The Saint Magazine. January 1967. Volume 24, No. 5.

Fall of Zoo by Edward D. Hoch

We have been told many stories, each purporting to be the truth, about the last hours of this man who came so close to destroying forever the Europe our fathers knew. We may in fact never know who fired the shot which wrote finis to his story, as his world crashed around him...

The evening mists lay thick in the grassy fields of the Tiergarten as Rudolph Bohg made his way slowly home. There was still enough daylight in the Sunday sky for him to see the shell craters and fallen trees that dotted the park, and in the distance he could hear the sporadic firing that marked the Russian progress into the city.

He had played here as a child, running through the streets of Berlin with all the others, and then working here in the park when manhood came. It was home to him, more of a home than he’d known in the little apartment by the Teltow Canal, and certainly more of a home than his six years in the German army had ever provided. Now, as the battered barred cages of the Berlin zoo came into view he felt the tension ease for the first time in hours.

He passed the blasted remains of the reptile house, and then the empty cages where the lions had been. Here and there animals still remained — a few monkeys, the crusty-skinned hippo, even some frightened zebras. They all seemed to be waiting for the end that seemed so near. Behind him, near the victory monument at the center of the Tiergarten, a Russian artillery shell landed with a deafening blast. He could hear other shells passing overhead along the trees, sounding that strange low keening that built to a piercing scream like nothing else on earth.

He halted now, along a line of empty cages where only a single dead baboon was visible in the deepening dusk. There was someone ahead, a figure in shabby work pants and leather jacket. Rudolph Bohg raised the machine pistole he’d carried, almost forgotten in his right hand. “Who are you?” he shouted.

The figure came closer, unafraid — because the days of fear had passed. Then he saw that it was a woman. She could have been forty, but he knew she was ten years younger, knew even after six years that only Lotta Kruger Would have remained here with the animals she loved. “This is my home,” she answered him quietly. “Are you a deserter?”

He glanced down at the dirt-stained uniform of an SS Major that he still wore. “This is my home, too,” he told her. “I’m Rudolph. Rudolph Bohg — do you remember?”

“Rudolph!” She ran to him then, and he let the gun drop limply in his hand as they embraced. It was an embrace without meaning, for they had never been lovers, not even in those days before the war when they’d worked long hours together with the animals.

“I’ve come back,” he said, “I had no place else to go.”

“My God, Rudolph! They say the Russians are only a mile away!”

“The Russians are everywhere.” He kept his left arm around her, still holding the pistol in his right as if it offered some protection against the shells and the bombs. He glanced around in the twilight. “You’ve been hit hard here.”

“No Worse than the rest of Berlin. We were open until nine days ago, when the water and electricity went off. People still came, too — every day.”

“Your father?” He had been a zookeeper, had given Bohg his first job.

“Killed in an American air raid last year. Many of the zookeepers are dead or gone, but a few of us have stayed on.”

“The cages seem empty.”

A shell burst a bit too close, sending a sudden fireball to break against some remaining trees. She led him quickly into the shelter of the elephant house, where one great beast still remained.

“You remember there were six elephants,” she said. “Now we have one. Of fifteen thousand animals, only sixteen hundred remained alive when we closed the zoo. Now there are even fewer. The Russians have been shelling us for days.”

“But why? Why the zoo?”

She wiped a bit of soot from her cheek, and he was reminded of how pretty she’d been once. “Over there,” she pointed, toward the bird sanctuary. “They call it the Zoo Bunker — a giant flak tower covering a city block and as tall as a thirteen-story building. They say there are thirty thousand people jammed inside, and the walls are impregnable. The Russians have been shelling it for days. Some say it can hold out for months. They have enough food.” She paused a moment as a shell went over.

“Why aren’t you in there?”

“They die, still. Sometimes at night the soldiers bring the bodies out, just to be rid of them. They die in there, too. Jammed in worse than our animals ever were.”

“I saw the lion cages were empty.”

“We had to kill them, when the shelling started. And the other dangerous things. We ate some — I couldn’t, but the men did. The ostriches died early, last year, but we still have some swans and even a stork left alive. Sometimes the people came to steal them too,” she said. “But they were hungry.”

Bohg had heard scattered reports about conditions at the zoo itself, but now that he was here, the full import of it seemed to strike him. “One elephant,” he said sadly, looking up at its grandeur. “You say there’s no water or electricity?”

Lotta Kruger shook her head. “Or gas. But the telephones still work, where the lines are up. The thing came so suddenly. I remember looking at the spring flowers just two weeks ago, and thinking how far away the war seemed — even with the bombings.”

“April was always a fine month in Berlin,” he told her.

“What about you? You’re an SS Major.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“And you’ve deserted?”

Now he could barely see her face in the failing light. Soon it would be night. “Everyone is deserting. The war will be over in a few days.”

“Hitler has not deserted. He announced that he is remaining in his bunker beneath the Chancellery.”

“I know,” Bohg said, looking back across the Tiergarten toward the distant Chancellery building. Fires were burning in the park now, and the ruins of a small airplane were visible in their glow.

“Then why did you desert?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to get his bearings. “Perhaps you could call me a war criminal,” he answered finally.

“A war criminal! You killed Jews?”

“Jews, gypsies, madmen — does it matter? They’re looking for me. I suppose they’ll kill me if I’m found.”

“You should be in the Zoo Bunker.”

“No. Out here is fine.”

A shell landed nearby, shaking the building and sending the great elephant into new spasms of terror. “The Russians will be here in another day or two,” she told him. “This afternoon we could see their tanks coming up the Lutzowstrasse. The city is being defended by boys and old men. There is no one else.”

“The women?”

“Many are killing themselves. They fear what the Russians will do to them. I think we were all hoping the Americans would get here first.”

Outside there were voices, shouting something in a language he couldn’t understand. “Russians!” he whispered. “An advance patrol! Come on.”

They ran from the elephant house, and he pulled her along by the hand as he had so many years ago, when they were both so close to being children. He had a flashing memory of a sunny summer’s day when they’d left the animals to eat their lunch by the banks of the Landwehr Canal. That was long before the war, in the days when people still laughed at Hitler.

They’d followed the path toward the demolished aquarium, but now suddenly a soldier blocked their path, his machine gun outlined against the glow of distant flames. He shouted in Russian, and Bohg threw Lotta to the ground. He went down on one knee and fired a quick burst from his machine pistol before the Russian could aim. As the man toppled backward in death, he ran forward to grab the fallen weapon. He knew there would be others nearby.

“Rudolph!” Lotta shouted. “To your left!”

He turned, firing as he did so, and saw two more figures topple before his bullets. “They’re all around us,” Lotta sobbed.

“I don’t think so. The main firing is still a good half-mile away.”

There seemed to be no others, and he rose slowly to his feet. “Take the pistol,” he told her. “I’ll keep the machine gun.”

“I wouldn’t know how to use it.”

“You’ll learn quickly enough. You may want it — after I’m gone.”

“I know,” she said, close to his ear. “You want to die, don’t you? Rather than be arrested as a war criminal. But what could you have done that was so terrible? How could you have changed in six years?”

“I didn’t change. The world changed. Come on.”

They’d almost reached the hippopotamus pen when an artillery shell hit it dead center, throwing them backward to the ground and ripping through the hide of the tough old animal. “Rudolph! Are you all right?”

“I think so. Cut my arm a little.”

“The hippo! It’s...”

“Don’t look.”

“What kind of a war is this, where the animals must die?”

He helped her to her feet, and they made their way past the great dead beast. “The people die, why not the animals? Most of them are just as innocent.”

“Will there be nothing left for tomorrow?”

He couldn’t answer, because he did not know. He thought that something — the city — would remain, but he could not be certain. They came at last to a monkey cage where a wounded chimp screamed and chattered in pain. Bohg shot the animal, and that was the only sort of answer he could give.

“We used to cure them,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And feed them. Remember the crowds on a Sunday in the spring?”

“It was a good life.”

“I wish I had a cigarette.”

He gave her one, and they stopped by the canal to smoke. The shells bad stopped, but not far off they could hear the rumble and squeak of tanks in the darkness.

“We heard about you once,” she said finally. “We heard you were on Hitler’s personal staff.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever you did, he made you do it. That will be a defense.”

There was fire from the direction of the flak tower now, as the German defenders caught sight of the enemy tanks moving across the park. At moments the entire night seemed alive with the blinding brightness of flares and tracers. “This must be what hell is like,” Lotta said.

“I’ve got to get you out of it, to someplace safe.”

“Don’t be foolish,” she told him. “I’m only glad you came back tonight, before...” She left it unfinished.

“I had to see the place once more, even like this.”

Across the canal, a Russian tank exploded and burst into flame. The others turned, uncertain now that the defenders had their range. But then, in the fire’s glow, a machine-gunner spotted Bohg and Lotta. The second tank’s turret revolved slowly, spraying a thin line of bullets toward them across the water. Bohg stepped in front of her, trying to fire back, but the bullets staggered him as they hit.

“Rudolph!” She was on her knees beside him, screaming his name. “Rudolph!”

He rolled over in the damp grass, feeling suddenly warm but without pain. “Don’t cry, Lotta. I came back here to die. Run and hide yourself. Keep the pistol with you.”

“Rudolph!”

The tanks were pulling back, but he knew it would not be for long. The zoo — his zoo — would fall to them soon. “I have to tell you something,” he whispered. “About this afternoon.”

“What? What are you saying, Rudolph?”

“You’re the only one that will ever know it.” He was suddenly very tired and he tried to hurry on. “I wasn’t running from the Russians. It was the Germans I feared.”

“What?”

“I was in that bunker with them all,” he said, pointing across the park. “I went into the room and she was dead already, but he was alive and he had a gun. I don’t know why I did it.”

“What, Rudolph?”

He coughed, and the blood began to fill his mouth. He stared up at her in the darkness, wondering if she would ever understand. “This afternoon I killed Hitler.”