Quoting Jan Wolf Mohnhaupt’s Animals under the Swastika, pages 3–6:

In the shadow of beech and oak trees, on the north slope of a mountain, in the middle of [the Third Reich], there was once a zoo. It was just a very small zoo, but, in addition to a koi pond, a monkey island, and bird aviaries, it also housed a bear den measuring about ten by fifteen meters. All around there were benches for the men who took their lunch breaks here. Some of them would tease the monkeys; others would watch two young brown bears that would get up on their hind legs, trying to push through the pen with their front paws.

As he wrote in an official communiqué, Karl Koch had the little zoo built to provide his employees with “diversion and entertainment” and “to present the animals in all their beauty and unique character, which the workers would otherwise hardly have occasion to observe or acquaint themselves with in the wild.”¹

The men who built the zoo were “behind the wire,” as Koch called the three‐meter‐high, three‐kilometer‐long electric fence. Behind it stretched a wide, sloping expanse. In the summer, it was dry and dusty; in winter, icy winds swept over it. Endless rows of wooden barracks stood here, side by side.

The Buchenwald Zoological Garden, as the small animal park was officially called, and the concentration camp with the same name were only a stone’s throw away from each other. From the crematorium to the bear den, there were maybe ten, at most fifteen, paces.

At one time, the electric wire fence between them was the border between the Buchenwald of the prisoners and that of the guards, supervisors, and civilian workers. It constituted the boundary between humans and animals on the one side and “Untermenschen” (“subhumans”) on the other. The fence kept worlds apart.

Today very little recalls the zoo anymore, which the SS had built in 1938, as a “recreation area” right next to the camp. In 1993, the Buchenwald Memorial began uncovering what remained of it. A few foundation walls were still preserved, including those of the bear den, which had withstood the test of time under the brush and foliage. “We wanted to make the zoo visible again,” says Rikola‐Gunnar Lüttgenau, spokesperson for the memorial.

Supposedly it was for didactic reasons above all else: “It is disconcerting to imagine the [Fascists] visiting the zoo with their children and watching the animals while people were dying right next door. Because you recognize that part of your own way of being normal, like going to a zoo, can also be part of a world where you do not feel you belong at all.”²

Anybody visiting the ruins of the zoo today who walks around the low brick wall and the remains of the climbing rock will notice this erstwhile idyll’s immediate proximity to the Buchenwald concentration camp. The zoo obviously served as a kind of smoke screen, a divider that in fact hid nothing but just shielded the supervisors’ area from the prisoners’ camp. “The SS prettied it up for themselves,” Lüttgenau says.³

Until recently, research into the camp zoo has been rather scant, although it shows up frequently in historical descriptions as well as in newspaper articles and in drawings made by former prisoners.⁴ It also inspired author Jens Raschke to write a children’s play that he titled Was das Nashorn sah, als es auf die andere Seite des Zauns schaute (What the rhinoceros saw when it looked at the other side of the fence).

It relates an anecdote, found in an eyewitness report, according to which a rhinoceros supposedly lived at the Buchenwald zoo, at least for a short time.⁵ Sabine Stein runs the memorial’s archives and knows the story, though there is no evidence for it: “Time and again, I’ve asked survivors about it when they came for memorial services,” Stein says, “but no one could recall any rhino.”⁶

While the rhino is likely a legend, the Buchenwald zoo was real and, moreover, not the only one of its kind. In the Treblinka extermination camp, too, there was a dovecote, as well as cages with foxes and other wild animals, for the diversion of the guards.⁷

The animals, which came mostly from the zoo in Leipzig, had been purchased with the meager wages that the inmates received for their forced labor in the surrounding factories, workshops, and quarries.⁸ When animals were injured, it was frequently blamed on the prisoners. When one died, they also had to pay for its replacement in the form of a “voluntary assessment.”⁹

Posts as zookeepers were coveted, especially those for the bear den because those employed there always had access to meat and honey. Nobody, once they had worked there, ever wanted to give up the position. Hans Bergmann, too, was willing to risk a whole lot for it. In October 1939, this Jewish prisoner wrote a letter to the camp’s chief warden and “most obediently” asked him to be allowed to work with the bears again, because the current keeper, a Roma inmate, supposedly could not cope on his own with the four animals, including the pregnant female named Betty.

Bergmann felt that everything had to be done to help her cubs pull through. Moreover, he noted, “I am very attached to the animals and am certainly convinced that, together with the [insert slur here], I can muster all four bears, plus raise the cubs in a few weeks.”¹⁰

The guards themselves preferred to employ Sinti and Roma for work with the bears, as Lüttgenau confirms. The […] Roma […] hired themselves out as itinerant artists and performers and frequently put on shows with dancing bears. “Therefore the SS obviously assumed that they were ‘inherently’ able to get along particularly well with these animals,” Lüttgenau says.¹¹

The camp warden forwarded Bergmann’s letter to his superior, Karl Koch, who was the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He lived on the south slope of the mountain, on the sunny side, where he additionally had the SS‐Falkenhof built, a courtyard of sorts with cages for owls, eagles, and ravens, as well as enclosures for wolves, deer, and wild boar.

Whereas the zoo next to the camp fence was reserved for the guards and civilian workers at Buchenwald only, the people of the nearby town of Weimar were allowed to visit the Falkenhof on weekends. They also knew about the zoo, however, because the SS marketed postcards in town depicting the brown bears of Buchenwald at play, with a caption that read “Bear Den. Buchenwald Zoo.”¹²

Ilse Koch, the wife of the camp commandant, also went for strolls with their children through the small animal park. And their way always took them along the electric wire fence. Though it was otherwise strictly forbidden to take photographs there, there are images in their family album showing Karl Koch feeding and petting the animals with his son Artwin.¹³ A few years later, Ilse Koch would stand before an American military tribunal and claim to have noticed neither the fence nor the camp behind it.¹⁴

Karl Koch was concerned that the animals not be disturbed, and he issued orders prohibiting “any feeding or teasing whatsoever.”¹⁵ Anyone who did something to the animals, however minor—who climbed over the fence onto the rocks in the bear den, say, or who even leaned against one of the cages—could count on being punished.

That held true for the SS squads as well. After all, the animals were supposed to thrive, and so the prisoner Bergmann’s request must have seemed compelling to Koch. He therefore endorsed his petition to be employed as a bear keeper. Next to his signature, though, he also left the following note: “If any cub dies, punish harshly.”¹⁶

(Emphasis added.)