The Zookeepers' War Read online

  The Checkpoint Charlie showdown never progressed past threatening gestures, and after sixteen anxious hours, the men on both sides stood down. But the greater showdown between East and West was far from over. From then on, it became a symbolic battle, rather than the type fought with tanks. The Allies continued to stake their claim to West Berlin, an “island of freedom” in the middle of a “Red sea.”

  Food supplies for three quarters of a year were stored throughout the western part of the city, in preparation for another blockade. The zoo began amassing supplies for its animals, building new barns and cold storage rooms. Fish were the only foodstuff not kept stored, which meant that the seals would have to be flown out in case of a food shortage. Still, they were luckier than the livestock. The zoo’s domestic animals were designated a major part of the city’s supply of meat, should the worst come to pass.

  * * *

  On February 21, 1962, one year before President Kennedy came to Berlin, his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, visited the Berlin Zoo. Far in front of the entrance a cluster of people had already formed around him and would not budge from his side, so the gatekeepers eventually had to open wide the gates of the zoo and let everyone in without charging admission—which greatly rankled director Heinz-Georg Klös.

  Kennedy had brought with him a bald eagle, the emblem of his country, which he promptly named Willy Brandt, in honor of West Berlin’s mayor—“without checking the eagle’s gender beforehand,” a journalist would chide. Neues Deutschland, the newspaper of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party, was soon providing exhaustive coverage “of the habits of Willy Brandt, [who] loves to eat dead rats” under the headline “Behind Bars.” East German newspapers would continue to report on the namesake of the mayor of West Berlin for some weeks.

  Official state gifts often come with another hitch: they tend to involve animals that the donor nations are eager to part with. Heinrich Lübke, the West German president, had a male leopard palmed off on him during a trip to Africa that was later discovered to have been castrated. Willy Brandt, the eagle, was barely able to swallow and his callused claws made it impossible for him to sit on a branch or grip his prey. The zoo’s veterinarian called him “one creaky old bird.” The eagle died two years later, but Klös had already acquired a younger one, “which had been passed off to the public as the real Willy Brandt whenever Kennedy’s eagle suffered from rheumatism and could not sit outdoors,” the Hamburg-based magazine Der Spiegel smugly reported.

  This stunt may have stemmed from Klös’s interest in winning over the politicians and other dignitaries in West Berlin—Mayor Brandt chief among them. And when he wanted to achieve his goals, he could be quite persuasive. Klös certainly kept coming up with new ideas to lure Brandt to the zoo. “Bring your son along. He’ll surely like it,” he’d say.

  On one occasion he took Brandt and his eleven-year-old son, Lars, to see Kurt Walter, whom everyone in Berlin called “Ape Walter.” The head of the primates section at the zoo was rearing two young chimpanzees, whom he fed from a bottle. Lars Brandt was impressed. He’d never forget the sight of the baby chimps lying in a cradle in Walter’s home. Just eleven years old, Lars was still too young to think about why he—of all children—was able to peek behind the scenes or to be gifted the skin shed by a poisonous Indian chain viper by Werner Schröder, the aquarium director. But Willy Brandt knew what Klös was aiming for, and he played along. He was aware of the zoo’s significance for the city and its people.

  * * *

  The definitive division of Berlin meant that the Zoological Garden had lost more than a million potential visitors in one day. Heinz-Georg Klös therefore went begging to city hall for more subsidies. He even suggested that the city’s buses start and finish their routes at the zoo so that more tourists would pass by. For him, the only good to come of the new situation was that he no longer had to worry about zoogoers drifting away to Friedrichsfelde. Berliners could no longer choose between the Zoo and the Tierpark. It would take until December 1963, two and a half years after the construction of the Wall, for West Berliners to be allowed to travel to East Berlin.

  Meanwhile, Klös annoyed the people of West Berlin by raising the entrance price again. Shortly after he began working at the zoo in 1957, the price of a ticket went up from one mark to a mark fifty. Klös also did away with the zoo’s popular Oktoberfest, which the press—particularly the tabloids Bild and Nacht-Depesche—resented, especially as this meant “spurning” a reliable source of revenue (some 50,000 marks per year), as irate letters to the editor were quick to point out. And soon a visit to the zoo would cost an adult two marks!

  His predecessor, Katharina Heinrich, and her colleague, Werner Schröder, had begun celebrating Oktoberfest to attract additional visitors during the cold half of the year, saving the zoo from financial ruin. But that was in the late 1940s. Klös had taken a look at the recent balance sheets: in past years, revenues had gone way down, and the zoo was no longer earning anything from the event. For him, the success of Oktoberfest was nothing but folklore. The festivities were disturbing the animals and putting a strain on the budget.

  The World’s Largest Animal House

  The initial commotion about the new entrance price soon subsided. Berliners held their Zoo in too high a regard to keep protesting, and besides, they could see that it was being enhanced. In December 1962 Klös presided over the opening of a new aviary with a tropical hall where birds could fly about freely. Nothing this extraordinary had happened in Berlin since the opening of the aquarium’s crocodile hall in 1913. Heinrich Dathe was invited to West Berlin for the grand opening, and had a good look around. His response to the aviary followed half a year later.

  On that June day in 1963, East Berliners flocked to Friedrichsfelde in unusually large numbers—and not just to enjoy the brilliant sunshine. A positively gigantic event awaited them: the Alfred Brehm House for big cats would be unveiled. This was not just any building. At the opening ceremony, a banner above the entrance hall proclaimed: “A milestone in achieving socialism.” With an expanse of more than fifty thousand square feet, the Alfred Brehm House was the biggest and “most modern animal facility in the world,” as the press in East Berlin never tired of proclaiming.

  Nor was the opening scheduled for just any day. Dathe had chosen this particular Sunday—June 30—because it was the seventieth birthday of Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party’s central committee, and chair of the Politburo and the state council. Ulbricht had never been to Friedrichsfelde, and didn’t show up on his seventieth birthday either. His wife, Lotte, was a passionate zoogoer, but he didn’t much care for animals, preferring to watch sports. Still, the symbolism was what mattered, and Ulbricht was given a gracious acknowledgment from afar. The occasion also gave Mayor Friederich Ebert a long-awaited chance to cut the ribbon for the opening ceremony.

  East Berlin’s mayor liked to visit Friedrichsfelde, especially because of Mao, a Chinese alligator who’d been living there for six years. Ebert had a soft spot for all species of crocodilians and had set aside city funds to purchase numerous other exotic animals to help Dathe outdo his rival in the West. Perhaps he also liked the Tierpark because children greeted him more euphorically there than anywhere else.

  Dathe knew how much Ebert liked being recognized in public. When Ebert came to Friedrichsfelde, Dathe always made sure a school class was standing nearby to “run across” the mayor—seemingly by chance—and cheer and wave to him. He also kept a photograph of Ebert in the Tierpark guide.

  Once Ebert had cut the ribbon outside the Alfred Brehm House and the applause had died down, the invited guests slowly made their way into the semidarkness, murmuring in amazement as they strode along the rows of cages lined with pastel tiles and filled with striped and spotted cats. They gaped at massive rock formations against which the lions and tigers looked like house cats on the set of an epic movie.

  The cats had been temporarily housed in a conv
erted railroad car near the castle. When the time came to convey them to their new cages, one big cat after another was tranquilized, pulled onto a door that had been taken off its hinges, heaved into the back of a small van, and driven across the Tierpark. Four animal keepers squatted next to each dozing cat, ready to spring into action if the tranquilizer wore off during the drive. Dathe was never present during these activities; he preferred to leave them to others.

  The visitors streaming into the tropical hall were unaware of all this as they gazed in amazement at the flying foxes dangling upside down from slender palm trees. The building’s construction had taken six years. Dathe was normally an eloquent conversationalist, but when he’d described the project on East Berlin’s public broadcasting station, he outdid himself, his exhilaration shining through. He’d gushed about “a building in the shape of a lying sphinx stretching out its two paws” where “inside there are outdoor-style installations” and “in the middle a tall building, almost sixty feet at its highest point, that portrays a primeval forest in which birds can move freely, and people can go inside.” He sounded like a boy recalling the biggest and most beautiful sandcastle he’d ever built. And indeed, as a twelve-year-old, Dathe had fantasized about a hall of this kind in an essay for school.

  His European colleagues were impressed. Ernst Lang, president of the International Union of Directors of Zoological Gardens, would declare after a visit to Friedrichsfelde in 1965 that “in this zoo there is nothing to discuss, only much to admire.” And for years to come, Dathe would include a quotation from Monika Meyer-Holzapfel, director of the Bern Zoo in Switzerland, in the Tierpark’s promotional guide: “This is how we picture the zoo of the future!”

  * * *

  Dathe welcomed zoologists from other countries quite openly, and made no secret of what he was doing. When questioned by the Stasi about his “contacts with nonsocialist economic territories,” he stated that his contacts were “with places around the entire world and quite multifaceted as a result of membership in the International Union of Directors of Zoological Gardens and as the editor of the International Zoo Journal.” Dathe was not about to narrow his horizons. International contacts were vital when running a zoo; he had seen what happened when Germany regarded itself as the center of the world.

  When zoologists from the West stated at the border crossing that they wanted to see the Tierpark or Dathe, they were generally let through without further scrutiny. One of these visitors was a young officer in the U.S. Army. As a teenager, Marvin Jones had worked as a volunteer at the Bronx Zoo during World War II, where he’d begun to record the animals’ family trees, something highly unusual for the time. After about a decade in the army, Jones put in a request to be stationed in a location with an interesting zoo. And Berlin, with its two zoos, offered twice the enticement. As a U.S. soldier, Jones was allowed to travel to East Berlin, but not to get into any East German car; the risk of abduction was too great. So when he wanted to visit Dathe at the Tierpark, he’d arrange to be picked up by Dathe’s assistant, Wolfgang Grummt, at Checkpoint Charlie, and the two would walk the seven miles to Friedrichsfelde together. In the evening, Grummt had to bring him back again by foot.

  Dathe’s freedoms sometimes rippled well beyond the walls of the Tierpark. When he and his wife, Elisabeth, attended a parent-teacher conference at their younger son’s school, they, like all the other parents, had to sign a paper stating that they did not watch Western television at home. Dathe refused. “I’m sorry,” he told the flummoxed teachers, “but I can’t comply with that. My profession requires me to keep myself well informed, and I can’t do so without international magazines and television stations.”

  Dathe had once been skeptical about whether he’d need a television set at all. Back in 1958, he thought it would just be a distraction. But now the Tierpark had its own television program, Tierpark-Teletreff. In each episode, Dathe would take viewers on visits to the enclosures and share tidbits about the animals inside.

  In any event, the other parents were delighted to hear his objection. “Then we won’t sign either!” they announced on the spot. From then on, the whole class was exempt from the rule.

  Into a Shipping Crate with a Moose

  The formal division of Berlin barely restricted Dathe in going about his work, but his colleagues faced very different circumstances. Since the building of the Wall, many were no longer able to visit family and friends in the West.

  Bernd Matern had been working in the Tierpark as a zookeeper since 1960, after completing an agricultural apprenticeship in cattle breeding. He was first assigned to the “outer ring,” an area at the northeast rim of the Tierpark where rare species of wild cattle, antelope, sheep, and goats were housed in nondescript temporary enclosures.

  Matern lived in the district of Berlin-Treptow, his front door some three hundred feet from the sector border. Another three hundred feet farther, his sister lived in the American sector; only five streets lay between them. For years, Matern had neither accepted nor avoided the border, and had regularly gone to his sister’s for visits. But then came August 13, 1961—and suddenly the Wall was there.

  Matern didn’t want to spend even one more day in East Germany. But then Dathe offered him oversight of the deer section, one of the largest in the park. Matern was only twenty-one, but the director thought highly of him—and besides, the position had recently “opened up” when the previous section head, an amateur diver, had swum to the West across the Havel River. In retrospect, perhaps his escape shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, as he’d earlier started up a diving group to which Dathe’s older son, Holger, belonged. Once a week, the group held practices in the nearby Karl Friedrich Friesen swimming pool—oxygen tanks included—without anyone growing suspicious.

  Several other animal keepers had already fled. Because the Tierpark was the central reloading point for all animal transports between East and West, nearly every day at least one shipping crate passed through—giving Gerd Morgen, who was in charge of the quarantine station, an enticing opportunity. Ever since the twenty-year-old had seen a movie about the zoo in Winnipeg, Canada, he’d fantasized about going there one day. His plan was to hide in one of the shipping crates and send himself to the West. The trouble was that only bears were shipped, and it was best not to stow away in a crate with a bear.

  “If only a different animal were to come through,” Morgen thought, “I’d give it a try.”

  In the fall of 1961, when a young female moose arrived from Russia on its way to a northern German zoo, Morgen saw his chance to flee. But the moose turned up in a filthy wooden crate that could be seen into from all sides. “We can’t send that animal to the Federal Republic this way,” he chided the zoo’s carpenter and asked him to build a closed wooden crate. Only a narrow slit at the top of the front flap would stay open.

  His colleagues wondered why he’d choose such a spacious crate for a moose until the day before the animal was to be shipped, when Morgen let them in on his plan. “When the train stops at the station nearest the Berlin Zoo,” he explained, “I’ll get out and go to my mother’s, and I’ll stay there.” The others didn’t ask many questions—even Matern. If he were to get an opportunity like this, he knew he’d seize it too.

  Morgen’s plan was to hold off on getting in with the moose until the crate arrived at the East Berlin railway station. There was only one problem: the customs office monitored the train platforms from a glass booth over the tracks. But his fellow zookeepers offered a solution: they knew of a blind spot that would block the customs officials’ view. On the evening of October 26, they brought the shipping crate to the station and positioned it so that Morgen could get in unnoticed. He’d already used a bolt cutter to shorten the nails that held the front flap shut so that he’d be able to open it up from the inside. His colleagues made a show of hammering the too-short nails into the wood. Then they brought the crate to the front of the platform and heaved it into the first car. The train started up and headed west
.

  Inside it was dark and stuffy. Morgen settled in and covered himself with some hay, feeling the moose’s warm breath on his face. He’d designed the crate to be long enough for both of them, but narrow enough to prevent the moose from turning around and kicking him. Luckily, the moose was used to spending days in cramped crates after her long trip from the Soviet Union. Shortly after the train departed, she lay down and paid no more attention to Morgen, as though his presence were the most natural thing in the world.

  After traveling a few minutes, the train screeched to a halt. Friedrichstrasse Station: the border crossing. From a distance, Morgen heard the clomping of boots, which had to belong to the transit police, the trapos. The boots came closer. Through the wooden wall, he heard the muffled sounds of the railroad car door being opened wide and several men talking loudly as they approached. The trapos stopped in front of the moose crate; one peered through the slit at the top. This was the reason Morgen had had it installed, or else the policeman might have tried to peer through a crack in the side panels. Through the slit in the front, the officer couldn’t see the stowaway, who was lying in a blind spot right below. In the semidarkness the policeman saw only the animal’s long ears.

  “Get up, you old donkey!” he growled at the animal.

  Morgen had to bite his lower lip so as not to burst out laughing.

  Luckily, the officials went on to the next car and soon the train continued on its way into West Berlin. Morgen felt sweat streaming over his face. The moose stayed calm.

  When the train arrived at Zoo Station, Morgen waited until all the West German passengers had gotten in and their suitcases were in place before standing up, pushing aside the front flap, and climbing out with great difficulty. Only then did he realize that his legs had fallen asleep. He closed up the crate and looked for a way to get onto the platform, but the nearest door to the railway car was locked. Morgen tried again—no luck. He ran down the corridor, found an open side door, and voilà: he was outside.