGonigal sarcastically remarked on his personal blog that:

‘This story is every bit as true as the AKC's note that the Laekenois "was the target of a bounty by Hitler" in World War II.’ (4)

To then proceed on to make fun of the AKC’s Hitler claim even more:

‘The most famous Management Shepherd was Ricardo, a dog responsible for saving scores of men during the Battle of the Marnes when it dove into a bunker and disabled a machine gunner by biting it in the testicles -- a story later magnified in the telling by Germans who spoke of the "Teufelshunde" or "devil dogs" being used by the other side. Was that machine gunner Hitler? Is that how he came to have only one testicle? Is that why he put a bounty on them in World War II? We may never know. What we do know is that for his bravery, Ricardo was given the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold, Belgium's highest military honor.’ (5)

Indeed even books that cover history of the breed appear to suggest that there is no connection between the Laekenois and the military per se and that what people are thinking of is another type of Belgian shepherd called the Groenendael which was widely used as a messenger dog in World War I, but they have no reference to it being used in World War II at all. (6)

My thought here is that what McGonigal is referencing about World War I and the Germans having an issue with Belgian dogs during the Battle of the Marne – although there is no specific statement of which Battle of the Marne (the one in 1914 or the one in 1918) - but my guess is that it references the first in 1914 which makes more sense of the references to Belgium, because the context is that – as Peter Hoeres writes - in 1914:

‘During the advance German armies encountered greater resistance than expected. The German troops were also exposed to attacks by francs-tireurs. The German troops responded with harsh measures. According to John Horne and Alan Kramer 6500 civilians were killed.’ (7)

The German – largely conscript - army of early World War I were notoriously jittery about the Belgian francs-tireurs – what we’d called partisans today – which led to other unfortunate – but famous - incidents such as the (now believed to be largely accidental) destruction of the town of Louvain and its famous university on 25th August 1914. (8)

So that would make sense of such a strange order if indeed there ever was one – assuming that the Laekenois and/or the Groenendael would have been identified as common dogs used to relay messages between francs-tireurs by the Germans - and it would have been a temporary measure at best.

Then someone somewhere got the idea that ‘Hitler had put a bounty on their heads’ after World War II, but this claim appears to be extremely recent and to have first begun in and around 2020 with the first mention I can find being from the AKC with no supporting source cited.

Thus, we can see that Adolf Hitler did not put a bounty on Belgian Laekenois dogs to encourage them to be killed and this appears to be a myth created by the American Kennel Club out of thin air possibly to promote the Laekenois breed as a ‘heroic anti-Nazi dog’.

References

(1) https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/07/02/belgian-laekenois-american-kennel-club-recognizes-rare-breed/5354406002/

(2) For an easy summary see: https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/04/feeling-their-pain-animal-rights-and-the-nazis/

(3) For example: https://www.europetnet.org/pet-resources/dog-breeds/item/1498-belgian-shepherd-dog-laekenois.html; https://scrumbles.co.uk/blogs/dog/laekenois-breed-guide

(4) https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-akc-is-ready-to-ruin-laeknois.htm

(5) Ibid.

(6) Bonnie Wilcox, Chris Walkowicz, 1989, ‘Atlas of Dog Breeds of the World’, 1st Edition, T. F. H. Publications: Neptune City, p. 173

(7) https://www.geschichte.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/04120600/downloads/Francs-tireurs_Overview__Hoeres_.pdf, p. 2

(8) https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germans-burn-belgian-town-of-louvain