The Zookeepers' War Read online

  It was not the Stasi’s first attempt to keep tabs on Dathe. When he was still working at the Leipzig Zoo, he had gone through something similar. Shortly before he was to leave for a conference, Schneider had called him into his office. There was a man sitting at the director’s desk, someone Dathe had never seen before, but who showed great interest in his trip.

  “Is it correct that you’ll be going to West Germany shortly?” the stranger asked.

  “That’s correct,” Dathe answered warily.

  “Then surely some other colleagues will be going there from the GDR, won’t they?”

  “Of course,” said Dathe, still unsure where this unknown man’s questions were heading.

  “Ah,” said the man, “I would just be interested in learning what sorts of things will be said.”

  Dathe, taken aback, glanced over at Schneider, who kept looking straight ahead with a blank expression, as though this had nothing to do with him. Now Dathe realized what was going on. “Oh, you mean I ought to work as an informer?” he hollered. “You know what? I’ll stay here.”

  Now it was the stranger who grew nervous. “Oh no. No, please take your trip,” he said.

  Dathe never heard from the man again.

  * * *

  Less than four months had passed since the Tierpark’s opening when on October 26, Karl Max Schneider died at the age of sixty-eight. He was buried with military-style honors, a tribute that had never before been bestowed upon a zoo director. Now Heinrich Dathe had to run the Leipzig Zoo in addition to the Berlin Tierpark. He had spent years working toward running the zoo in his hometown, and now that the time had come, it was but one more task among many. His interim deputy director in Leipzig, Lothar Dittrich, was just twenty-three years old.

  For the Leipzig Zoo, the loss of such a formative individual would take a long time to recover from. Very soon, the new Berlin Tierpark would surpass it as the most important zoological institution in the GDR.

  Meanwhile, in Berlin, Dathe was trying to retain the impression of a peaceful coexistence with West Berlin’s Zoological Garden. Two days before the Tierpark opened, he announced in the GDR newspaper Neues Deutschland: “The Berlin Zoo and our new Berlin Tierpark differ so fundamentally in their structure that any ‘competition,’ which no one wishes to have, is impossible.”

  The decision for whether the two zoos would become rivals, however, would soon be taken out of his hands.

  CHAPTER 3 THE FOURTH MAN

  On a rainy morning in October 1955, Katharina Heinroth traveled to Leipzig to bid farewell to an old companion. She was on her way to the funeral of Karl Max Schneider, where she would be giving the eulogy. She had often exchanged animals with Schneider, building a successful hippopotamus breeding operation that crossed political borders. And Schneider had stood up for her every time she was attacked by the Berlin Zoological Garden’s shareholders or board.

  “I’m down by yet another friend,” Heinroth thought as she strode behind Schneider’s coffin, which was borne through the city to the South Cemetery. Afterward, the mayor of Leipzig, Hans Erich Uhlich, approached her to say that he was still looking for Schneider’s successor. He offered her the position.

  A year earlier, Heinroth had received a similar offer from the Wuppertal Zoo, in the West. She was flattered by these efforts to entice her away from Berlin. Her work was being recognized after all, even if it was disregarded by those closer to home. Just recently there had been problems in the predator section: a tiger and two young leopards had stopped eating, and were vomiting and producing bloody diarrhea. No one could identify the cause. “The last thing we need is to have a death just before the annual board meeting,” Heinrich wrote to her mother, to whom she regularly reported zoo news and in whom she would continue to confide for many years to come. “The bellyaching will let loose all over again.”

  Katharina Heinroth was now fifty-eight years old. Her second in command, Werner Schröder, had his hands full with the aquarium, and she could barely keep up with the zoo on her own. In addition to her work as director, she ran a zoology lecture series at the Technical University and her voice could be heard on the Friendship with Animals radio broadcast once a week. When she wrote to the board asking permission to hire an assistant, several members advised her to withdraw the request so as not to open herself up to further attacks. But she was not the type to bow to pressure, and things could not go on the way they were. She was working sixteen-hour days and getting six hours of sleep at most. There were days when she “could hardly speak anymore,” she wrote to her mother. When she finally settled down late at night, everything spun around in her mind. She still had so many plans: she wanted to establish an institute for behavioral science within the zoo, and a new hippopotamus house was already under construction. Together with Schröder she had managed to expand the zoo to seventy acres by exchanging land with the city. The zoo’s collection was again up to nearly two thousand animals. In spite of all the enmity, she did not want to give up her position. She was too devoted to the zoo.

  So she rejected the offer from Leipzig.

  A Forced Departure

  While Heinroth was in Leipzig, the supervisory board met in Berlin. All members concurred that it was high time for the woman to go.

  A few days after she returned home, Heinroth was visited by a man named Fritz Schmidt-Hoensdorf. In the early 1930s, he had headed the zoo in Halle, and was now teaching parasitology at the Free University in Berlin. Even though he had served on the board of the Berlin Zoo for only one year, Heinroth sensed that he was already one of her fiercest opponents.

  “Let’s get right down to it,” Schmidt-Hoensdorf said as he sat down across from her. “I have to tell you that the board has decided to part ways with you. It would be best for you to resign, so that you can be granted early retirement.”

  But Heinroth had no intention of stepping down, and she wasn’t about to make things easy for him. Instead, she replied, “How in the world did the board arrive at that decision?”

  Schmidt-Hoensdorf was cagey. “Of course we all know what you’ve done for the zoo,” he said. “And we’re very grateful to you for that. But the supervisory board cannot entrust the further construction oversight to a woman. If it were to go awry, we’d have to kick ourselves for having left you all on your own. It’s easier to pin the blame on a man.”

  Heinroth sensed that any further discussion would be futile. The decision had been made. A few weeks later she got it in writing. “In order to ensure a steady implementation of the reconstruction of the Berlin Zoological Garden over an extended period of time, the supervisory board believes it will need to bring in a scientific director who is younger in years,” the letter read, “by the beginning of the year 1957 at the latest.” As compensation for all claims stemming from her contributions and those of her deceased husband, Heinroth would receive a monthly pension of 900 marks.

  Katharina Heinroth was exhausted from struggling against so many obstacles, yes, but she had no wish to resign either; they would have to throw her out, she decided. Ultimately, though, it was not to be. Several months later, worn down by the opposition, she agreed to leave. She was allowed to name her successor and train him for half a year.

  Her first choice was Heinrich Dathe, even though he had just opened the Tierpark in the eastern part of the city. However, hiring Dathe would have been politically problematic for the board, not to mention an act of labor piracy, according to the official version of the story. As a second option, she suggested Bernhard Grzimek, the director of the Frankfurt Zoo. But he turned her down.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Grzimek had studied veterinary medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University, and had often visited the Berlin Zoo. The director at the time, Ludwig Heck, regularly supplied him with free entrance tickets. There were still animal keepers who had known Grzimek as a student, and who, he feared, would have no respect for him if he now returned as director. Besides, the political situation in the divided city made him uneasy.
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br />   A third candidate, Wilhelm Windecker, who had been running the Cologne Zoo for four years, also turned down her offer. Heinroth was starting to find the lack of interest distressing when she remembered a young man she had met a year earlier in Münster.

  * * *

  In 1955 German zoo directors had come together, as they did every year, to discuss the latest perspectives on animal husbandry. As at all such meetings, the participants posed for a group photograph. This year, the photographer had chosen as the backdrop a statue of Hermann Landois, the founder of Münster’s Zoological Garden. Like a mildly bored school class, the directors stood on the staircase in front of the bronze sculpture, gathered, it seemed, around Katharina Heinroth. Everyone was smiling, or at least trying to, except for Werner Schröder, who retained his usual expression, a look that seemed to sum up all the travails of the postwar years. In the last row, Heinrich Dathe was grinning behind Heinroth’s head.

  In front of the staircase were two cast iron cannons. A man in a light brown tweed suit had swung onto the left one, his blond pompadour tousled from his hand running through it a bit too briskly. He looked markedly younger than twenty-nine. Even though one would not suppose so at first glance, the youngster on the cannon was an aspiring zoo director. Heinz-Georg Klös had assumed leadership of the Osnabrück Zoo in northwest Germany just a year earlier, becoming the youngest zoo director in either Germany.

  Klös was originally from Wuppertal, where as a teenager he helped out in the local zoo, after most of the animal keepers had left for the front. At that age he was already certain that he’d become a zoo director someday. But before he was able to complete his schooling, the war intervened. When he was seventeen, he was drafted into the military and assigned to antiaircraft work, then reassigned to the mounted artillery division. While in Belgium near the end of the war, he wound up in British captivity. After his release in June 1945, he wasted no time in taking steps toward his intended career, starting with his college entrance exams. However, it was difficult to matriculate at German universities, which were admitting only a limited number of students; someone as young as nineteen-year-old Klös would have to wait.

  He returned to work as a caretaker at Wuppertal’s aquarium and aviary while biding his time. During this period the first animals were traded between zoos in different sectors. In 1946, Klös accompanied two Indian humped cattle to the Frankfurt Zoo, which had been restored just enough to reopen. The Wuppertal Zoo was located in the British occupation zone, Frankfurt in the American zone. Klös needed to be sure they avoided taking a route via Rhineland-Palatinate through the French sector; rumor had it that the French were confiscating everything they could get their hands on.

  Because accommodations in Frankfurt were scarce, Klös stayed at the home of zoo director Bernhard Grzimek, where he would be a frequent visitor in the years to come. In the summer of 1947 Klös was finally able to begin his study of veterinary medicine at Justus Liebig University in nearby Giessen. He used the weekends to visit the Frankfurt Zoo. Grzimek was himself a veterinarian, which generally made it more difficult to advance in the field of zoo administration. Most directors were zoologists, who looked down somewhat on veterinarians, because the latter had to acquire more knowledge on the job.

  Grzimek took the young veterinary student under his wing. Instead of having him work as an animal keeper, he let him tag along on his rounds through the zoo, introducing him to the responsibilities of a director.

  During summer vacations, Klös returned to his hometown, where he worked in the zoo or picked up extra cash writing newspaper articles for the General-Anzeiger Elberfeld-Barmen.

  The Elephant in the Suspension Railway

  In July 1950, Klös was dispatched to write a feature story about the Zirkus Althoff, which would soon be giving several performances in the city. The circus director, Franz Althoff, was known for his spectacular advertising campaigns, so the young reporter decided to find out what was now in the works. Klös had had a bit of experience in the circus world himself; between semesters, he’d spent several weeks tending to the horses at Zirkus Hagenbeck.

  Althoff’s main attraction, and the highlight of his latest advertising campaign, was an Indian elephant named Tuffi, a four-year-old female who had been with Althoff since she was a calf. Even then she’d displayed no fear of people, and so she’d been used for publicity in a number of places where the circus performed. In the Bavarian town of Altötting, she drank up an entire holy water font, in Duisburg she took a tour of the harbor, and in Solingen she climbed up scaffolding to bring bricklayers a case of beer. In Oberhausen she rode to the town hall in a streetcar to pick up the mayor in his office on the fourth floor. That day, she departed somewhat from the planned agenda by eating a potted plant and urinating on the carpet.

  Helma Vogt, Althoff’s spokesperson, had already thought over what Tuffi could do in Wuppertal: she would visit her fellow elephants in the zoo. To get there, Vogt figured a streetcar stunt would surely go over well. “What do you think?” she asked Klös expectantly.

  “In Wuppertal you ride the suspension railway,” the young man explained in a patronizing tone.

  To Helma Vogt, this objection came across not as condescending, but as the germ of a brilliant idea. She had never been in a suspension railway, let alone pictured an elephant getting into one—but if everyone in Wuppertal used it, Tuffi would have to do so as well.

  On the morning of July 21, the intersection by the old market square in the Barmen neighborhood of Wuppertal was jammed with people, the police doing their best to push the masses of spectators and journalists back onto the sidewalk. The crowd could already see in the distance a single-file line of fifteen elephants adorned with white leather harnesses making their way to the station. At the very end of the line was Tuffi.

  No one quite recalls who came up with the brilliant idea for a procession. As might be expected, both Franz Althoff and the head of the city’s transportation services made public statements claiming credit. Whoever’s idea it was, they hoped to draw attention well beyond the borders of the city to the circus, the zoo, and to Wuppertal.

  While the herd waited at the bottom of the staircase to the railway station, Althoff made a big show of buying four tickets for Tuffi, each of which she took from the counter herself, by her trunk. Then he and she climbed up the stone stairs, accompanied by Althoff’s twelve-year-old son, Harry, spokesperson Helma Vogt, an elephant keeper, and a throng of journalists, who took nonstop photos of the shoulder-high pachyderm as she climbed the steep staircase with astonishing agility.

  The railway was suspended from a forty-foot-high steel frame that ran across the Wupper River, which snakes through the middle of the city. On the platform, Tuffi remained relaxed, displaying not the least fear of heights. Every once in a while she stuck her trunk through the netting that stretched across the platform’s edge. Soon the train pulled in.

  Car 13 was reserved for her. Althoff had planned for the journalists to ride with Tuffi in a circus bus along the route to the railway stop, where Tuffi would wave her trunk out the window for the cameras, then the journalists would join up with the elephant after her railway jaunt. But no sooner had the elephant boarded the railway car than some of the journalists pushed their way in. The others (including Klös), fearing that their colleagues would get better pictures, squeezed in as well. When passengers in the neighboring cars caught wind of the commotion, several of them quickly changed compartments too, so that car 13 eventually held not only the four circus people, but also about twenty journalists as well as numerous passengers and a fifteen-hundred-pound elephant. No one would—or could—get out.

  The train whirred along toward the district of Elberfeld, home of the Wuppertal Zoological Garden. “Great advertising, isn’t it?” Vogt gushed to Klös, who was standing beside her.

  Up to this point, Tuffi had been the picture of serenity, but in the air things got far shakier. When the train screeched its way around the first curve, she trumpet
ed and flapped her ears in a clear sign of agitation. To make matters worse, she stepped on a passenger’s foot, causing him to shout, “The elephant has gone wild!” Everyone crowded to the front of the car to see what had happened. Klös and the others at the front pushed back.

  Elephants cannot look behind them. They have to turn around, which Tuffi promptly did. As people tried to clear out of her way, they fell on top of one another, and the seating area and journalists’ camera equipment broke apart. There were screams. Tuffi gave Vogt a swift kick, and Vogt lost consciousness.

  It was too much for Tuffi. She just wanted to get out, and banged her head against a window, once, twice, then broke the glass. She kept on banging—and the next thing she knew, she was in free fall. Franz Althoff planned to jump after her, but his son held him back. Klös, who was propping up the unconscious circus spokesperson, suddenly saw the chaos in slow motion. While Tuffi was plunging twelve meters down, all he could think was, “I can’t picture the faces of passersby on the sidewalk if they’re watching this.”

  Eventually the train, which had continued without interruption, got to Adlerbrücke, the next stop. Everyone who could still walk pushed through the door, rushed down the stairs, and ran back along the riverbank to where Tuffi had jumped. The Wupper is less than two feet deep in many places downtown, and the riverbed is rocky. But as luck would have it, it was somewhat deeper at this stretch, and the ground muddy. When the first journalists got there, Tuffi was having a wonderful time wading through the shallow water. As if by a miracle, she had not suffered any injuries beyond a couple of scrapes on her rear end from landing on her side. Helma Vogt fared worse. She was brought to the hospital with bruised ribs and gashes on her face. Klös went with her. When she came to, the first thing she asked him was, “What happened to Tuffi?”