Rin Tin Tin Page 15

  As von Stephanitz had hoped, the German shepherd had become the most prized dog in Germany. There were 60,000 members of the breed club, and it was still growing. As the Weimar Republic imploded, von Stephanitz focused on his dogs; his only politics were canine. When many of the club’s members joined the Nazi Party, he put it out of mind and busied himself with the club’s stud registry, a breed survey, and his own book project, The German Shepherd Dog in Word and Picture, the definitive text on the breed. The Nazis were more interested in von Stephanitz than he was in them. Of particular interest: von Stephanitz had created a universe parallel to the Nazi ideal—he had created a pure “race” of dogs, weeding out inferior animals to accomplish it. He had established a singular German breed that had proven its value and superiority to the rest of the world.

  Von Stephanitz’s resistance to politics was finally tested in the early 1930s, when the Nazis declared that they wanted control of Verein für Deutsche Schäferhunde, the German Shepherd Dog Club. They wanted the dogs for their military value, but they wanted the club for its great symbolic value as the governing body for these uniquely German and specifically engineered animals.

  At first, von Stephanitz refused to step aside. He was then told that if he didn’t comply he would be sent to a concentration camp, so he finally resigned. It had been his life’s work. In 1936, right after the Breed Book and Stud Registry were handed over to the club’s new Nazi leaders, von Stephanitz died. By 1939, when the Blitzkrieg began, Germany had a canine corps of 200,000 dogs.

  Nazis admired wolves because of their success as predators—they were the dominant creatures in the Nazis’ view of nature as a violent, hierarchical battleground—and German shepherds were admired for their germanischer Urhund, their similarity in appearance to wolves. Hitler loved the breed. In the 1930s, he owned two German shepherds, a mother and daughter, both named Blonda. In 1941, after both Blondas had died, his secretary, Martin Bormann, gave him a black-and-silver female named Blondi. Hitler became so attached to the dog that he allowed her to sleep in his bed. He did not offer the same privilege to his lover, Eva Braun.

  Around that same time, Anne Frank celebrated her thirteenth birthday. She loved Rin Tin Tin and wanted to take her friends to see a Rin Tin Tin movie for her party, but Jews had been forbidden from attending movie theaters. Her parents managed to get a copy of Lighthouse by the Sea, one of old Rin’s earliest films, and showed it to Anne and her friends at home. In her diary, Anne wrote that the Rin Tin Tin movie had been “a big hit” with her classmates. She often thought about the dog. A few days before her party, she had written, “This morning in my bath I was thinking how wonderful it would be if I had a dog like Rin-tin-tin. I would call him Rin-tin-tin too and I’d take him to school with me, where he could stay in the janitor’s room or by the bicycle racks when the weather was good.”

  Hitler cared deeply about animals and animal welfare. “In the Third Reich,” he once announced, “cruelty to animals should no longer exist.” Some of the earliest laws enacted by the Nazi Party pertained to animal protection, and violators could be sent to concentration camps. Vivisection, tail docking, and neutering were banned. Hunting and horseshoeing were regulated and restricted. Cooking lobsters and crabs by boiling them while they were still alive was outlawed. Veterinarians were elevated to the highest level of Nazi Party membership. Even though there were no wild wolves in Germany, the species was placed under strict protection. Schoolchildren—who were rewarded for reporting suspected non-Aryans in their neighborhoods—were offered courses on animal welfare from primary school through college. In 1933, the extensive Reich Animal Protection Act included a ban on the use of animals in film.

  Hitler’s concern for animals seems perverse, considering the ease with which he sent millions of human beings to their deaths. But of course, everything he did was perverse: he loved Blondi so much that he tested his suicide pills on her, and then apparently was horrified to see her die. So what accounted for this concern for animals? Some of these laws, such as a ban on kosher butchering and on Jews having pets, were probably enacted because they furthered the goal of religious persecution; the restriction on vivisection might have been an effort to inhibit Jewish scientists. But the Nazi reverence for nature and natural order was more far-reaching and fundamental than a simple anti-Semitic attack. The pagan-like worship of nature as an immutable force was at the core of the Nazi belief system. Nature, with its inviolable schematic and pitiless ranking of strong over weak, was held up as a model and a justification for the Nazis’ worldview, and therefore nature, and animals, had to be honored and protected. Within this scenario, Aryans viewed themselves as dominant predators, and the rest of the world as prey; therefore, they reasoned that their behavior followed the order of the natural world. They believed they were not disrupting civilization but actually restoring it to a more organic arrangement, with Aryan supremacy providing a universal and correct alignment.

  Nazis also used their attention to animal well-being as a way to further humiliate their victims. By elevating animals in the natural order and legislating their comfort and safety, they were, by implication, degrading Jews and Gypsies and non-Aryans to a status even below barely sensate creatures like lobsters: a Jew could be put in a gas chamber, but a lobster could not be cooked in a pot of boiling water.

  This grotesque contradiction was illustrated by the Angora Project, a rabbit-breeding program operated by the SS at the Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raised by inmates at the camps, the rabbits lived in gorgeous hutches and were fed lavish meals; their fur was trimmed and used as insulation in Luftwaffe pilots’ winter jackets. But Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, who ran the project and kept a notebook documenting it, also wanted the rabbits for another purpose; he liked the starving prisoners to be reminded, as they prepared meals for the animals and cleaned their cages, that they had less value in the Nazi world order, deserved less dignity and fewer rights than the animals they cared for.

  Anyone who loves animals seems to be essentially a good person—or at least, conversely, anyone who would deliberately hurt an animal does not. Unfortunately, the Nazis’ relationship to animals explodes this assumption. I had only recently lifted the veil on some of my own family history—examining unanswered questions and odd gaps, questioning our mysterious lack of relatives and the refusal of my grandparents to visit their hometown in Hungary. My grandparents were both from affluent, assimilated Jewish families and had left Hungary at their leisure, in the 1920s, with their good china and their silver and their favorite oil paintings, settling first in Mexico and then in the United States. They often told me stories about their early years, and these stories were crowded with brothers and sisters and cousins I had never met. Whenever I asked where this relative or that one lived now, the stories ended abruptly and I was hustled away to have a snack or play in the yard. Eventually, I forgot about these phantoms, the ones who were mentioned but then whisked out of the story, like actors jerked off a stage by a director’s hook. I was never told they died. They simply disappeared from the narrative, as if they had never really existed.

  Much too late to have asked my grandparents more about it, I learned that these siblings and parents and cousins, these weightless placeholders in the old stories, had died in the concentration camps, the director’s hook catching them and yanking them away just before the end of the war, when they probably thought they had managed to outwit it. I realized that if my grandparents had ever gone back to Hungary to visit, there would have been no hometown left that they would have recognized, no one there who had been family or friend.

  11.

  The dog heroes of World War I—Satan of Verdun and Rags of Gallipoli and Michael the Messenger Dog and Stubby the Hero Dog—had demonstrated how useful dogs could be in battle, but the U.S. military didn’t realize it in time to develop a canine corps. It was no better off when World War II began. There were between 13 and 15 million dogs in the United States at the time
, but the entire force of American military dogs consisted of fifty huskies stationed in Alaska. Shortly after entering the war, though, the military announced that it wanted 300,000 dogs trained and deployed to Europe and the Pacific as soon as possible. The majority of the dogs would have to be donated by civilians; there was no other way to obtain so many adult dogs. If all went well, the dogs would be sent home at the end of the war.

  The idea for Dogs for Defense, the group that organized to help collect the dogs, came from a group of professional breeders and dog handlers in New York, led by Arlene Erlanger, who owned Pillicoc, a poodle kennel. Once the group had secured the support of the American Kennel Club and made arrangements with the Quartermaster Corps—the army division that managed animals and equipment—it began the process of separating American families from their dogs.

  Like Helene Walker, Erlanger was a proper New York matron who trailed ladies’ maids and chauffeurs in her wake. But she was also pragmatic and strong-willed. She had lobbied the Army without success to develop a canine corps during World War I, and she was determined not to let another war go by without the United States using dogs in it. After Pearl Harbor, she told a New York Sun reporter, “The dog must play a part in this thing. Other countries have used dogs in their Armies for years and ours has not. Just think what dogs can do.”

  In a photograph I saw of Erlanger, she is seated beside Quartermaster Major General Edmund Gregory. He is in a medal-encrusted uniform; Erlanger is wearing a navy blue overcoat, white gloves, and a pillbox hat, and has a chinchilla stole draped over one shoulder. She looks as though she might be on her way to a country club luncheon, but in fact she was meeting with Gregory to hand over custody of hundreds of guard dogs she had just managed to get donated to Dogs for Defense. After organizing the drive to collect dogs, Erlanger did not return to a life of suburban repose. As the war went on, she wrote the technical manual for the U.S. Army, TM 10–396 War Dogs, with a standard training protocol, and later was hired as a special consultant to the Quartermaster General, producing training bulletins and films.

  In the early days of the war, German submarines began to surface along the eastern seaboard and the Gulf Coast and there was concern that spies and saboteurs had infiltrated the United States, so the first mission of Dogs for Defense was to guard domestic airports, military installations, and public utilities. The public was asked to donate animals between one and five years old, taller than eighteen inches, and not “storm shy or noise shy.” They could be either purebred or mixed breed, as long as they met the other requirements.

  Ads for Dogs for Defense appeared during newsreels at movie theaters and in newspapers and magazines. One of those ads, sponsored by Purina Dog Chow, featured a drawing of a soldier with a German shepherd by his side. In the background, six soldiers march in formation, their rifles shouldered. The headline reads, “Joe and Shep Take Over—and Release Six Men for Other Duties!” The ad explained the importance of dogs in the war effort: “It has been proven here and abroad that one well-trained dog is equal in keenness of perception at night to at least six human guards. That’s one big reason the United States Army is now recruiting dogs for war duty—why Major General Edmund B. Gregory, Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, estimates that thousands of trained dogs will be needed! Dog volunteers are needed now!”

  Within a few months, Americans had given nineteen thousand of their pets to Dogs for Defense, packing the kennels at the War Dog Reception and Training Centers in Virginia, Nebraska, Mississippi, Montana, and California: there was Jack, a three-year-old Belgian shepherd, who was offered for service by Joseph Verhaeghe of Floral Park, New York; Butch, a Doberman pinscher, owned by Mr. Walter Dipping of Chicago, headed to the Marine Corps; Chips, a German shepherd who eventually earned a Distinguished Service Cross for clearing out an enemy pillbox in Sicily “with utter disregard for his own safety,” enlisted by Mrs. Edward Wren of Pleasantville, New York; and Peppy, a Doberman, the house pet of Mr. J. F. Bryan of Long Island, who would go missing in action for three days in Guam after being shot. Other dogs included actress Greer Garson’s poodle, Mary Pickford’s German shepherd, Rudy Vallee’s Doberman, and violinist Jascha Heifetz’s Great Dane. Even Lee donated a dog—Truline von Pondview, the mother of Rin Tin Tin III, who was eventually killed in action in the South Pacific.

  So many dogs were being given to Dogs for Defense that the number of field trials and dog shows around the country immediately fell off. A typical 1942 headline from the dog column of the New York Times announced, “Dogs for Defense Out for Recruits—Demand for K-9 Additions Is Unceasing Because of Their Value on All Fronts—Suffolk County Kennel Club Votes to Abandon Annual Show at Huntington.” Many of the shows that were held, including the Westminster Kennel Club show, donated their proceeds to Dogs for Defense.

  If you donated your pet to Dogs for Defense, you received a card in the mail that read:

  We are happy to advise you that your dog, with name, brand number and breed as follows, has arrived at this Depot in good condition. At this time we are not able to predict your dog’s adaptability to the rigors of Army training. You will, of course, understand why the interests of military secrecy will best be served if further information is withheld from this point forward. Thanking you for your generous donation at the time of this national emergency, I am, [Signature of Commanding Officer].

  Half of the dogs that were donated were sent back to their owners within weeks because they failed the physical or were too small or too nervous. The remaining dogs started an eight-week obedience program, practicing their attacks on stuffed dummies of Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. At first the dogs’ progress was disappointing. The handlers and obedience teachers leading the program had experience in a show ring but not in teaching dogs how to attack an infiltrator or sniff out a land mine. The approach was scattershot and the program was still only semiofficial; Dogs for Defense was a civilian group, and the U.S. military hadn’t yet formalized the canine corps. The following year, however, the secretary of war officially established the War Dog Program within the jurisdiction of the Quartermaster General, and—with Arlene Erlanger’s training manual on hand—the canine corps was under way.

  The families who donated their dogs soon overwhelmed the Quartermaster Corps with letters, Christmas cards, and birthday cards for their dogs. There were also thousands of notes sent to the quartermaster himself, asking how this or that dog was doing, whether Skipper had passed basic training, if Thor had mastered airplane spotting and messenger work yet, if Ginger or Lucky or Tippy or Cappy was thriving on army rations. At first the staff tried to answer each letter, but as the number of dogs grew, the mail became unmanageable and all inquiries were answered with certificates of appreciation on War Department letterhead.

  The soldiers at the front who were actually using the dogs occasionally wrote to the owners, especially if the news was bad. The first dog to die in action was Rollo, a Doberman pinscher, killed by machine-gun fire in the Solomon Islands. Many more fatalities followed. “Now I have to tell you the worst,” a Marine named Guy Wachtsletter wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Leo Raymond of Ridgefield, Washington, about their dog Tubby. “Tubby was shot and killed the night of August 31. He has to his credit eight Japs. . . . he behaved like a true Marine at all times and didn’t even whimper when he died. He was shot through the heart and died instantly. We have buried him in the Marine cemetery along with the other real heroes of this campaign and if it is at all possible I’ll send you a picture of his grave. He has a cross with his name and rank. He was a corporal.”

  There had been no call for citizens to donate dogs during World War I. If there had been, it wouldn’t have been quite as emotional a gesture as it was during World War II. In 1917, dogs were still seen as an elevated type of livestock. They were commonly used as hunters and shepherds, so training them as soldiers would not have seemed dramatically different. In all of Rinty’s early films, for instance, he is portrayed as a companion but not really a pet—he is rare
ly even shown inside houses, and his intimacy with his masters comes from being a coworker rather than a member of the family.

  But by the time World War II began, dogs were a familiar fixture on the stage set of modern domesticity. Americans had continued their steady move from countryside to city, and dogs were accompanying them. They had been promoted from farm workers to companions, from outside animals to hearth-warmers. As soon as dogs became our escorts—our friends—putting them to work, and especially work that could kill them, required a great commitment to the cause. The war in 1942 was that sort of cause, when doing something hard probably seemed easy compared with the prospect of a world controlled by Adolf Hitler.

  The army acknowledged the emotional difficulty of giving a dog away. “Appreciative of the sentimental and monetary value of these dogs being lent to them by their owners for the duration of the war, the Army provides the utmost care and attention for them at all times,” according to Fighting War Dogs of World War II, a brochure published in 1944 by the U.S. military. The brochure, promoting Dogs for Defense, included articles such as “Dog Catches a Jap,” “Skippy Has 200 Flying Hours with AAF,” “Queenie Dies in Action,” and “Terrier Goes from California to Africa.”

  One story, “Boy Offers Dog as Sacrifice to War Effort,” quotes a Boy Scout named Eugene Knispel. In a letter to the Quartermaster General, Knispel wrote, “Being a Boy Scout and having the privilege to own a very fine, intelligent, young Belgian Police Dog, I deem it my duty towards my country to offer him to be trained for Defense. How proud I would be if my dog could belong to your K-9 Corps. Would you be kind enough to let me know how to go about enrolling him?”