The Zookeepers' War Read online

  Werner Philipp’s father was one victim of these policies. Not long before his son made what was to be his last journey through Treptow to visit the zoo, the tax office carried out one of its notorious audits of his company and determined that he had to pay one million marks in back taxes for the previous year, even though his annual revenue was only about 90,000 marks; after paying his three bookkeepers, only 25,000 marks remained for himself and his family. The “back taxes” left him bankrupt. On top of that, the tax office accused him of vague “economic crimes” and threatened him with three years in prison. The family would soon drop everything and flee to the West, taking along only the bare minimum and traveling separately. But even with so much else on his mind, Werner Philipp would not give up his passion for the zoo.

  The Competition Begins

  By the spring of 1953, more and more people were leaving the GDR every day; 300,000 had already slipped past the guards and across the border since the previous year. Moscow saw that the GDR was overextending itself with its ambitious construction plans, overlooking the well-being of the people, and so the Soviet Union called on the Socialist Unity Party leadership to change course. In early June, these leaders conceded that they had made “a few mistakes,” and agreed to reverse the expropriations, return property, review arrests and sentences pertaining to so-called economic crimes, and improve the food supply. But they continued to insist on their new work quotas, and so on June 17 construction workers went on strike, marching down the most prestigious construction site in the country: Stalinallee, the new central boulevard of the capital. The police looked on helplessly, while the government fled to the headquarters of the Soviet occupation force, which eventually quelled the rebellions with tanks and soldiers.

  The Politburo in East Berlin was starting to realize that things could not go on like this. You couldn’t just keep raising production targets; people needed to feel as though they’d been given something in return.

  That October, Karl Max Schneider, the director of the Leipzig Zoo, was awarded the National Prize of the GDR for “outstanding creative work in scholarly fields.” During the festivities, Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl and Soviet ambassador Mikhail Pervukhin took him aside and told him of their plans to build a prestigious zoo in the eastern part of Berlin.

  The Magistrate of Greater Berlin (as the city government of the socialist sector continued to call itself) did not want East Berliners traveling to the British sector to visit the zoo there, as they would be maintaining contact with the West and throwing their money at capitalism. Besides, GDR state officials had to seek approval from the Ministry of the Interior just to go see a few animals. Having a zoo of their own in the East would solve these problems, the two men explained.

  Back in Leipzig, Schneider told his assistant, Heinrich Dathe, what he had learned. Neither Schneider nor Dathe thought much of the idea of establishing another zoo. Both felt that there was already plenty that needed to be done to repair the country’s three existing zoos. While the zoo in Halle had come through the war relatively unscathed, many buildings in the Leipzig Zoo had still only been patched together. The zoo in Dresden, which was, at one hundred years, the oldest in the new country, had suffered damage on an entirely different scale: in February 1945, a firestorm had raged through the city after a British bombing, damaging the zoo so badly that it took more than a year after the end of the war for it to reopen. But if the gentlemen in Berlin were serious about their plan, the two zookeepers knew what that meant. There was really only one individual qualified to be the director of this new Berlin zoo: Schneider’s right-hand man, Heinrich Dathe.

  Forty-three-year-old Dathe was a passionate zoologist. Even as a child he went birdwatching, binoculars in hand, as often as he could in his rural hometown in Saxony. If he were to become rich, he wrote in an essay for school when he was twelve, he would build a big hall where “snakes, lizards, hummingbirds, insects, sloths, apes, and flying dogs” could live. Back then, he regarded the traditional zoo as nothing but “a prison where animals are locked up.”

  When he was thirteen years old, his parents relocated to Leipzig, where his father took a job as an office manager. Dathe completed his college entrance exams and in the early 1930s began to study zoology, botany, and geology at the University of Leipzig. He frequently visited the city’s zoo to sketch the animals and began working there as an assistant while still a student. He quickly rose in rank over the next decade to become director Schneider’s deputy. His career seemed mapped out for him, until it came to a sudden halt. The past—both Germany’s and his own—had caught up with him.

  From Ornithologist to Nazi

  In 1932, at the age of twenty-one, Heinrich Dathe had become a member of the Nazi party. At Leipzig University, National Socialism had enjoyed widespread support; many professors were in the party. And Dathe was a child of the 1920s. He had experienced the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles—which he, like so many others, believed Germany had been bullied into accepting—as well as the subsequent period of inflation and the ensuing global economic crisis. He was determined to contribute what he could to help Germany regain its former standing in the world. However, his eagerness to complete his expensive studies as quickly as possible and begin earning money clashed with his political commitment. And so, until the mid-1930s, Dathe held the lowest rank in the Nazi party hierarchy, putting him in charge of collecting membership dues. His neighbors would later testify that he was an affable sort of Nazi.

  Two days after the start of the war he was drafted and sent to the western front, where his right arm was severely wounded in 1940 in northern France. In the sick bay he met his future wife, Elisabeth, a nurse, from Saxony like himself. He was attracted to the beautiful way she rolled her “r”s. After an extended convalescence at home, during which their daughter, Almut, was born, he returned to the front in 1945, this time to Italy, where he wound up in American captivity. He spent much of the remainder of the war giving zoological lectures to his fellow prisoners and keeping up with his birdwatching.

  Shortly after the war’s end he received offers of employment from several West German zoos, but his wife, their three-year-old daughter, and their two-year-old son, Holger, who was born during his time as a prisoner of war, were waiting for him in Leipzig. He was flattered by the offers, but Dathe wanted only to get back to Leipzig and his zoo. Once he had returned, however, he saw that life had gone on without him. At first, his children wished that the stranger who wanted to be their “Papi” would go away. And Dathe soon learned he had been fired in absentia from the zoo because of his membership in the Nazi party. When he applied for a teaching position at the Kürschner-Schule, a continuing education institute, he was rejected for the same reason. In order to feed his family, he took temporary jobs as an editor, and earned money mimicking bird sounds on the radio. He had always found it unpleasant to ask for a favor, or even to ask for directions, but now found himself struggling in an era in which bribing was called “trading” and stealing “hoarding.” Even his old boss, Karl Max Schneider, could not help him, as he had been fired from the zoo as well. Dathe’s career seemed to have ended before it had begun.

  Hope sprang anew when Schneider returned to the zoo after two of his successors proved inept. The once and future zoo director wanted to round up his old team again—Schneider needed every available man, and his former deputy most of all. The state recognized that it would be impossible to manage in the long run without pardoning at least some of the men who had been in the Nazi party, so Dathe was asked to undergo an assessment to establish whether he was a confirmed Nazi. A publisher and one of his wartime companions attested to his humane and scientific qualities, and eventually Heinz Keil, the administrative director of the zoo and a concentration camp survivor, spoke in his favor. After several conversations, he had concluded that Dathe had not internalized Nazi ideology and issued a clearance for him, which meant that Dathe was now free to return to the zoo. In July 1950 he started there again a
s a research assistant.

  In light of these experiences, Dathe arrived at a decision: never again would he belong to any political party. Doing so had practically cost him his career, and he valued his career above all else.

  * * *

  It took a good three quarters of a year for the fantasy of a new zoo in the East German capital to crop up again. At a special parliamentary session in early June 1954, the Magistrate of Greater Berlin proposed a program referred to as “our Berlin moving along even faster on the new track.” In addition to building additional housing, a new clinic in Treptow, and sightseeing tours for West German visitors, the program would set up animal enclosures in all districts and “construct a zoo in the democratic sector,” as East German politicians sometimes referred to East Berlin. The zoo in the Western sector was said not to measure up to the “standards of the capital, which was growing larger and more beautiful.” That the zoo might simply be in the wrong part of Berlin went unmentioned.

  Shortly afterward, Karl Max Schneider received an invitation from the deputy mayor of East Berlin, Herbert Fechner, to attend a meeting at which the issue of a new zoo would be discussed. On the appointed date, however, Schneider would be at a conference of zoo directors in Copenhagen, so his deputy had to fill in for him, reluctantly. No one needed a second zoo in Berlin, least of all Dathe.

  Early in the muggy Monday morning of June 21, 1954, Heinrich Dathe made his way to the Leipzig train station. His carriage was packed with people who all looked as though it was their first time in a train.

  The day’s plan was to tour the three sites in East Berlin they had to choose from: Plänterwald, a marshy woodland whose southeast side adjoined Treptower Park; Wuhlheide, a public park in the district of Köpenick; and Schlosspark Friedrichsfelde, an overgrown park in Lichtenberg. The last of these, Friedrichsfelde, would be the first destination.

  The car Fechner provided headed east along Stalinallee. Looking through the side windows, Dathe saw the new “workers’ palaces” (large apartment buildings with porcelain tiles) going by, with a sixteen-foot-high bronze statue of Stalin smiling placidly into the distance from its pedestal. One year earlier, there had been riots here, with Soviet tanks rolling up, rocks flying, and numerous casualties. Now the construction workers on the scaffolding looked like ants, having long since returned to work. It was as though the East Berlin workers’ uprising of June 17, 1953, had never occurred.

  As they drove along, the area grew less formal, with cottages rather than stately older buildings lining the street. In 1821, Peter Joseph Lenné, a Prussian garden architect, had created a palace garden in Friedrichsfelde on the estate of the noble Treskow family. The palace suffered only minor damage in World War II, but afterward it was nationalized and left untended, as was the park. Dathe was still skeptical when they entered the estate, but as the car drove to the overgrown park grounds, his disinclination gradually gave way. He later wrote in his diary, “It felt almost ceremonial for us to be riding along the plane-tree-lined avenue to the little old palace.” The group spent an hour walking the grounds, Dathe listening to the calls of different birds in the trees and in the undergrowth. The farther he walked, the more he shed his initial reluctance, until he felt something he had never experienced before, something like euphoria, and an awareness of a new era dawning. “Something could be made of this,” he thought to himself. He was already picturing enclosures being built between the trees. All of a sudden he sensed quite clearly that here he would be able to design a zoo according to his own specifications. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” he told himself. “You get this only once!”

  After months of insisting that Berlin had no need for a second zoo, he was now determined to build that zoo right here. But Heinrich Dathe would not have been Dathe if he’d made this known to the others on the spot. His decision had been made, but when Deputy Mayor Fechner asked him what he thought about Friedrichsfelde, he asked for time to mull it over.

  Still, the rest of the group had noticed the way he scrutinized the spacious grounds. They didn’t even visit the other two sites that day, and those later turned out to be poor options anyway: the Plänterwald was too swampy and would have had to undergo a thorough draining, and Wuhlheide was too far out of town.

  Heinrich Dathe did not care in the slightest; the only thing on his mind was the overgrown park. When he got home at one in the morning, the first thing he did was wake up his wife to tell her about his change of heart. Still half-asleep, she heard him out. What else could she do? There was no way of changing his mind. He raved to her about Friedrichsfelde until four o’clock. Later, after just a few hours’ sleep, he sent a telegram to Copenhagen to update his boss: “Meeting in Berlin took place after all. Outcome as predicted. Regards, Dathe.” He did not yet tell people about his decision, as he had misgivings about leaving the Leipzig Zoo and his benefactor if he went to Berlin. But when Schneider came back and Dathe informed him of his plans, Schneider’s reaction was not what Dathe had feared. His only concern was for the future of the trade journal Der Zoologische Garten, which Dathe helped him edit. And because Dathe had trouble saying no, he agreed to continue doing his editorial work for the magazine from Berlin. Dathe was raring to throw himself into his new job.

  The Old Plan for the Second Zoo

  Another meeting in Berlin with Fechner soon followed, during which Schneider imposed a condition: “Before the press finds out about the construction, I would like to inform Dr. Heinroth of this development.” The new zoo could in no way compete with the venerable one in the western part of the city, and a rivalry would not be beneficial to a project that was still on shaky ground. Fechner agreed.

  That afternoon, Schneider and Dathe visited Katharina Heinroth in her study. Hanging on the wall behind her desk was a weekly calendar decorated with giant colorful butterflies and studded with appointment reminders. Next to it hung a portrait mask of a gorilla named Bobby, who in the late 1920s had been something of a celebrity. Beside the desk was a big birdcage in which a black hill myna hopped around, calling out “Come in.” Heinroth was sitting off to one side of her chair, as she usually did, her left elbow propped up on the desk. There was organized chaos everywhere: piles of opened letters and partially read manuscripts next to mountains of reference books.

  Schneider began by discussing several routine business matters. Finally, he said, “One more thing you should hear from us: East Berlin will be getting a zoo.”

  After almost ten years as director of the Berlin Zoo, Heinroth was not easily thrown. So she tilted her head and pressed her chin into her hand. “Oh,” she said, slowly raising her eyebrows. “That’s been proposed so many times.”

  There certainly had been numerous plans for a second zoo in Berlin. As far back as 1909, Hamburg animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck envisioned setting up a “people’s animal park” in the northern part of Charlottenburg. Two years earlier he had caused quite a stir in Stellingen, just outside Hamburg, with his fenceless zoo featuring outdoor enclosures and ostentatious craggy backdrops. There had never been a zoo like it. He was planning something of this sort for Berlin, and had even gained the Kaiser’s support, but before the plans could take concrete form, Hagenbeck died. The next year, World War I broke out, and the plans were scrapped. Then in the late 1920s, Theodor Knottnerus-Meyer, a zoo director who’d fled Rome to escape the Fascists, took up the idea of a people’s animal park. Lutz Heck was wary, fearing that his Berlin Zoo would meet the same fate as the old Hamburg Zoo. Soon after the opening of Hagenbeck’s animal park, the number of visitors to the old zoo dropped off sharply, and it was forced to close. Heck also had plans of his own to collaborate with his good friend Hermann Göring to establish a spacious branch of the Berlin Zoo on the outskirts of the city.

  Heinroth had been pitched the idea of adding a second zoo herself. Shortly after the end of the war, two Russian veterinarians suggested she build a zoo in Treptower Park. But she turned them down, saying “I already have more than enough on my
hands with one zoo.”

  Karl Max Schneider may not have been a keen observer of human nature, but he had known his colleague long enough to deduce her wariness about the likelihood of a second zoo ever being built, so he assured her, with an impish grin, “This time it’s for real.”

  “Well,” Heinroth replied, trying to avoid sounding overly snide, “if they’re banking on our destruction, we’re fifty years ahead.” It would take at least half a century, she thought, for the new zoo to become a real threat to hers.

  Rather than engage with this barb, Schneider simply informed her that Dathe would be the director.

  Now Heinroth was truly surprised, and straightened up in her chair. “Well, what do you know,” she said. “He could have come to me. I would’ve been happy to have him work as an assistant.”

  But Dathe had had quite enough of playing a subordinate role.

  * * *

  Hermann Henselmann, the GDR’s head architect, recommended that a young colleague of his named Heinz Graffunder oversee the building of the animal park, and on August 27, once Dathe had selected his preferred site, the Berlin Magistrate officially approved construction. But the future director seems to have been kept in the dark about this development. In a letter to Graffunder dated September 4, Dathe wrote, “I have to admit to you frankly that I’m disappointed by the course of events.” The planning was going far too sluggishly for his liking. He had yet to hear anything from the government about whether building could proceed. All he knew was that a board of trustees had been set up. He found it vexing “that speed is of the essence only when spurring into action a crowd of people who don’t know a thing about the matter at hand yet are perfectly willing to meddle, while the obvious steps are not taken.”