The Zookeepers' War Page 13

  In the smog-plagued West, Willy Brandt, who was running for chancellor as a Social Democrat, had decried pollution as far back as 1961, insisting, “The sky over the Ruhr must become blue again.” At first he was showered with what he’d later term “bucketfuls of scorn” from within his own ranks. His party reproached him for promising “the blue of the sky” while standing in front of two hundred power plants, blast furnaces, and refineries. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, went the conventional wisdom in the region spanning Dortmund and Duisburg; economic progress was well worth a little smoke in the skies. Hardly anyone really knew what fine dust was, anyway—if anything, it was what housewives wiped off the cupboards once a week. It wasn’t until public interest in cleaner air was aroused that the federal government also took up the cause.

  But in spite of some changes in the law, the situation did not improve. There was still hardly any talk of an environmental movement, even though people had streamed into movie theaters just a few years earlier to watch Bernhard Grzimek’s nature documentaries No Place for Wild Animals and Serengeti Shall Not Die. To many West Germans in the mid-1960s, conservation was something that happened off in Africa.

  And so, to some people, it seemed like an act of divine providence that this white, innocent creature had turned up out of filthy floods, in the shadow of the blast furnaces. It swam up the Rhine, and came to them! To help them become aware of just how badly the river stank.

  * * *

  Throngs of onlookers formed along the shores of the Rhine each day of those weeks to catch a glimpse of Moby Dick. “Why is a whale in the Rhine having such a nice time?” the Süddeutsche Zeitung wondered on its front page, while the newspaper Bild sent out a blimp to get aerial shots of the whale.

  East German newspapers also made mention of Moby Dick. On May 20, the Neue Zeit ran the sighting of a white whale outside of Duisburg above accounts of sexual offenses against an eleven-year-old girl in Erlangen, anti-Semitic graffiti in Munich, and a typhoon in the Philippines. As long as the hunt for the whale went on, the GDR carried coverage of it. As the days passed, the whale’s reported length increased, from thirteen feet in the early articles to twenty in later ones.

  Meanwhile, Wolfgang Gewalt was standing on a ship in the middle of the Rhine, attempting to use a Cap-Chur pistol to shoot a tranquilizer through the whale’s skin. The gun’s long barrel recalled the weapon that Sean Connery used while chasing villains as James Bond in From Russia with Love. What Gewalt didn’t know was that the cannula of the tranquilizer dart was far too short to penetrate the whale’s blubber, a layer of fat roughly eight inches thick.

  Friends started taking bets about the outcome of the hunt, and a waterfront restaurant owner joked to his diners, “If the catch is successful, we’ll have white whale cutlets.” But when Moby Dick suddenly plunged into the depths after a hit from Gewalt’s pistol and remained out of sight for days, the mood shifted. Tranquilizing the whale had been a risky move, because the animal would have to come to the surface eventually to breathe. Many were already starting to fear that Moby Dick had drowned. One newspaper demanded: “Arrest Dr. Gewalt!”

  For his adversaries, Gewalt’s name—which translates to “violence”—said it all. But the target of their hostility didn’t ignore their criticism; he actually reveled in it. He savored his edgy image. In his apartment, he displayed all the headlines calling for his head, as though they were trophies of animals he’d hunted down.

  In late May, however, Gewalt called off his hunt for the whale temporarily so that the animal could regain its “faith in mankind,” as he explained, with more than a hint of mockery, to the magazine Der Spiegel. “It’s certainly not normal for a whale to swim inland,” he reminded readers.

  * * *

  Moby Dick’s odyssey most likely began on the east coast of Canada in early 1966, when a young beluga was caught in a shallow bay at low tide. The whale was put on a freighter and sent off to a zoo in England, but shortly before the ship reached its destination, it encountered a storm in the English Channel. A wave flushed the whale overboard and into the North Sea. All traces of the creature were lost, until a few months later, when Moby Dick turned up in the Rhine.

  After his adventures in Duisberg, the whale was purportedly sighted again in Holland, where he was dubbed “Willi de Waal.” There, hunting him was prohibited; Frits den Herder, the founder of Europe’s first dolphinarium, railed in the press about Germany’s “barbaric trapping methods.” Still, those methods left less of a mark on Moby Dick than the toxic Rhine water, which gave the whale brownish spots on his skin.

  Hollanders tried to get the whale back into the ocean, but at a fork in the river he missed the branch to Rotterdam and instead swam to the dammed-up Ijsselmeer, where a lock was opened for the express purpose of getting him to the North Sea. He didn’t find that either, and swam back toward Germany, where Dr. Gewalt and thousands of curious onlookers awaited him at the banks of the Rhine.

  * * *

  Not everyone was excited to see Moby Dick back. Bernhard Grzimek, director of the Frankfurt Zoological Garden and Germany’s preeminent zoologist, griped in Der Spiegel that “hundreds of thousands of people are fretting about this one beluga” and yet “no one cares that the Norwegians virtually wiped out these same white whales near Spitsbergen in a bloody, brutal way, because Spitsbergen is far away.” Grzimek didn’t publicly criticize Gewalt’s conduct, but in a personal letter to the younger zookeeper he expressed doubts about his intentions to house the whale in his zoo. Duisburg’s dolphinarium—a concrete basin 33 by 33 feet and 10 feet deep—was probably too small.

  In early June, Gewalt took to the pages of Die Zeit to justify his actions to readers. “If a giraffe were to get lost in the forest outside Duisburg, we would seek to capture it,” he wrote, because it wouldn’t be able to find its way out. Besides, he continued, “in our enclosure, surrounded by others of the same species, it would be extremely well cared for.”

  Others weighed in too, and as state elections approached, the whale’s plight took on political dimensions. The Christian Democratic Union called for Moby Dick to be left alone, while the Social Democrat Party recommended capturing him and bringing him back to the open sea. Meanwhile, Moby Dick kept on swimming, against the current and unperturbed, leaving behind his hunter as he passed by Duisburg, Düsseldorf, and Cologne.

  On the morning of June 13, a meeting of the Federal Press Conference filled every last seat in a Bonn assembly hall. Government spokesman Karl-Günther von Hase had just opened the session, which would be addressing important NATO concerns, when suddenly a man rushed into the hall and announced that Moby Dick had turned up in front of Parliament. In an instant, world politics lost any interest it might have held. Politicians and journalists crowded outside. At the banks of the river, people were throwing sandwiches and pickled herrings into the water, but the whale spurned these offerings. He displayed his spotted, scarred back one last time and headed south.

  He swam close to four hundred miles upstream, leaving almost half the Rhine behind him, before turning around near the town of Remagen and swimming back the entire distance. This time, Wolfgang Gewalt let him do as he wished. The beluga spent one night outside Wesel before crossing the border into the Netherlands on June 15 and heading toward the mouth of the Rhine. During the final miles he was accompanied by two Dutch police cars on shore and three boats on the river. The next evening, at about twenty to seven, Moby Dick, the white whale who had cast his spell over Germany for an entire month, was spotted one final time before disappearing for good.

  In the years to come, the people living near the Rhine would keep his memory alive. An excursion boat was named after him, and the music group Medium Terzett composed a folksy song about him the following spring:

  What is the white whale wishing for, the white whale on the Rhine?

  He’s heard the Rhine’s made not of water, but of fine Rhine wine.

  What is the white whale wishing for, i
t’s easy to divine,

  The white whale’s wishing for Rhine wine as he settles down to dine.

  It would still take more than a decade for the contaminated river to begin to recover, but the appearance of a whale in the Rhine helped environmental protection become mainstream.

  * * *

  Duisburg zoo director Wolfgang Gewalt may not have been popular, but by June of 1966 he’d become famous. His failure to catch Moby Dick didn’t stop him from continuing to try to acquire whales; indeed, he soon redoubled his efforts. In 1968, Duisberg’s dolphins were moved into a bigger pool, and the old pool was reclassified as a whalearium. The following year, Gewalt traveled to Canada’s Hudson Bay, where he caught two white whales with the help of First Nations people and brought them to his zoo. Additional excursions followed: one took him to Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, where he caught black and white Commerson’s dolphins (also known as jacobitas), another to Venezuela, where Orinoco river dolphins ended up in his nets. By the 1970s, there were as many as six different species of whales and dolphins in the Duisburg Zoo, the most anywhere in Central Europe. But the related expenses were high, as were the losses. Of the first six imported jacobitas, only one survived the first few weeks, and three of the five river dolphins died within three years.

  Still, Gewalt’s expeditions to capture animals served as promotional campaigns for his zoo—and for himself. He was out to cultivate his image; otherwise, it would have been more cost effective to leave the trapping to others.

  Gewalt may have been extreme in his passion for collecting animals, but he wasn’t alone; zoos throughout the world had begun breeding endangered species to save them from extinction. Heinz-Georg Klös boasted to newspapers about releasing eagle owls back into the wild of the Harz Mounains, while the GDR hoped to return beavers to their natural habitat in the Elbe River. For many rare species, however, there were only one or two animals in captivity at any given time, not enough to breed effectively, meaning that the animals required to realize these breeding projects would first have to be captured in the wild.

  For animal trappers, these were golden times.

  Communist Tigers for Capitalist Tapirs

  The zoos on both sides of the Iron Curtain profited from the animal trade. Every fall, numerous trappers—exclusively West Germans—were permitted into the GDR to collect surplus offspring to resell to West German zoos. The East German zoos were given rare species in return. Sometimes, however, the exchange of animals was conducted on circuitous paths that bypassed the government—and weren’t always legal.

  Since the 1950s, trappers had kept up-to-date lists of those animals most sought after by zoos. Gerd Morgen, who’d briefly found work as an ape keeper in Basel after fleeing East Berlin, soon left the zoo to hunt gorillas and chimpanzees in southern Cameroon, while a young Bavarian, Martin Stummer, was making a name for himself in Ecuador. Like everything in Stummer’s life, this had been a matter of coincidence. The twenty-four-year-old had stumbled into this line of work quite simply because he was an adventurer.

  As a teenager, Stummer rode his bicycle from Munich all the way to Greece. His later travels took him farther afield, and his destinations to greater heights. He skipped school to climb a six-thousand-meter mountain in Pakistan with a friend. After graduating, he headed first to Africa, where he visited doctor and theologian Albert Schweitzer in Gabon, and then to South America, where he took up residence.

  In the villages of Ecuador he discovered that the indigenous people catch piglike mountain tapirs and keep them as a living meat supply; the young animals lived side by side with other household pets, only tied up with ropes. Even though they were still growing, the ropes weren’t loosened over time, and they eventually cut into the animals’ flesh, leaving most with bloody necks. Stummer figured the animals would surely fare better in European or American zoos—and even if he earned money in the process, he was convinced his actions would be honorable.

  He founded an animal trading company and named it Amazonian Animals. At first he bought animals from indigenous people, saving them from winding up in a cooking pot. But he was drawn to the unknown, and before long he was taking trips to the Pacific coast, to the rain forest of the Amazon, and to the highlands of the Andes to catch pumas, snakes, and macaws. He established contact with government agencies to facilitate getting export documents, and set up several animal collection sites.

  He was successful, especially at capturing mountain tapirs—mysterious creatures that lived in the inaccessible forests of the Andes at altitudes of more than two thousand meters. It was rare to even glimpse them in European zoos. Only a single specimen had spent a short time at the Berlin Zoo, back at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Stummer’s helpers had their dogs track down the shy tapirs, which were lassoed before the good swimmers could escape into the torrential Río Palora. The young ones—easier to transport and still adaptable—were tranquilized with a weak dose of curare, a poison used on arrowheads. From the Andes Stummer brought the animals to his headquarters in Quito, where the sensitive folivores spent several weeks getting used to the plants they would be fed in captivity. Word of the German’s hauls got around quickly, and he delivered the rare animals to several zoos in the United States and Europe. A single pair brought him $5,000.

  Then, one day, Stummer received an invitation from Siegfried Seifert, the new director of the Leipzig Zoo, to come to East Berlin.

  It was a cold winter day when Stummer met Seifert in the capital of the GDR, at an Interhotel on the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse. Once they’d sat down at a table at the back of the lobby, Seifert came to the point: “We need a couple of mountain tapirs.”

  “No problem at all, Herr Direktor,” Stummer said. “I’ve recently been authorized to capture and export ten pairs.”

  “Very nice,” said Seifert. He hesitated briefly, then added, “The problem is we don’t have any Western currency.”

  “That’s not good,” Stummer replied, starting to get annoyed that he’d bothered to make the trip.

  “I know, I know,” Seifert said, soothingly. He leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “But in exchange I’ll get you one male and three female Siberian tigers, all guaranteed purebred. We’ll get the authorization from our government and fill out the complicated paperwork. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  “Even so, we’d have to proceed cautiously,” Stummer said, a little too loudly, and still clearly miffed.

  The director waved his arms up and down. “Please, Herr Stummer, lower your voice,” he said. “The hotel has eyes and ears. There are bugs hidden everywhere, and the Stasi is always watching. We’ll be in trouble if they think an exchange of communist tigers from Siberia for capitalist mountain tapirs can’t be reconciled with socialist interests.”

  Eventually they came to an agreement: Seifert would also order several boa constrictors, which Stummer would tuck away in a shipping crate with the tapirs, per Seifert’s instructions, since he wouldn’t be able to get papers for the snakes. (The snakes were likely placed in burlap sacks to keep them from strangling their traveling companions.) At the end of their meeting, Seifert shook hands with Stummer and said, as he left, “Don’t trust anyone besides us. We’re not interested in politics. We deal only with animals.”

  On the flight back to Ecuador, Stummer grew increasingly nervous at the thought of what he would do with four Siberian tigers in the tropics. Luckily the world’s largest big cats were in high demand in the West, as they weren’t easily found outside the Eastern Bloc. Stummer offered the animals to several West German zoos; Wilhelma, a zoological and botanical garden in Stuttgart, took them off his hands, along with a pair of mountain tapirs and some other wildlife from Stummer’s collection. Stummer had built a veritable mini-zoo in Quito and gained a reputation as a specialist in hummingbirds.

  The animal trappers he had come to know were generally shady individuals, all riff-raff in Stummer’s eyes. Still, he told himself
that anyone who bad-mouthed trappers was sure to bad-mouth zoo directors as well, as they had seemingly insatiable appetites for new additions. The esteemed Bernhard Grzimek publicly called for bans on exporting endangered species, but wanted to secure exclusive rights to rare animals from Stummer. Stummer was willing to catch anything on a zoo’s wish list if the money was right.

  He got commissions from West Berlin as well, where Heinz-Georg Klös was determined to acquire northern pudus—the world’s smallest deer. Also known as “rabbit deer,” they live in the Andes, four thousand meters up. “Get me pudus, whether or not it’s legal,” Klös wrote in a letter to Stummer. He later followed up with the necessary applications and forms.

  But by the late 1960s animal trapping was already experiencing a decline. For traders like Hermann Ruhe, it became increasingly difficult to sell animals for a profit when zoos were breeding species themselves; stricter quarantine regulations certainly didn’t help. Still, it would take years—well into the 1970s—for criticism of animal trapping to become mainstream and for international laws, such as the United States’ Endangered Species Act of 1973, to limit trade in wildlife.

  By then, Gerd Morgen had already stopped hunting great apes; the effort no longer paid off. He left Cameroon and spent the following decades at sea as a cook. As a young man, he’d dreamed of traveling to Winnipeg, but Canada was too cold for him. Never again did he see the moose in the wooden crate that had unwittingly helped him escape from the GDR.