New book: War Zone Zoo

Dear forum members,

My name is Kevin Prenger and I'm the writer of the book 'War Zone Zoo' about the history of the Berlin Zoo during the 3rd Reich and WW2. It's available on Amazon as paper back or e-book. You can read the first two chapters there.

If you are interested I can publish an other chapter here. Please feel free to ask your questions about this book or the history of the Berlin zoo during the period 1933-1945. I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have!

Below the book cover:



The book description:
May 1945. The war in Europe has come to an end. Bombardments by the Allies and house-to-house combat between the German Wehrmacht and the Russian Red Army have turned the city into a pile of rubble. The impressive 19th century zoo next to Tiergarten Park has also suffered heavily from the violence of war. Many stray bombs came down on the premises. During the battle of Berlin, the zoo turned into a battlefield as tanks and shells left their destructive traces.

The premises of the zoo, once so well-attended, has deteriorated to a gruesome cratered landscape. Dead soldiers and carcasses of animals lie scattered everywhere. Less than 100 of the approximately 3,500 animals have survived.

'War Zone Zoo' tells the gripping tale of the Berlin Zoo, its employees and its animals in wartime. Its history and restoration also pass review. This is a story of how violence and dictatorship made the Berlin Zoo lose its innocence, but it is also a story of love for animals, human powers of survival and the rebirth of the historic and public icon the Berlin Zoo still is today.

 

A chapter on here would be most welcome. I might then have to buy the book. Anticipating......

 

Thanks for your reply FBBird. Below is chapter 13:

Zero hour

While soldiers were still sacrificing their lives in Berlin for their fatherland, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in the afternoon of April 30, 1945, along with Eva Braun whom he had married shortly before. Two days later, the Wehrmacht garrison capitulated in the German capital, followed by the signing of Germany’s unconditional surrender by Generaloberst Alfred Jodl on May 7 in Reims and by Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel in Berlin on May 8. The Second World War in Europe had come to an end. In Germany, Stunde Null (Zero hour) began, the period of transition to a new era in which the country in literal as well as in figurative sense had to be rebuilt from the ground up. In Berlin, damage was huge; entire blocks of buildings had been destroyed, streets were covered in debris and supply of electricity, water and food almost non-existent. The once impressive 19th century Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche on the edge of the zoo with its central tower missing looked like a half burned candle. Only two out of the four side towers were still standing while its walls looked like Swiss cheese as a result of the many hits by bullets and grenades.

Just like in its surroundings, destruction in the zoo was massive. Anything still intact after the bombings had as yet been destroyed by hits of mortars and grenades of the Red Army. “The zoo had been transformed into a rough battlefield, full of bomb craters like a lunar landscape,” Dr. Katharina Heinroth declared, “saturated with trenches; pavements and flowerbeds scored and flattened by the heavy tanks, all houses shot to pieces or burnt, not a single roof was to be found; many buildings had turned into huge piles of debris, wreckage of vehicles and tanks scattered everywhere, trees had fallen like match sticks, bars had been torn down or cut, branches shot off and between them the corpses of humans and animals. The perimeter wall, many miles in length had been destroyed in many places, just like water mains, power lines and the sewage system.”[1] On the premises, the remains of 82 people were counted and those of many more animals. Injured horses were stumbling among the piles of wreckage and the dead bodies of other animals. To the employees, it was heart rending to see what had been achieved with love and dedication over a century utterly destroyed in hardly 2 years. They felt deep sorrow for the victims among the animals.

Russian author and war correspondent Konstantin Simonov reported about a gruesome discovery in the monkey shelter after hostilities had ended. Accompanied by a keeper he entered the brick building and the first thing he saw on the floor in front of the cages were the bodies of 3 SS men who had been killed. “Obviously they had fled here and were probably killed by a single burst of fire from the door.” In the cage were 2 dead monkeys: “an enormous gorilla and a very large chimpanzee. Two dark puddles of blood have formed beneath them. The keeper is standing with us in the door. I think the death of the apes saddens him very much. He is standing there, speechless and shaking his gray head.”[2] The gorilla was Pongo, killed by knife cuts in his chest. There probably was another dead chimpanzee in the cage which Simonov did not see in the dark. What exactly happened in the cage is not clear, nor who killed the animals.

A count on May 31, 1945, revealed only 91 animals had survived the fighting. Among them the nine-months-old lion cubs Sultan and Bussy which had remained safe beneath the monkey rock. Initially they were kept hidden from the Soviet soldiers but later on, they became an important attraction when the zoo was re-opened. The young lions were fed with horse meat which was in ample supply in view of the many horses killed. There also was abundant food for the surviving carrion eaters, two hyenas. One of them however would die of old age on June 7. Another animal, an oriental stork Oshima, named after the Japanese ambassador to Germany, had found its own solution to survive: the bird had escaped from its cage and was fishing in the large duck pond.

Knautschke the hippo, meanwhile 2 years old, had also survived the battle. He had become an orphan though as his mother had been killed by a grenade in her outside pool. The pool had run dry and due to the lack of water to bathe in, Knautschke’s skin had dried out and cracked. As there was no functioning water tap or pump anywhere in the zoo, his keeper fetched buckets of water from the nearby railway station. The hippo was wetted daily in this way until his pool was repaired after a few weeks. Special care was also taken for the shoebill stork which had escaped from its shelter during the battle. The bird with the wide bill was transferred to the aviary of the pheasants. As no fish could be found for it (and the bird apparently unable to do so itself) it was fed with horse meat. The bird with its conspicuous bill could not tolerate this kind of food though and passed away a few weeks after the end of the war.

There were more animals that would not survive the first weeks after the end of the war. An Alpine ibex that had escaped in May was discovered on a balcony on the fifth floor. Attempts to get the climber down failed and the animal was shot by Russian soldiers. As the perimeter wall around the zoo had largely been destroyed pillagers, probably including hungry citizens, had no trouble at all entering the premises. In May and June, numerous animals were stolen from the zoo including various birds but also a donkey and a mantle baboon. Whether the baboons ended up in the cooking pot and how their flesh tasted is unknown. At the same time, many parrots and other birds were handed over to the zoo, animals that had escaped as well as pets which could no longer be kept by their owners because of the food shortage. A few monkeys that had escaped had allegedly returned on their own after the fighting because of the cold.

Hungry soldiers of the Red Army caused a decrease in the animal population as well. A soldier had ordered a keeper to slaughter a cow in return for a bottle of schnaps, a loaf of bread, about 2 pounds of bacon and the head and kidneys of the unfortunate animal. A watusi, 2 zebus and a yak were the only remaining animals in the cattle shelter. In addition, the Russian took 3 wild boar for their field kitchen. A surviving brown bear would have been slaughtered as well to be consumed by Russian military but a replacement was found near the Berlin municipal museum where since 1939 4 bears, living symbols of the city, were kept in a pit in the adjacent Kölnischer Park. Only one of them, Lotte, survived the fighting in April and found a new home in the zoo. She passed away in 1971. The major part of he administration of the zoo, the photo archives, rare books from the library, important blueprints and works of art had been secured during the war but much of it was looted as yet.

[1] Klös, H., Von Der Menagerie Zum Tierparadies: 125 Jahre Zoo Berlin, Haude & Spenersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlijn, 1969, p. 129-130.

[2] Strehlow, H., “‘… rasten Elefanten trompetend durch die Straßen…’ , Drei Dokumente aus der Nachkriegszeit des Berliner Zoologischen Gartens”, Bongo, Berlijn, nr. 42, 2012, p. 141.

 

Good stu

Good stuff. Any more?

 

You can read two chapters on Amazon.

 

Can't get my head round how to do that

 

You have to click on 'Look inside' above the cover.

 

Done that now, thank you. Enjoyed it.

 

I collect hundreds of zoo history books and I'll definitely order this one. Thanks for writing it!

 

Good to hear, FBBird and snowleopard.

Please let me know your opinion about my book when you've read it.

 

Looks interesting; I've ordered a copy.

 

Is this book also available in German?

 

Thanks, Pacu. I hope you will enjoy reading it!

Zoomaniac, I'm sorry but a German edition isn't available. When the English version becomes a best seller, I can pay for a German translation. ;-)

 

War Zone Zoo (2018) is a must-own for any serious collector of zoo literature and it makes a nice companion piece to Gary Bruce's Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (2017). Kevin Prenger does an admirable job of compiling many facts and statistics about the destruction of the zoo during WW2 and there are several photos that I hadn't seen before. I particularly enjoyed the final chapter ("Zoos in the line of fire") as there is a focus on other zoos that faced the violence of war. Warsaw, Blijdorp, Ouwehands, London, Ueno, Leningrad and Sarajevo are all given a page and I couldn't help thinking that there are many future book possibilities right there.

I managed to learn a great deal about Berlin Zoo and the attention to detail is impressive. If there are flaws then it would be the brevity of the book (just over 100 pages and it can easily be read in a couple of hours) and also the translation. There are numerous instances of a sentence being a little awkwardly translated into English from the original Dutch. Overall, I'm more than happy to have made the purchase and I'd recommend it to all of the zoo enthusiasts on this site that collect zoo books.

There will be a much more comprehensive review (written by IZES Chairman Tim Brown) in the summer issue of Zoo Grapevine & International Zoo News magazine.

 

Wow, thank you very much 'Snowleopard'! I'm very honored with your review. It is nice to know a zoo enthusiast like you learned a great deal about the Berlin zoo during WW2 thanks to my book.

Could you please send me a scan of the review in the magazine as soon as it's published? I'm looking forward to read it.

 

Did Berlin receive any animals, especially young elephants, from robbed zoos in Poland? There is a mystery of a young female Asian elephant Tuzinka, born in Warsaw zoo in 1937, and taken as a bounty (together with many other animals) by German troops occuppying Poland in 1939. Tuzinka was 2 years old then. Her further history, and that of many other animals is not known.

 

Dear Jurek7, Tuzinka was transferred to Köningsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia) by the order of Lutz Heck, director of Berlin Zoo. She died in 1944.

Source: Tuzinka, an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) at Unknown

 

Thanks. Do you know where other animals from Warsaw zoo went?

 

A lot were killed. Others were taken to the Schorfheide nature reserve in Germany. That must have been animals that belonged in this environment. Here Lutz Heck and his brother Heinz tried to breed extincted hoofed animals, with the Heck cattle and Heck horse as a result.

 

I'll certainly send you a scan of the review once the magazine is published. No problem!