The Zookeepers' War Read online

  If Klös wished to outdo his competitor, he would have to add a feature that did not yet exist in the Tierpark. And he had something in mind. When the city’s steering committee next visited the zoo, he suggested pressing ahead with the construction of a new ape house. “First of all, apes are hard to get without foreign currencies,” Klös explained. “And second, iron bars are needed for their cages—and they might be even harder to come by than foreign currencies, given the current shortage of raw materials.”

  * * *

  Klös left no stone unturned in his hunt for rare animals. He had a particular soft spot for rhinoceroses and had long ago set his mind on buying a pair from India, the last one in Berlin having died fifty years earlier. However, Indian rhinoceroses, which are second in size only to the elephant among land animals, are rare in nature and difficult to obtain. There are only a few hundred living in nature reserves in India and Nepal, and a few more dispersed among zoos in Europe. Of these, only the Basel Zoo had been breeding the animals for some years, but the Swiss had no interest in handing over one of their rhinoceroses—let alone two. So Klös approached the Hagenbeck animal trading company, but soon received a letter of refusal. He then wrote to his old friend Otto Fockelmann, who had often helped him obtain all kinds of rare species (as well as his first job as zoo director). After a while, Fockelmann let him know he had an idea for how to come upon at least one rhinoceros.

  As luck would have it, India’s Kaziranga National Park had a young bull named Arjun who was available for transport to Europe. He’d be expensive, priced at 30,000 marks. But there was an additional, far bigger problem: the bull had already been promised to the Dresden Zoo. Luckily, Fockelmann was working with an animal trader from Turin who had good connections in India; one of his contacts was an Italian priest who ran a missionary school and had acquaintances in government circles. The clergyman was able to persuade the Indian authorities, with an unknown sum of illicit money, to sell the rhinoceros to Fockelmann. In the fall of 1959, Arjun was brought not to Dresden, but to Berlin. Klös actually got along quite well with the Dresden Zoo’s director, Wolfgang Ullrich, and even considered him a friend. But a friendship can fall apart over a rarity like an Indian rhinoceros.

  Trust among zoo directors was shaky at best. Klös had learned that the hard way when he acquired an antelope from Bernhard Grzimek, with whom he’d worked as a trainee in Frankfurt, without taking a close look at the animal in advance. Grzimek surely wouldn’t take advantage of him, Klös thought; they were friends. When the antelope arrived, however, the animal was missing half its lower jaw.

  Klös also vied for animals with Heinrich Dathe. Whenever Hermann Ruhe, the owner of one of Germany’s premier animal trading companies, received new stock, German zoo directors from East and West came running to Alfeld an der Leine, a town in Lower Saxony. After Ruhe returned from an expedition to East Africa (as was evident from his tan), Klös was provided a budget by the supervisory board to buy two zebras and a pair of ostriches. He had his tricks to get the exact animals he wanted. He always carried a stack of little nametags labeled “Klös—Berlin Zoo” with him. During the initial inspection he’d place them on all the most appealing animals so that his colleagues would see which he’d claimed for his own. In the end he would pick out only the two finest and healthiest ones.

  Dathe, by contrast, had been given a free hand by the GDR Ministry of Culture—or at least that’s what Klös believed. “If I arrive with a truck, Dathe comes with a whole railroad car,” he once complained to journalist Werner Philipp. Klös had no other way to explain Dathe’s methods; instead of choosing a few animals, he would simply say to Ruhe, “I’ll take them all.”

  “A few of them aren’t very healthy,” Ruhe would warn. Although he was a tough businessman, he knew that Dathe could be sensitive and carry a grudge if anyone tried to foist sick animals on him.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Dathe would answer. “We’ll nurse them back to health.”

  Klös and Dathe differed sharply in their manner of conducting business. For Klös, a business transaction was good if he’d paid as little as possible. For Dathe, it was less a question of money than of acquiring distinctive animals. (It was fortunate that he was less concerned with finances, as owing to currency differences, Dathe and the other zoo directors in the GDR often had to pay ten times the amount that Klös and his colleagues were charged in the West.) Where the two men were alike was in their passion for collecting. Both would rather buy two new animals than forgo even one because of a lack of space. They took back to Berlin whatever they could get. Only afterward did they worry about how to accommodate their new charges.

  Dathe in particular had a habit of bringing animals to the Tierpark before their enclosures were ready for them. The big cats were housed in a discarded railroad car, the elephants in an old stable dating back to when the noble Treskow family resided in the castle in Friedrichsfelde park. Once a week, the zookeepers took the elephants a few hundred yards to the European bison facility, where they bathed in the moat—all except one young female, Kosko, who enjoyed complete freedom of movement within the Tierpark. She had come to Friedrichsfelde as a gift from North Vietnam’s head of state, Ho Chi Minh, but the old stable had been fully occupied when she arrived. Luckily, she was only two years old, and about as large as a bulky suitcase. She whiled away the time racing visitors’ children through the park.

  Homeless Man of the House

  Even Heinrich Dathe had had to live elsewhere when he’d first arrived in Berlin. Until the new director’s villa was completed, he stayed with the mother-in-law of his Leipzig deputy, Lothar Dittrich, who lived near the Tierpark. He saw his wife and their three children only on the weekends; they didn’t follow until later, once the construction of their new home was complete.

  It didn’t bother Dathe that the director’s villa was little more than an apartment. After all, who needed property in the German Democratic Republic? Besides, he regarded the Tierpark as his empire.

  Dathe’s residence was a few hundred yards away from the entrance to the park. When his children, Almut, Holger, and Falk, went to school in the morning, their route took them past the deer and the buffalo, whose sounds soon grew familiar: the bellowing of the red deer in the fall, the high-pitched calls of the Vietnamese sika deer, and the snorts of the dozing bison lying directly behind the garden fence, under the mighty oak trees.

  From the outside, the villa looked like a socialist attempt to re-create a witch’s cottage in Bauhaus style. The front featured a gray plaster facade and a pointed tiled roof, with a flat-roofed extension out back. The living room walls were lined with dark brown freestanding closets with frosted glass panes, and expansive garden-facing windows looked out onto turquoise columns depicting herons and pheasants. In Dathe’s office, carved wooden orangutan faces hung on the wall, and a cabinet displayed white porcelain grizzly bears. A grandfather clock set the beat for his workday: tick-tock, tick-tock.

  He took notes on every bit of paper he could lay his hands on—pages torn from vocabulary notebooks or the back of advertising leaflets. Mountains of files, towers of books, and stacks of documents rose from his desk, rendering the director almost invisible behind them. He kept only a small spot uncluttered for writing, about the size of a large sheet of paper. Over time, he found that one desk was not enough space to store the fruits of his devotion, and so his papers soon covered all the other tables in the house, even those of his three children. He used each table to tackle a different topic, and to collect the relevant literature. His children didn’t dare create a mess themselves.

  Dathe drew no distinction between working hours and leisure time. Starting at eight in the morning, he was out and about in the Tierpark. He gave himself a one-hour lunch break, generally at a quarter to two. But if a shipment of animals or a birth was imminent, lunch could wait, although it was hard for his wife to keep his meal warm. After lunch he went upstairs to his bedroom for a few minutes of napping. That refreshed him
for the rest of his workday; he rarely came home before seven. After dinner he went to one of his desks. The Tierpark came far before anything else.

  His wife even had trouble getting him to go shopping with her. If he needed a new suit, his driver, who luckily wore the same size, usually had to fill in for him. Dathe himself came along only for the final fitting, if at all.

  Even when the family took its annual three-week vacation at the Baltic Sea, he gave at least one or two lectures on site. Unlike other fathers, who sat in beach chairs or built sandcastles with their children, he’d spend the day walking around with his Zeiss binoculars, on the lookout for birds. Every few feet he’d stop, look up at the sky, and pull his notebook out of his pocket if he noticed a rare species or a special pattern of behavior, so he could jot it down.

  Dathe’s children got used to structuring their leisure time on their own, as they knew they could spend quite a long time waiting for their father to come home. But life in the zoo had advantages: who else could tell the other children at school how a breech delivery works or how to give an infusion to an elephant? Falk, at ten years the youngest of the three, usually played soccer in the yard behind the house with his friends until it grew dark. Sometimes they marked off a playing field with sticks, grabbed an old tricycle tire that they turned into a discus, and pretended they were Olympic athletes. In the winter, when the driveway froze over, they skated until the icy surface was smooth as glass, making it almost impossible to get inside the house without falling. When his father came home, Falk got in trouble for making the driveway slippery; most of the time he was sent out again to spread something on the ice.

  A great deal of their family life took place at home. Heinrich Dathe did not like going to restaurants, and besides, there was no decent restaurant nearby to which one could bring visitors, especially not visitors from the West. He preferred to entertain his guests at home, where he had the added benefit of not being wiretapped. Falk would have picked up on any such interception; he was interested in technology and had long since inspected the sockets for bugs.

  Every time Dathe spontaneously announced that guests would be coming for the evening, his wife, Elisabeth, had to hurry out to shop and put together a meal. The children were sent off to stock up on cigarettes or cake. Dathe himself did not smoke, and barely drank alcohol, but liquor and cigarettes were always in the house in case guests or workmen showed up; workers were typically given a drink and a cigarette or two when they finished for the day.

  Dathe’s preferred vices were chocolate and sugared milk, which Falk had to pick up with a tin jug from Mauers, the grocery store across the street from the Tierpark. Even though local transportation was good—streetcar line 69 passed by on its route from Johannisthal to the Walter Ulbricht Stadium—the neighborhood around Friedrichsfelde resembled less a bustling capital than a village in rural Brandenburg. On Schlossstrasse, which would soon be renamed “Am Tierpark,” stood just a few old three- or four-story buildings. Aside from the grocery store there were two medical practices and a bar named Johnny, and to the south a nursery and then sheds and grain fields as far as the eye could see.

  A Headstrong Deputy Director

  The city of Leipzig took its time finding Dathe a successor. Several possible candidates turned the post down, including Katharina Heinroth back in 1955. So as Dathe had his hands full with the Tierpark, the day-to-day management of the Leipzig Zoo—which he had been left in charge of upon the death of Karl Max Schneider—was turned over to his former assistant, Lothar Dittrich, who was named deputy director. In spite of Dathe’s heavy workload in Berlin, he asked Dittrich to keep him informed of any noteworthy developments.

  Dathe called up Dittrich in the fall of 1956, when workers in Poland were taking to the streets to protest the Soviet system and students in Budapest were demonstrating for more civil rights. People across the GDR were reminded of the construction workers’ strike of June 17, 1953, when, for the first time, the citizens of an Eastern Bloc country revolted against the state. At work, there was talk behind closed doors about whether something like that could happen again; the Tierpark staff barely spoke of anything else. Dathe had no use for this kind of distraction, so he phoned Dittrich to find out how the mood was in Leipzig. What Dittrich had to say was not to Dathe’s liking.

  “Here, too, the zookeepers are talking about this,” Dittrich said. “Some of the staff have already hinted that they want to demonstrate if it should come to that.”

  “And what are you going to do about it?” Dathe asked.

  “If they wish to demonstrate, I won’t stand in their way,” Dittrich said, although he assured Dathe that he would “of course, make sure that every section continues to be staffed.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Incidentally, they’re right. Something does have to happen here. Things can’t go on being so shortsighted and small-minded in this country. I’ve already given thought to how I can participate.”

  Dathe could hardly believe what he was hearing. “You will do nothing of the sort,” he shouted through the telephone. “Not a single zoo employee will take part in any demonstration. Is that clear?”

  That same day, he had his chauffeur drive him to Leipzig, where he ordered his deputy director in person that no one was permitted to leave the zoo. “You are to focus exclusively on the zoo, and on nothing else,” he told Dittrich in a fury, “certainly not politics!”

  Dathe’s aim wasn’t to protect the state—he wouldn’t have been able to convince Dittrich of that anyway. Dathe simply wasn’t a politically minded person. Since experiencing the consequences of his Nazi party membership, he’d avoided politics as much as he could. Always a confirmed pragmatist, his motto had become, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” He did what he had to for the good of his Tierpark. Anything beyond that didn’t interest him.

  Dathe’s single-mindedness did not always win him friends. In the late 1950s, East Berlin mayor Friedrich Ebert wrote a letter to Johanna Blecha, the city’s cultural councilor, in response to complaints about the zoo director from Erich Mielke and Willi Stoph, the ministers for state security and national defense. When Mielke’s ministry had allotted money to build a new predator cage, Dathe wrote back to say that the sum was not enough, and asked for more. Mielke regarded his response as ungrateful and outrageous. With Stoph, Dathe seems to have been even brasher: he repeatedly insisted on starting up a call for donations among the soldiers in the National People’s Army. Still, Dathe was so well known by then that he could get away with this kind of behavior without fear of serious repercussions for himself or his Tierpark.

  Several years earlier, the Moscow zoo had designated the Tierpark the official reloading point for all animal shipments between the Eastern Bloc and Western Europe. Arriving animals had to spend several weeks in quarantine before they could travel on to the West or the East, and Dathe had enough space to accommodate entire herds. During their time in Berlin, animals from the Eastern Bloc would receive an official stamp from GDR authorities identifying them as “German,” regardless of whether they came from the Caucasus, the steppes of Central Asia, or the forests of Siberia.

  Unlike Klös, who still stood in the shadow of Bernhard Grzimek, the director of the Frankfurt Zoo and the German Federation of Zoo Directors’ new head, Dathe had long since become the key zoo director in East Germany. Nothing worked without him; he was running the most important zoo in the GDR, and so the centralized state structure accommodated his wishes. Grzimek noted in a letter to an American colleague that “the GDR government seems to be building this new zoo for political reasons and prestige. At the same time, the old zoos in the East—in Dresden, Halle, and Leipzig—aren’t getting any materials for reconstruction or modernization.”

  Several East German zoo directors shared this view. Hans Petzsch, director of the Halle Zoo, was among the most vocal opponents of Dathe’s outsized influence. When the Tierpark had opened, his zoo had donated the first animals: a stork and a camel. But now d
ecisions as to which animals the other zoos got were being made in Berlin. At one meeting, Petzsch is said to have banged his fist on the table and shouted, “I don’t need a Pope in Berlin. I’m the sovereign Grand Duke of Halle!”

  Lothar Dittrich in Leipzig also felt the effects of economic scarcity, and he was unwilling to adapt to the difficult times. His ire was not directed at Dathe, however. What bothered him most was the small-minded bureaucracy of the GDR, and he clashed with party officials. But the risks of opposition were clear: Hans Petzsch got drunk one evening and declared somewhat loudly in public, “The Goatee has to go!” The “Goatee” in question was Walter Ulbricht, the GDR’s head of state. Use of this nickname was regarded as defamation of the state, and could result in a prison sentence. Petzsch didn’t go to prison, but the comment lost him his directorship of the Halle Zoo. He had to struggle along as a freelance writer from then on.

  By 1960, Dittrich was still just the number two at the Leipzig Zoo; Ludwig Zukowsky, a native Berliner, had eventually been appointed Dathe’s successor. But Dittrich remained under state observation. Unlike Dathe, he was neither politically unassailable nor willing to block out everything unpleasant going on outside the world of the zoo. This would soon result in problems that would eventually lead Dittrich to arrive at a momentous decision. But to understand how he got there, we first need to know a bit more of his story.