The mysterious Fritz Remmler: Dr. Doolittle or spy?
Remmler's menagerie overshadowed by Gestapo suspicions
Fritz Remmler
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By Vesa-Pekka Hiltunen
The odd zoo operated by Friedrich "Fritz" Remmler (1881-1973) in Kainuu was forgotten quickly when the rumour-mill got working many years later on the activities of the animals' owner.
Decades after the abrupt closure of the Suvenniemi Zoological Station, suspicions were raised in some newspaper articles that Dr. Remmler was in fact a Nazi intelligence officer and that his zoological activities were a cover operation for espionage.
Later these claims were followed up in a 1974 book by Ali Alava on the activities of the Gestapo in Finland.
According to Alava, Dr. Remmler and his wife were spying on behalf of the Germans.
As early as during the First World War, Fritz Remmler (who was actually born in Finland, in Tammisaari, and lived in the country until 1914) had infiltrated into the Finnish Jaeger troops that were trained in Germany, and which played an important role in the Finnish Civil War on the side of the Whites.
Thereafter, it was said, Remmler had close connections with the feared Gestapo or German secret state police.
The claims went something like this: aside from shooting his nature films, Remmler captured images of places in Finland that were of significance in terms of military strategy, taking other Germans out on spying trips that were disguised as exercises in collecting animals.
When Remmler went to Berlin in 1937, he did not merely attend a hunting exhibition, but also underwent specialised Gestapo training.
He is also alleged to have taught falconry to no lesser personage than Field Marshal Herman Göring.
Again according to Alava, Finnish counter-intelligence began to smell a rat over Remmler already in 1936-37, when Göring's adjutants paid regular visits to Kainuu.
The abrupt closure of the menagerie and Remmler's deportation came from the fact that he was regarded as an undesirable alien in Finland on the outbreak of the Winter War in late November 1939.
But this was not the last we were to see of him.
Remmler returned to Finland in the 1940s on intelligence-gathering business, and lived for a while in Rovaniemi in Lapland. He left along with the fleeing German troops in 1944.
Thereafter he moved to Canada, where he served as a game manager for General Motors (!) on their large estates.
He also continued with his film-making right up to his death in 1973.
There are few people left who are around to report first-hand on the Suvenniemi menagerie of the 1930s.
One is Hilkka Karakko, who was a girl of eight when Fritz Remmler's zoo was shut down. Karakko's father Kusti Leinonen was one of the keepers on the farm, looking after predators.
For years, Karakko has devoured whatever information she can get on the curious place and how it worked.
She has interviewed people who lived on the estate and their descendants.
She says she finds it hard to swallow the idea that the zoo was an espionage centre or just a front.
"Why wouldn't anyone who was working there have noticed anything that smacked of spying?" asks Karakko.
"Everyone who has seen the place with their own eyes knows to say how passionately Remmler took the business of training the animals and filming them, and how much work the farm involved."
Karakko also thinks it is a little odd that the rumours and insinuations started circulating in the papers only after Remmler's death.
"The writers did not have access to the sort of information that would have rested on real and documented sources. Instead they produced a whole battery of insinuations, speculations, hearsay, maybes and possiblys, or their own beliefs", she charges.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.4.2009
More on this subject:
 The curious case of Dr. Remmler's pre-war menagerie
Helsingin Sanomat
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