Deutscher Falkenorden

Deutscher Falkenorden was Germany’s national falconry association, given state patronage during the Nazi period. Although Germany had no more than fifty falconers, falconry carried a powerful public symbolism: the association, its purpose-built centre, and its presence at the 1937 International Hunting Exhibition made the sport a vehicle for national display and political imagery.

Identity and State Patronage

The association’s standing was not simply a reflection of the number of people who practised falconry in Germany. Its state patronage gave the activity an institutional presence, while its purpose-built Reichsfalkenhof at Riddagshausen, a vast half-timbered State Falconry Centre in the forest, supplied a prominent physical counterpart. The contrast between the small falconing population and the flourishing symbolism of the sport underscores that its significance in the Reich exceeded its practical scale.

The 1937 Exhibition

At the 1937 International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin, Deutscher Falkenorden appeared as part of a larger presentation of falconry as German heritage and power. The exhibition catalogue’s cover showed a stylised, naked Übermensch holding a golden hawk. Inside the exhibition halls, thousands of antlers and red banners bearing swastikas framed displays of German hawks, falcons, and eagles. The association’s institutional role therefore sat within a spectacle that connected birds of prey to an idealised national image.

Germany and Britain were the only countries with falconry exhibits. Germany won first prize; the British Falconers’ Club came second. The demonstrations also exposed a gap between theatrical representation and the treatment of quarry: a saker falcon caught a tethered pigeon, while an eagle was released at a rabbit so tame that it continued nibbling grass until the eagle landed.

Renz Waller and the Association’s Reach

Renz Waller headed Deutscher Falkenorden and helped arrange falconry’s state patronage and design the Reichsfalkenhof. His connection to T. H. White gives the organization an unexpected reach beyond Germany’s exhibition display: Waller had sent White his goshawk Gos, and White later wrote to him asking for another bird. Waller replied that he would try to obtain one. The association’s history thus intersects with the book’s account of private falconry, even as its public role linked the sport to state-supported spectacle.

Falconry as Political Symbol

The book sets the association’s prominence against falconry’s wider social history. In Britain, flying falcons properly required access to extensive open land—grouse moors, partridge estates, or farmland—resources more readily available to the wealthy and well connected. The older distinction between aristocratic falconers and solitary trainers of goshawks also shaped how different birds and their handlers were judged. In Nazi Germany, falconry acquired another political charge: Hermann Göring treated it as a Romantic sport of ancient Teutonic kings and regarded hawks as natural elites, embodiments of power and violence. Deutscher Falkenorden’s state patronage and institutional work belonged to this setting, where the image of the hawk could serve not only as a sporting emblem but as a representation of hierarchy and national power.