The Zookeepers’ War: An Incredible True Story from the Cold War

World War II

• Although an increasing number of British Royal Air Force Raids shattered Berlin in 1943, the Berlin Zoo had gone largely unscathed.
  • But, on November 22, 1943, 753 British bombers dropped 2,500 tons of explosives, igniting 21 fires in the zoo.
  • 700 out of 2,000 zoo animals died that night, and starving Berliners slaughtered more.
• In May 1945, Katharina Heinroth took charge of the Berlin Zoo as the city fell to the Allies and the zoo’s former director, a Nazi party member, fled. 
  • Heinroth was the first woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Breslau’s Zoological Institute, and the wife of the aquarium director.
• Only 91 Berlin Zoo animals survived WWII, including a reindeer, a rare Japanese stork, one elephant, and a young hippo named Knautschke.

The US, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France assumed joint control of Germany, dividing the country into four zones. Berlin was also split four ways—one sector to each Allied power. The British took control of the Berlin Zoo.

• In August 1945, Heinroth became director of the Berlin Zoo and Werner Schroder, a zoologist, became managing director.
  • They spent most of their time rebuilding the crumbling grounds: traffic ran through the zoo, boundary walls were decimated, and people plundered at night.
  • Although there was no money to purchase new animals, hundreds of Berliners brought their pets to the zoo (there were many parrots).
• In 1947, the zoo suffered more explosions when the British blasted apart a nearby air raid shelter. Zookeepers had to lure 649 frightened animals into wooden crates.

In May 1949, the US, British, and French zones became a sovereign state, the Federal Republic of Germany, which included West Berlin. In October 1949, the former Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR), with East Berlin as the capital.

The Berlin Zoo

• Heinroth and Schroder worked well together; they not only rebuilt the aquarium, but also constructed a new elephant house. And, they also brought in the zoo’s first rhino in over a decade, as well as a tapir and a sloth.
  • In terms of hippos, which were rare, Heinroth had Knautschke, and the Leipzig Zoo’s director, Karl Max Schneider, had two females. They began trading animals to help the species survive, and soon there were offspring.
• The Berlin Zoo’s supervisory board was extremely hostile to Heinroth; they felt that only a man should manage a zoo, even though she saved the zoo from permanent closure.

Although the GDR was only 3.5 years old, it was already experiencing an economic crisis. The state prioritized heavy industry (iron and steelwork) over producing food and consumer goods. Many entrepreneurs lost their businesses and by 1953 people swarmed to leave by the hundreds of thousands.

Heinrich Dathe – East Berlin – Tierpark

• The East Berlin government didn’t want its residents supporting capitalism by paying to visit the Berlin Zoo.
• The GDR wanted its own zoo in East Berlin, and it considered Heinrich Dathe as director. At 43, he was a passionate zoologist and deputy director of the Leipzig Zoo.
  • He had been fired from the Leipzig Zoo because, when he was 21, he joined the Nazi Party.
    • Eventually, the state decided that it would be too difficult to manage postwar East Germany without pardoning some former Nazi party members; in time, Dathe was cleared and he returned to the Leipzig Zoo.
• Dathe accepted the directorship offer, and he made it clear to Heinroth that their zoos would not be competitors.
  • East Berlin’s zoo would be named Tierpark Berlin, and it would span 400 acres (five times larger than the Berlin Zoo).
  • Dathe wanted to provide what the West couldn’t: an expansive park with vast enclosures for many animals.
  • Construction became an overwhelming project, so the public pitched in; working in Tierpark became one of the state’s most popular unpaid projects.
• Tierpark’s first animals traveled via freight—on one day, hundreds of spectators watched camels on leashes stroll through the streets. 
  • Other animals were gifts from Eastern European zoos and GDR businesses.
  • One city donated ostriches, a bed manufacturer donated storks, a children’s magazine collected money for two giraffes, a company donated polar bears, and the ministry for heavy industry and a newspaper each donated an elephant.
• For the GDR, Tierpark was of paramount importance—a figure to the world. 
  • As such, the Stasi (the GDR’s state security agency, now considered one of the most repressive police agencies in history) tried to use Dathe to their advantage, but they were largely unsuccessful because Dathe aggressively fought each attempt to become an informant.

Heinz-Georg Klos – West Berlin – Berlin Zoo

• In 1955, the Berlin Zoo’s supervisory board wanted to replace Heinroth with a man. She was permitted to pick and train her successor, and she chose Heinz-Georg Klos.
  • Klos, 29, was a veterinarian and the youngest zoo director in either Germany.
  • Klos accepted, but then the board decided that Heinroth wouldn’t be allowed to train him and instead forced her out of her residence on zoo grounds.
• Heinroth left in 1956, and during Klos’s first days, a beloved giraffe and a newborn hippo died; his debut was deemed a failure.
• Heinroth’s departure altered the relationship between the Berlin Zoo and Tierpark.
  • Dathe personally resented Klos, believing that he profited from Heinroth’s dismissal. Officially, Dathe and Klos worked together, but a fierce competition flared between them.
  • Dathe tried to use the Berlin Zoo’s upgrades as leverage to obtain more for Tierpark. 
    • For instance, he asked the East German head of state for supplies to construct a special heated enclosure “so that we don’t fall behind the zoo in West Berlin.”
• Soon it was clear that Tierpark was not a simple supplement to the Berlin Zoo; in 1956, the first year after it opened, 85,000 fewer visitors came to the Berlin Zoo.

Panda diplomacy – Dathe – Tierpark

• Chi Chi was the name of a popular 1.5 year old female panda, and traders made an offer to Dathe.
  • Chinese animal trappers captured her when their dogs chased away her mother and Chi Chi, a six-month-old, couldn’t follow quickly enough.
  • Dathe accepted, and Chi Chi arrived in 1958. In just a few weeks, 400,000 people crowded Tierpark to see her. 
  • Chi Chi’s stint in Tierpark increased the zoo’s considerable prestige, and Dathe soon became Berlin’s best-known resident.
• By 1958, Tierpark covered more than 200 acres, making it the world’s largest zoo, and had 1.7 million visitors annually.

The Berlin Wall

After the GDR’s founding, 2.5 million people fled to the West. As the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union deteriorated, West Berlin’s status was especially delicate. In August 1961, East German forces installed barbed wire along the border between itself and West Berlin. Thus began the Berlin Wall, which eventually ran through streets and houses. Families were separated, and West Berlin sealed off.

Politics and zoos

• After the Berlin Wall was built, the Berlin Zoo lost over a million potential visitors. Klos, fearful of the danger Tierpark posed, begged for more subsidies.
  • Klos was determined to win over politicians and other dignitaries to draw prestige and crowds to the Berlin Zoo, and was desperate to have animals that Tierpark didn’t have.
  • In 1962, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy visited the Berlin Zoo and brought a bald eagle.
    • Official state gifts often involved animals that the donor nations wanted to dispose of. The eagle, for instance, was ill and soon died.
  • Soon, the Berlin Zoo’s popularity grew, as did Klos’s power. Local politicians were also aware of the zoo’s importance. 
    • There were about 2 million people living in West Berlin, but 3 million people visited the zoo annually, and very few were tourists.
    • Bothered by Tierpark’s modernity, Klos tried to portray the Berlin Zoo as a strong, 130-year-old German tradition. This type of establishment was carefully maintained, unlike Tierpark. 
• Similarly, East Berlin politicians, such as the mayor, liked to visit Tierpark. The mayor, who greatly enjoyed crocodilians, set aside city funds to buy other exotic animals to help Dathe outdo the Berlin Zoo.
  • By the early 1980s, zoos were East Berlin’s most popular destinations, welcoming 16 million visitors annually—there were as many zoo-goers as citizens of the GDR.
  • Additionally, until the late 1970s, no member of the zoological senior management was a part of the ruling Socialist Unity Party; the zoo was like a small haven of subversion.

Panda diplomacy – Klos – Berlin Zoo

• Klos aspired to make Berlin Zoo the world’s most biodiverse, and he wanted a panda.
  • In 1980, the West German Chancellor announced that pandas would be coming to Berlin. 
  • Specifically, he wanted to signal to the Soviets that West Berlin was part of West Germany. The Soviet ambassador was, accordingly, affronted.
    • The ambassador protested that West Berlin wasn’t eligible for a state gift because it was only a “special political entity.”
• Nonetheless, two pandas arrived and became West Berlin celebrities. Sadly, one of the pandas passed away three years later. 

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

• In the late 1980s, protests were beginning to grow within East Germany. 
  • The Hungarian government issued an order to dismantle the fence between Hungary and Austria, which created the first gap in the Iron Curtain, resulting in throngs of refugees fleeing East Germany.
  • East Germans also escaped via Poland and Czechoslovakia.
• On October 9, 1989, people in East Germany continued to protest. There were reports that the government had been ordered to shoot, dredging up memories of the recent massacre in Beijing when the Chinese military brutally suppressed protests in Tiananmen Square.
• On November 9, 1989, the Socialist Unity Party spokesman announced that travel laws would be relaxed.
  • That night, East Germans stormed the Wall—after 28 years, the Wall finally fell.
  • Hundreds of thousands continued to leave, and many used their freedom to explore the Berlin Zoo (which offered free admission for two weeks).
• Dathe worried about what would happen to Tierpark. He was nearing retirement, but didn’t want to leave, saying that he was the only one who knew how to run a zoo under nonsocialist conditions.
• In 1990, as West and East Germany began a negotiated reunification, cutbacks loomed and the public began to discuss whether Berlin really needed two zoos.
  • In November, Dathe received a letter ordering him to step down and move out of his residence on zoo grounds.
• West Berlin’s Department of Finance gained oversight of Tierpark and the Berlin Zoo, which is what Klos wanted.
  • The shift in oversight from East to West created much confusion, especially when the government placed many employees on waiting lists for potential dismissal—people worried that Tierpark would be permanently shuttered.
  • In December, 7,500 people signed a petition to support Tierpark’s preservation and to express their solidarity with Dathe.
• On January 6, 1991, Dathe died at the age of 80 in Tierpark.
  • During German reunification, many institutions closed, but the treatment of Heinrich Dathe seemed to infuriate people the most.

Present day

• The Berlin Zoo and Tierpark now share a director.
  • A 2014 survey revealed that former West Berliners go mainly to “their” zoo, and former East Berliners go to theirs.
• Klos remained on the supervisory board that governed the Berlin Zoo and Tierpark well into the 2000s.
  • He passed away on July 28, 2014 at the age of 88.
• Klos may have prevailed in the politics of the zoo wars, but Berliners remember Dathe as the victor, and he’s considered the godfather of modern German zoos.
• Regardless of the ending, for many years, Dathe and Klos were monumental figures in both Germanys, who successfully instilled renown and majesty into their zoos, during a time of fraught political tension.

• The Red Army’s initial takeover of the Berlin Zoo at the end of WWII and the devastating events that followed
• How the Stasi had several Informal Collaborators within Tierpark
• The meaningful story of Lothar Dittrich, deputy director at the Leipzig Zoo, whom the Stasi followed closely and nearly captured when he fled to the West
• How Wolfgang Gewalt, another Klos rival and director of the Duisburg Zoo, embraced dolphinmania and chased a beluga whale through the Rhine, which brought a wave of attention to the river’s environmental upkeep
• The complicated relationship between Werner Schroder and Klos, and how Klos ultimately and unceremoniously ousted him