Alligator from ‘Hitler’s zoo’ dies aged 84
Kidnapped as a youngster, deported from his native Mississippi to Nazi Germany, freed from captivity by an RAF bomb only to be taken back into bondage by the Red Army – by any standards, Saturn’s life was eventful.
By the standards of his species, however, it was epic stuff. Now, at the grand old age of 84, having survived shrapnel and hunger strikes, the world’s most grizzled alligator has died in a zoo in Moscow. Saturn is thought to have been born wild in 1936 and snared months later by hunters. According to his Russian keepers, he was then shipped to the Zoological Garden in Berlin, where he emerged unscathed after
British air raids destroyed the alligator enclosure in 1943 and was among only 96 of the zoo’s 16,000 animals to survive. There has also been speculation, probably baseless, that he was part of Hitler’s personal menagerie.
Whatever the truth, in 1946 British soldiers took him to Leipzig and gave him to the Russians, who carted him off to Moscow.
Saturn spent most of the Cold War growing prodigiously, to a reported 3.5m, and mating fruitlessly with an infertile female called Shipka. In 1970 an inexperienced keeper nearly lost an arm trying to feed him by hand. He was almost killed by a rock tossed by a drunken visitor, and periodically refused food for months.
A German journalist who visited in 2005 claimed that the staff sometimes let children jab Saturn with a broom handle. ‘‘He is,’’ he proclaimed, ‘‘the last German in Russian captivity.’’
In the Mississippi swamps alligators can live for 35 years. Saturn outlived the entire Warsaw Pact. He was lethargic towards the end, attended by a female many years his junior and stirring twice weekly for a meal of fish, rat and rabbit.
‘‘He is the last German in Russian captivity.’’
German journalist in 2005