German shepherd dogs were deeply rooted in the German identity. Adolf Hilter exploited the German shepherd's identity for propaganda purposes. This particular dog is a German shepherd with wolfish coloration, which further adds to the mistique. This dog is not Blondi, Hitler's pet GSD. She was an entirely different color and size.
I need to mention that I have repeated the line about the wolfd0gs of the Rhine many times on this blog. The mention is supposedly in Tacitus’s Germania
I did so without checking the primary source, but because so many credible dog authorities used this stories, I posted it verbatim.
Those authorities got their information from other credible authorities, so no one checked the primary source. I don’t blame anyone for making this mistake. It is often very hard to find credible historiographies of dogs. Many dog histories are about making fantastic claims.
The golden retriever historians are to be commended for their very good historical research, and the widespread acceptance in the breed societies of the verified breed origin stories. As far as I know, this is the only breed where the actual historical record was used to debunk a myth about the retrievers being derived from Russian circus dogs and for this debunking to have such broad acceptance. All too often, breed fanciers hold onto fanciful stories, even if the history seems overly fantastic and requires many assumptions– and contradicts the genetic evidence.
For the record, one of these sources did not claim any relationship between these “wolfdogs” and the German shepherd. It was just mentioned as a type of dog that was in Europe. I figured that it could have been laika-type spitz or one of the early German herding spitz breeds.
