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For Juliane
PROLOGUE ANIMAL PEOPLE
City dwellers in general, and Berliners in particular, love animals more than their fellow men.
—Wolfgang Gewalt, former director of the Duisburg Zoo, in an interview with Die Zeit, 1966
The following anecdote stems from the late 1980s, with the world on the brink of crisis, when it seemed that the Berlin Wall would stand for at least another hundred years, and West Berlin’s Zoo and East Berlin’s Tierpark were not only their respective countries’ most popular recreational facilities, but also symbols of their systems of government. The city of Berlin had been divided for nearly thirty years, and the only sign of unity was the two zoo directors’ dedication to cultivating their mutual aversion. It is hard to know who started the feud; as so often in life, though, it all came down to who had the biggest of whatever was being compared—in this case, elephants.
The setting was the West Berlin Zoological Garden, where Heinz-Georg Klös, the director, had recently enlarged his elephant enclosure and bought a few new animals, which he was now showcasing. Klös was an avid animal collector, and his zoo had the largest number of species in the world. He attached great importance to having more elephants than his counterpart in the East, because, in the world of zoos, elephants are prize possessions. Having more elephants meant winning a battle. Back in the 1960s, Willy Brandt, West Berlin’s mayor at the time, was said to have gone over the head of his own Department of Finance to secure the money needed to purchase additional elephants, with the sole aim of flaunting this acquisition in front of the East Berlin Tierpark and its director. At least, that’s how Klös remembered it.
Courtesy now dictated that Heinrich Dathe, the director of the Tierpark (“animal park”), be invited to the unveiling of West Berlin’s new elephant enclosure. Dathe’s presence could be to Klös’s advantage: the director of the Zoo would be able to make sure his rival saw just how badly he had been bested—after all, Dathe had been struggling for more than ten years to get funding for a new pachyderm pavilion despite East Germany’s floundering economy.
Dathe did not think much of Klös, professionally or personally. And Dathe, who was sixteen years older, made his junior counterpart fully aware of his disdain—he once made a show of serving dumplings at a gathering, pointing out the resemblance between the German word for dumplings (Klösschen) and his guest’s last name.
And so, when Dathe criticized the new elephants in the Zoological Garden for looking “a little puny,” Klös had reached the limit of his patience. One word led to another, and eventually a shoving match ensued between the two aging men—neither much taller than five foot five—right there among the elephants.
Top Dogs Behind Tall Walls
In retrospect, we have to wonder which was more responsible for driving these two men apart: their similarities or their differences. Both came to divided Berlin in the 1950s: Heinrich Dathe in 1954 from the city of Leipzig, several hours to the south, in order to create the world’s largest and most modern zoo in the capital of the newly formed communist German Democratic Republic (GDR); Klös three years later from Osnabrück, a smaller city way off in the country’s west, to restore the oldest zoo in the Federal Republic of Germany to its former glory. The Tierpark and the Zoo became their missions in life, and before long an intense rivalry developed. Jürgen Lange, the longtime director of West Berlin’s aquarium, described the relationship between the two: “If one of them buys a miniature donkey, the other buys a mammoth donkey.”
Dathe was an educator by nature. A short, stocky, prematurely balding man with a round head and horn-rimmed glasses, he tried to hide his receding hairline by combing his remaining strands of hair over the bald spot above his forehead. But he made no attempt to conceal his singsong, backwoods Saxon accent, pronouncing cockatoos “gagadoos” and camels “gamels.” Dathe was sought after not just locally, but throughout the world, owing both to his expertise and to his control of the central quarantine station for the transport of animals from the Eastern Bloc to Western Europe. He also published the influential trade journal Der Zoologische Garten. Everyone reached out to Dathe, and everyone wanted something from him.
On the other side of the Berlin Wall, Klös ran the richest and most important zoo in West Germany, but he lacked Dathe’s self-assured personality. Everything seemed to come easily to Dathe; Klös always came across as eager, yet oddly insecure. He was forever trying to wriggle his way into any new plans. If some organization was starting up, he would find a way to get involved.
Klös had the disadvantage of being “only” a veterinarian—someone who traditionally had a harder time of it in the world of zoo directors than a zoologist did. Today, a background in veterinary medicine isn’t unusual for a zoo director, but then it was regarded as a shortcoming. Klös, however, was a superb organizer and manager, with a knack for badgering politicians and business tycoons until they handed over money. “Don’t eat dinner next to Klös, otherwise you’ll lose your purse” went a rhyming quip in West Berlin. Some people claimed Klös was so good at rustling up money out of nowhere that he must also be able to pull rabbits out of hats.
Klös could be dogged, certainly, but he was determined to maintain his institution’s relevance to a country from which West Berlin had been physically blocked off. With the West German capital four hundred miles away, the far-off Bonn, he made every effort to ensure that each West German president visited his zoo at least once—and he got them all, even Gustav Heinemann, a confirmed hater of animals.
For Dathe in the East, it was important to gain a foothold for himself and his animal park not only within the GDR, but also beyond the confines of its borders. Cozying up to the men in the Politburo paid off handsomely, particularly if they were also animal lovers, such as Friedrich Ebert Jr. and Günter Schabowski, high-ranking members of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party. “Dathe would not have worked out in the West any better than Klös would have in the East,” says Lothar Dittrich, the director of the Hanover Zoo and a close friend of Heinrich Dathe. “They were two top dogs—each in the place that best suited him.” In the other’s Germany, they would have failed miserably.
But while Dathe and Klös were masters of their respective games, both could be naive. Through to the end of the GDR, Dathe clung to the belief that the East German secret police had never kept tabs on him, while Klös proved still more obtuse when he recommended that his predecessor, Lutz Heck, an old Nazi and close friend of Hermann Göring, be named an honorary member of the Association of German Zoos. Politics sparked their interest only where their animals were concerned.
For both men, their zoos came first, well before anything else—even their own families. Their zoos were their families, wives and children often little more than hangers-on. In Berlin, in the Cold War, being a zoo director was more than a nine-to-five job; it was a calling. Klös and Dathe were “animal people,” a description used by zookeepers and circus performers to describe those who get along better with beasts than with their fellow men.
Politics by Other Means
The political and social influence the two zoo directors had in their halves of the divided city was possible only in the context of the Cold War—but it was also an outgrowth of the special bond between Berliners
and their animals. Berliners are not just animal lovers; they are animal-obsessed. No other city has made so many of its nonhuman residents VIPs, from Bobby the gorilla, the first of his species to join the Berlin Zoo in the late 1920s, to Knautschke the hippo, one of the only animals to survive World War II, to Knut the polar bear, who in death received almost as many flowers, condolence cards, and stuffed animals as Princess Diana.
The Wall was the bulwark between the administrators’ separate turfs, where they reigned without competition, the existence of the zoo on each side providing the justification for the other to flourish. Both became symbols of their half of the city and embodied its political system: the Zoo was the treasure of the island that was West Berlin, a cornucopia of species packed within the constricted space of a city hemmed in by the Wall. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Tierpark was spacious and expansive, planned on a drawing board, but not designed of a piece and never fully completed: the socialist utopia as a work in progress.
In divided Berlin, in the words of historian Mieke Roscher, whose research at the University of Kassel focuses on human-animal relationships, “the feeling of being enclosed within a border was palpable everywhere. In a sense, West and East Berlin were themselves two zoos.” Amidst the tensions of the Cold War, animal parks were havens in which visitors might get a glimpse of an unspoiled world. Yet within the gates of these purported paradises, rigid hierarchies ruled. And those in the know claimed the two zoos were run as strictly as any city hall, court of law, or international military alliance set up to guard against the outbreak of World War III.
CHAPTER 1 WAR AND CROCODILE TAIL SOUP
There would surely be no more bombs that day. In the early evening, fog had settled in, and now thick clouds veiled the sky over Berlin. How could enemy pilots possibly locate their targets in this weather? The Zoological Garden was dark and quiet, the visitors were long gone, and the gates were shut.
It was November 22, 1943. Over the past few months, Royal Air Force raids on Berlin had been stepped up, but apart from six hits two years earlier, the zoo had thus far emerged largely unscathed. Even so, Lutz Heck was prepared. The director held repeated drills to teach his staff what to do if firebombs hit. He also readied for the possibility of animals escaping by buying two elephant guns, 11-millimeter caliber. In some other zoos, predators had been shot dead as a precaution; these guns allowed Heck to avoid such drastic preemptive measures, at least for now.
Heck, who had been a supporting member of the SS since 1933 and a member of the Nazi party since 1937, was a close friend of Hermann Göring, Germany’s Reich Master of the Hunt. Göring, second in command in the Third Reich, always kept a pet lion cub (brought to him by Heck) at his country residence, Carinhall, in the Schorfheide forest outside Berlin. When the cub grew too large and dangerous to live in a private home, Heck arranged for it to be picked up, and promptly supplied Göring with a replacement.
Among zoologists, Heck was a controversial figure. Together with his brother, Heinz, the director of Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich, he bred back aurochs, an extinct species of European cattle, by crossbreeding various domestic cows until the young animals bore a resemblance to the wild form. Many colleagues criticized this back-breeding effort as unscientific, but Lutz Heck knew he could quickly silence his adversaries by threatening them with the Reich Master of the Hunt. Göring was keen on promoting breeding projects in hopes of creating new, extraordinary hunting trophies. In 1938, he appointed Lutz Heck head of nature conservation in the Reich Forestry Office, and on April 20 of the same year—the Führer’s birthday—he granted him the title of honorary professor. Several years earlier, Göring had even rewarded Heck with a substantial expansion of the premises north of the Berlin Zoo, where a special “German Zoo” was established: from black grouses to beavers to brown bears, only animals from within the Reich were on display. Oak trees bordered the enclosures, and the animal identification signs were emblazoned with little swastikas.
Heck had been the director of the Berlin Zoo since 1931. Founded in 1844, it was Germany’s oldest, and with more than 4,000 animals from 1,400 species, the most biodiverse in the world. The zoo was owned by an association of shareholders, with 4,000 shares broadly distributed across the residents of Berlin. In lieu of receiving monetary payments, shareholders and their families were granted free entrance. So the zoo belonged to its visitors—at least to those who could afford to buy stock or were lucky enough to inherit it.
Lutz Heck took over his post from his father. Privy councilor Ludwig Heck, who had made the zoo famous, liked to brag that he had been a National Socialist before the term even existed. His son ran the zoo in complete accord with Nazi guidelines. In July of 1938, Jewish shareholders were required to sell their shares back to the zoo, generally far below their fair value, and the zoo then resold them at higher prices. By the end of the year, Jews were no longer allowed to visit.
Heck had attempted to get himself put in charge of all German zoos. The Nazis felt this would exceed the reasonable number of posts for him to hold, however, so permission was denied. Even so, the Heck family’s close ties to the party proved advantageous for the country’s other zoos, especially after the outbreak of World War II. In times of war, there were often problems with animals’ feed supplies, which Lutz Heck was generally able to rectify quickly—unlike in World War I, when many zoo animals had starved to death. But it was his own Berlin Zoo that would reap the most direct profits from the war: Heck used forced laborers, and the Russian campaign enabled him to bring animals over from Eastern European zoos.
But by November 1943 the days of expansion were done. The war had long since come home. Heck saw one question written all over the faces of his zookeepers as they tended to their animals: “Will we get out of here alive?” He had taken the precaution of evacuating part of the zoo’s collection—750 animals from 250 species—to other cities: a Tasmanian devil went to Frankfurt, a giraffe to Vienna, garpikes from the aquarium to Leipzig, and wild donkeys and lions to Breslau. To protect those that remained, Heck had steel boxes with slits built into the ground and covered with earth; they looked like oversized molehills. The caretakers were told to stay in these shelters until danger passed. An underground air raid shelter was also built at the entrance to nearby Budapester Strasse.
A flak tower, nicknamed Gustav, had begun to give him a queasy feeling. The reinforced concrete colossus sat enthroned on the northwest border of the zoo, like a medieval fortress. The tower was intended to provide refuge to soldiers and civilians during air raids, but Heck feared it was far too easy a target for British and American bombers. “Will we get out of here alive?” was a question Heck was now pondering as well.
It seemed that at least this mid-war Monday would end without any major incident. In a staff apartment at the edge of the zoo, several caretakers were celebrating the birthday of a colleague with a few bottles of beer. Beyond the zoo’s walls, people were, as usual, seeking distraction from the everyday wartime routine. Many headed to the opera on Kantstrasse, paying no attention to the instructions on the program for what to do in case of an air raid. Others went to one of the nearby movie theaters to see Münchhausen—one of those new color films, with the ever-popular Hans Albers flying through the air on a cannonball—or Melody of a Great City, which people would later say was the last film to show an as yet undestroyed Berlin in all its glory. But on this foggy November evening in 1943, no one could have anticipated that.
At 7:25 p.m., the telephone in the zoo’s gatehouse rang. The message was from air raid warning headquarters: “Strong combat units approaching from Hanover, heading east. Several waves to follow.” The gatekeeper rushed to pass along the news. Within a few minutes, all sections of the zoo had been informed. The caretakers sent their wives and children to the air raid shelter, which could hold about twenty thousand people on five levels, and then moved into their molehills. “Nothing much will happen tonight,” they assured one another. “In this foggy weather? Impossible
!”
Half an hour later the first airplanes reached the city. Over the next twenty minutes, 753 British bombers dropped 2,500 tons of explosives. Twenty-one major fires raged in the zoo that night. The roof of the elephant pagoda caved in, killing a white rhinoceros and seven elephants; one was buried under a roof beam, his entrails hanging out of his belly, thick as rolled-up mattresses. Siam, the male elephant, was the only survivor. Of the two thousand animals that had remained in the zoo, seven hundred were dead.
The next day, the worn-out caretakers, their faces blackened with soot, joined up with a group of prisoners of war and went about cleaning up. They put out fires and cleared away debris, under which they kept finding dead animals.
The following night brought renewed attacks, which devastated the neighborhoods of Charlottenburg and nearby Hansaviertel. Once the raids were over, the zookeepers rushed out of their hideouts to put out more flames. The bombs had destroyed many of the city’s water pipes, making it necessary to transport water in vats and buckets. Everyone pitched in. Katharina Heinroth, the wife of aquarium director Oskar Heinroth, stood in front of the red-brick hippopotamus house with a relatively intact hose and tried to quench the flames on the burning roof. Next to her, the hippos circled nervously in their outdoor tank with terrified, wide-eyed stares. One-year-old Knautschke would not budge from his surrogate mother’s side.
Heinroth did not know how long it took her to put out the fire, but sometime in the early morning she finally managed to do so. From the charred roof beams, the water dripped down onto the hippos.
Rubble Woman with a PhD
Katharina Heinroth, born in Breslau, near the Polish border, in 1897 as Katharina Berger, was the second wife of the aquarium director. Both she and Oskar Heinroth were already divorced when she began working as his secretary in 1932, helping him type up the manuscript of his book, The Birds of Central Europe. Even though Oskar had had a key role in building the Berlin Aquarium and leading it to world renown, he was first and foremost an ornithologist. Their work soon brought them closer, and they married the following year. On the rooftop terrace of their apartment above the aquarium they kept carrier pigeons and together studied their sense of direction.
The Zookeepers' War Page 1