The Zookeepers' War Read online

  * * *

  Dittrich’s problems began several years earlier, when Karl Max Schneider was still director of the Leipzig Zoo and he was Schneider’s assistant. Schneider had agreed to exchange animals with the People’s Republic of China: Siberian tigers would be sent to Leipzig from Beijing—Germany’s first in the postwar period—and in return, Leipzig would deliver four hyenas and six lions from its world-famous breeding center.

  In 1954, the first pair of tigers arrived by train, and the next year the second. Now it was Leipzig’s turn, but before the exchange could be completed, Schneider died. Since Dathe was already in East Berlin, Dittrich was responsible for following through with the exchange—but how? Transporting the animals on the Trans-Siberian Railway would be too complicated; the easiest way would be to send them by sea. But the GDR’s merchant fleet, established just a few years earlier, didn’t yet have ships suitable for cargo of this kind. Czechoslovakia offered to ship the animals, but only if payment was made in Western currency, which was unavailable in Leipzig. Then one day at the Leipzig Fair Dittrich happened to strike up a conversation with a shipping agent of the Hamburg America Line, whom he told about his transportation problem.

  “You know what?” the agent said. “If you have us do the transport, we’ll move the merchandise for you at no cost.”

  “What luck,” Dittrich thought. He had the lions and hyenas placed into shipping crates and sent them to Hamburg, along with a hundred sheep as food for the journey, which would take several weeks. Due to closing of the canal during the Suez Crisis, the ship would have to sail around South Africa.

  On the day of departure, a great many journalists gathered at the harbor in Hamburg. After all, it was not every day that a West German company would be transporting East German animals to China.

  “If you quote me, I ask that you quote me verbatim,” Dittrich told the reporters. He was aware of the need for caution; in the GDR, business with companies from the capitalist West was frowned upon.

  The very headline he’d feared appeared in big letters on the front page of a tabloid the next day: “Red Lions for Red China.” Back in Leipzig, party representatives accused Dittrich of helping a class enemy, West Germany’s Hamburg America Line, establish contact with the People’s Republic. After Stalin’s death two years earlier, tensions between the Soviet Union and China had peaked; bringing together the West and the Chinese now came across as an affront.

  “The company provided the shipping free of charge,” Dittrich tried to argue—not that it mattered to party officials. In their eyes, Dittrich had made a “severe political blunder.” To him, the bigwigs were incapable of thinking in economic terms.

  This was no isolated incident; another followed in 1958. For quite some time, the roof of Leipzig’s nearly sixty-year-old great ape house had been in bad shape. One of the beams was almost completely rusted through. But it wasn’t so easy to come by a new one in a rush. The whole city was low on consumer goods and raw materials—and if something was on hand, it was usually earmarked for the capital. Berlin came first; the rest of the GDR was more like an afterthought. By the time building material was allocated, the roof might have collapsed.

  So Dittrich hired the master builder at the Leipzig Opera to get him a new iron beam from a mill in Hennigsdorf, just outside Berlin. When the builder arrived at the zoo with the beam, the Stasi was already waiting, and arrested him for “plan violation.” When Dittrich found out, he called up the ministry’s district administration office. “How could you detain that man?” he asked. “He was authorized. If you arrest him, you’ll have to take me too.”

  The Stasi didn’t buy that argument. “We arrest the one who did it,” Dittrich was told.

  The next day, Dittrich had the weeping wife of the builder sitting in front of him. “I’ll do everything in my power to get your husband out,” he promised her. “Of course he’s innocent.”

  The next day brought another visitor, this time an opera director who was quite upset. In just a few days there was a scheduled performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz—but without the builder the scenery could not be completed.

  “Wonderful,” Dittrich said to the director. “Let’s go together to the Stasi and say that without him nothing can move forward.” Before long, the innocent man was free.

  For Dittrich this incident was just one more confirmation of the government’s idiocy. As the years passed, there would be more and more frequent occurrences of this sort. And with each of them, Dittrich’s Stasi file grew thicker. Dathe could take the liberty of forbidding Socialist Unity Party posters in his Tierpark and needling politicians with appeals for funds, but Dittrich enjoyed an entirely different standing. He was well aware that he couldn’t maintain a position of authority if he was unwilling to defer to the state.

  There were other reasons the Socialist Unity Party wasn’t kindly disposed toward the Leipzig Zoo. The party’s youth organization had been unable to gain a foothold there, and none of the zoo apprentices had volunteered for military service. When at long last one did step forward, he was seen off with great pomp, but he soon defected to the West. Dittrich was blamed for this when the Stasi brought him in for questioning.

  Dittrich could see that his file, which lay open on the table, already looked to be about two inches thick. When the interrogating officer briefly left his seat, he was able to peer over and make out one sentence: “D. is an opaque subject.”

  Flight Plan

  Soon afterward, in early 1961, the government drew up a new—and, in Dittrich’s view, senseless—budget, which came with further restrictions for the zoo. Dittrich decided that enough was enough. With his wife, who was six months pregnant, his six-year-old daughter, and his mother-in-law, he defected to West Berlin in April. From there he wrote a farewell letter to his colleagues in Leipzig, in which he outlined his reasons for leaving.

  Since the GDR’s founding nearly twelve years before, two and a half million people had fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. The majority of them, like the Dittrichs, headed to West Berlin. Once there, their first order of business was to report to the Marienfelde refugee camp in the south of the city, where they formed long lines in front of the reporting office to apply for asylum in West Germany. They might wait for days. Twenty-five white three-story buildings provided temporary housing, but these were soon overcrowded. To create more space, bunk beds were set up in the kitchens.

  Dittrich was able to persuade the Americans to let his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law stay with friends in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district while he remained on site for interrogation; every refugee was considered a potential spy. U.S. armed forces commanders conducted their interviews with interpreters on hand if needed. But an interpreter was hardly necessary in Dittrich’s case, as he spoke English quite well.

  After a few days he received notification that everything was in order. He was given identification cards for himself and his family; they were now West German citizens. The next morning they were instructed to come to Tegel Airport at ten o’clock in order to be flown out. Dittrich headed to Charlottenburg, where his family was waiting, to tell them the happy news. No sooner did he get there, however, than the doorbell rang. It was a messenger from the refugee camp. “The flight plan has changed,” he said. “Be at Tegel at eight.”

  * * *

  Shortly after the family took off, a car stopped in front of a Charlottenburg apartment building. Three Stasi officials got out, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and rang the bell. The Dittrichs’ hostess opened the door. “Whom do you wish to speak to?” she asked.

  “Lothar Dittrich,” came the reply.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we don’t know anyone by that name.”

  The men were expecting this response. They pushed her aside, stormed into the apartment, and searched every room. But there was no trace of Lothar Dittrich or his family. Where could he be, they wondered. “Maybe he’s at the zoo,” one of them murmured, “sayin
g goodbye to his colleagues in the West.” The three men drove off in their car as abruptly as they had appeared.

  At the Berlin Zoo, Heinz-Georg Klös was making his morning rounds, looking in on each section with his retinue of assistants and veterinarians. These rounds followed a fixed pattern: The section heads would start with updates, followed by questions from Klös. Until the director asked the first question, no one on his staff could speak. Klös generally found something that was not to his liking, such as cobwebs hanging over the visitors’ area in the hippopotamus house. “Those were there yesterday,” he chided the zookeepers. “You’ve got to get at them again with a broom.” He was furious if the signs at the enclosures were not sparkling clean, and he had just as little patience for being disturbed at his morning ritual—as he was by three men in cheap shiny leather jackets who were lining up in front of him.

  “What do you want?” he asked them fretfully.

  “We’re looking for Herr Lothar Dittrich,” they said.

  Now Klös was not merely annoyed, he was beginning to doubt their sanity. “Gentlemen,” he replied, unable to resist slipping into a patronizing tone. “You would have to go to Leipzig for that. This is the Berlin Zoo.”

  Disgruntled and with no greater knowledge of the whereabouts of the man they were seeking than they’d had before, the three men departed.

  Safe in the West, Lothar Dittrich learned of the incident and alerted the commander in charge in Marienfelde, where his men tried to reconstruct who had known about Dittrich’s plan to leave—and who had betrayed him.

  At about five in the afternoon, the next day’s flight plan had arrived, indicating that the Dittrich family needed to be at the airport at ten the following morning. Shortly thereafter, the interpreter who’d been present at Dittrich’s interrogations left for the day. From her home, she transmitted the flight data to her liaison at the Stasi, not knowing the plans had already changed. Lothar Dittrich had escaped abduction purely by chance.

  * * *

  A new life in the West awaited Lothar Dittrich and his family, in an empty apartment in the town of Alfeld, in Lower Saxony. After their first week, Dittrich was already 10,000 marks in debt.

  Lothar Dittrich had a university degree. He’d been deputy director of a major zoo. Now he would have to start over again. But that didn’t matter; the main thing was that the family was finally out. He and his wife, who’d worked as a journalist, were full of hope that they’d be able to establish themselves again. They thought the future would be brighter, albeit different. But there would be other attempts to force their return to East Germany.

  Dittrich soon found a job as a keeper with local animal trader Hermann Ruhe. One morning, as he was in the middle of herding young antelopes into their enclosure, a stranger appeared in front of the fence.

  “Hello, I’m from the Alfeld detective squad,” the man said by way of introduction. “I have a few questions for you. Would you kindly step outside?”

  “Unfortunately that won’t be possible,” Dittrich answered. “As you can see, I’m busy.”

  “It won’t take long,” the policeman said with a smile.

  “If I leave now, they’ll all start fighting,” Dittrich replied.

  The policeman was not about to give up so quickly. “Believe me, it’ll go very quickly,” he insisted.

  But Dittrich wouldn’t give in either. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It really isn’t possible. It’ll take me at least an hour and a half to round up all the animals and lock them in. But I can meet you at six thirty this evening at the Ratskeller, where I’ll be happy to answer your questions.”

  The officer eventually agreed and left. No sooner was he gone than Dittrich began to lock up the animals. It took him only ten minutes to get them into their pen.

  After his attempted abduction in Berlin, Dittrich had been given guidelines from the Federal Intelligence Service on how to behave in a suspicious circumstance like this. The first thing he did was call up the Alfeld police and ask, “Why did you send a detective after me?”

  The police at headquarters were astonished by his question. “That’s odd,” they said. “We don’t have a detective squad here. They’re over in Hildesheim. But stay on the line for a second and we’ll check with them.”

  In the background Dittrich could hear the policemen talking: Hildesheim? Didn’t send anyone either.

  “Did you hear?” an official said into the phone. “Our colleagues in Hildesheim don’t know anything about this either. We’ll have to ask our superiors in Hanover and call you back.”

  An hour later, Dittrich’s phone rang. “Of course no one was sent to you,” the policeman told him. “But please go to the appointment tonight and we’ll have people on the scene. You needn’t worry about any danger to your life.”

  That evening Dittrich made his way to the Ratskeller. When he arrived at the appointed time, he felt as though he were in a bad crime novel. Even from the door he could see that the men sitting at the tables, trying too hard to blend in, were all plainclothes policemen.

  Dittrich sat down at a table and waited for a while, but the ominous visitor from that morning did not show up.

  It wasn’t until many years later that Lothar Dittrich learned his name had been placed on a list that Erich Mielke, the minister for state security, personally submitted to the central committee of the Socialist Unity Party. The list contained the names of refugees slated to be brought back to the GDR. Mielke’s intent was not to return Dittrich to his old job at the Leipzig Zoo, but to incarcerate him in the Bautzen maximum security prison.

  The Battle Lines Are Drawn

  In early August 1961, a letter arrived at the Berlin Zoo’s administration office. A visitor’s annual pass had been taken away because she’d fed animals without permission. Not so very long before, feeding the animals had still been tolerated. Klös had hesitated before declaring it forbidden, perhaps because he was afraid of public outcry.

  The zoo administrators agreed that the woman ought to get her pass back. She was an elderly East Berliner, and the zoo could not afford to lose the few remaining regular visitors from the Soviet sector. Far too many of them had gone over to the Tierpark in recent years.

  It’s not known whether the woman got another chance to visit the zoo. It seems unlikely though, as just a week later the zoo lost its remaining visitors from the eastern half of the city for good. In the early morning hours of August 13, something began that no one had anticipated, not even Lothar Dittrich when he’d fled East Germany four months before.

  The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had continued to deteriorate over the years, with the status of West Berlin a particular point of dispute. Two and a half years earlier, the Soviet head of state had called on the Allies to withdraw their troops from Berlin. At a summit meeting in Vienna with President John F. Kennedy in June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev declared West Berlin “the most dangerous place on earth” and threatened to excise the “malignant tumor.” Kennedy insisted that the Allies would continue to control their sectors, and that they must still be allowed to enter the Soviet sector. (Soldiers had historially been among the only people allowed free movement between the two Berlins.)

  It had been obvious to Lothar Dittrich that the GDR would have no choice but to do something—and soon—to stem the tide of refugees to the West. But when he heard the news on the radio in his kitchen in Alfeld the next morning, he almost fell off his chair. Less than half a year after he and his family had fled to the West, East German workers’ militias and armed security forces had closed off the border crossings to West Berlin overnight and begun installing barbed wire along the border.

  In the days that followed, concrete blocks were hauled from all around East Berlin to construct a structure that would define—and symbolize—the cityscape in the coming decades. The Berlin Wall ran right through streets and even houses. Wherever necessary the windows were filled with bricks and mortar. Families were separated, West Berlin se
aled off. And block by concrete block, the front lines were drawn between the Tierpark and the Berlin Zoo.

  In the years to come, their rivalry would become a proxy struggle, with each director an emblem of his city’s politics. And as Dathe and Klös would, from their opposite sides of the wall, come to understand, victory in this war was no longer a matter of currying favor with visitors, but rather of pleasing the bigwigs in Bonn and East Berlin.

  CHAPTER 5 THE ZOO OF THE FUTURE

  Strange noises broke through the morning commotion on the streets of West Berlin. The gibbons in the Zoological Garden were singing like a jazz band gone wild. When the wind blew the right way, as it did that day, the sounds of the apes staking out their turf echoed past the Wall all the way to East Berlin, as though the city were still one.

  But since that night the previous August, everything had changed. More than ever, fear hovered over West Berlin. Would there be an invasion by the East German National People’s Army, or, even worse, the Red Army? The Americans stationed two hundred fighter planes in France as a precautionary measure in case of a Soviet attack. No Berliner wanted to picture what would happen then—a clash of the superpowers, a World War III.

  By October 27, two and a half months after the Wall’s first bricks were laid, danger seemed imminent. The gibbons making such a racket in the zoo that morning were oblivious to the turf wars of their human kin. They knew nothing about that treeless spot named Checkpoint Charlie, one of the few crossing points left between East and West. There, the hominids were not singing; they were standing across from each other, some driving tanks, ready for battle and waiting for their leaders to give the command to shoot. For them, war was nothing out of the ordinary.