The curious case of Dr. Remmler's pre-war menagerie
Gorilla, antelope, kangaroo and a roaring leopard in a small village in Kainuu
By Vesa-Pekka Hiltunen
Like most countries, Finland has a rich tradition of village eccentrics, but every so often one comes across a case that transcends the normal norms of eccentricity and goes into the "totally weird" file.
We have to go back to the year 1928, and to the northern town of Kajaani in Kainuu Province.
In the outlying village of Tuovila there are no electric lights and no water mains. Water is hoisted up from the well or brought in in horse-drawn drays.
The residents of the isolated village are confused to say the least by a recent arrival, one Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Remmler.
The German Dr. Remmler speaks German, Russian, Swedish, Finnish, English, and French.
He walks around with his pet on a lead. The pet in question is a small tame bear cub.
Remmler has bought a former farm in the village. The four-hectare property contains a log house, a stone-built shed for livestock, a barn, other outbuildings and storehouses, and a smoke sauna.
These do not, however, satisfy the requirements for Remmler's ambitious plans.
He has decided to make the farm into a zoo, the Suvenniemi Zoological Station.
Remmler employs staff and builds a large hall for the animals in two sections: a log building for the bears and wolves and a bird house, and to go with it he constructs a lookout tower next to the cattle shed.
Furthermore, he fences off an area of around half a hectare with a tall wooden fence.
In addition to the bear cub we have already met, he brings onto his land a cow, some chickens and sheep, and also some falcons and eagles. The birds of prey have jesses on their legs and are attached to posts by cords.
The animals in Remmler's menagerie come and go with bewildering frequency, and even more exotic creatures show up, including a leopard, a cheetah, hyenas, a kangaroo, an ostrich, an antelope, various apes and monkeys, some baboons, and a gorilla.
Remmler acquires some of his collection of animals through a 1927 newspaper advertisement:
"The Suvenniemi Zoological Station will buy live bears, wolverines, wolves, lynxes, Arctic foxes, pine martens, otters, hares, eagles, and eagle owls and their young."
The advert also contains a tariff of prices that Remmler is willing to pay for these animals.
A lynx or an Arctic fox will bring the supplier 3,000 markka in cash, and the humble hare just 50 markka.
Animals are caught with nets and a range of snares, or they are taken from nests.
Even though the farm is somewhat out of the way, as the Finnish name suggests [syrjä, syrjäinen = remote, isolated], the roar of the leopard carries a good long distance and is a little disconcerting for the neighbours, as far away as the outskirts of Kajaani.
Intrigued villagers and others come to look at the animals in the menagerie.
Dr. Remmler does not charge admission, at least until the children on the farm discover a handy market opportunity and begin to offer walking tours of the property for a small fee.
The boys stir up the unfortunate gorilla to perform lewd acts to prompt blushes and giggles whenever a female visitor shows up.
Sometimes they tease visitors with a couple of tame magpies that are urged to steal keys and other items from the curious onlookers.
However, money is not made from showing off the animals as such, but from selling them on. Remmler fashions a living by dealing in wild Finnish forest animals and game birds to customers in Central Europe, Scotland and Canada.
Trained eagles, hawks, and hares as prey he trades to wealthy landowners in Germany and France who have a penchant for hunting.
Fast forward a little into the 1930s, and Dr. Remmler breaks into a new area: making movies. He shoots short films to his own scripts. Before long, Remmler gets some film companies interested in his odd animal kingdom.
The farm is used as the setting for a series of shorts on educational animal fables, and for clips in a Finnish film whose name in translation comes out as something like "Wolf's Blood".
The cleverest of the animals accompany Remmler and his entourage on a visit to the large hunting exhibition held in Berlin in 1937.
The German press is particularly interested in the hunting falcons, and Remmler poses with his birds in several newspaper articles.
Then, suddenly, on December 16th 1939, it is all over.
It all happens very quickly, and the Kainuu zoo vanishes in a matter of hours.
The older people in the village look grave and whisper among themselves.
The situation seems catastrophic. The hares and the birds are killed. The more valuable animals are crated up and carted off to the railway station for shipment to the Korkeasaari Zoo in Helsinki or to Sweden.
Finland is at war, and the mysterious Dr. Remmler has been deported from the country.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.4.2009
The original article is based on information gained from contemporaries by Hilkka Karakko, and on press cuttings.
More on this subject:
 The mysterious Fritz Remmler: Dr. Doolittle or spy?
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 21.4.2009 - THIS WEEK |
The curious case of Dr. Remmler's pre-war menagerie
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