Pest Control
Diane Ackerman’s latest in paperback–The Zookeeper’s Wife–is a fine mixture of scene and summary, telling the true tale of two Polish zookeepers who helped save the lives of over three hundred people from the Nazis. How? Hiding them in empty cages of their bombed zoo.
Obsessed with pest control, the Third Reich funded many research projects before and during the war that focused on insecticides, rat poisons, and clever ways to foil wood-eating beetles, clothes moths, termites, and other banes. Himmler had studied agriculture in Munich, and favored such entomologists as Karl Friederichs, who sought ways to stop the spruce sawfly and similar insect pests, while justifying Nazi racist ideology as a form of ecology, a “doctrine of blood and soil.” From this perspective, killing people in occupied countries and replacing them with Germans served both political and ecological goals.
IN STOCK: The Zookeeper’s Wife, by Diane Ackerman (Norton, $14.95)
