Mick Hartley

Ha! You know who else (£) thought animals were as intelligent as people?

I now have a new line to use when arguing about animal communication skills:

Nazi scientists tried to breed a secret army of “educated” dogs that could speak, read and write, according to research published in a new book.

Of all the experiments conducted by Hitler’s henchmen in their search for the secret weapon that could help them win the war, the activities of the Tier-Sprechschule may be the most bizarre.

So called “educated” dogs were collected from across Germany and sent for training to the “Animal Speech School” in Leutenberg near Hannover. They included an Airedale terrier called Rolf who, it was claimed, was able to spell by tapping his paw on a board, each letter of the alphabet being represented by a certain number of taps.

Rolf was said to have discussed religion, learnt foreign languages, written poetry and once asked a visiting noblewoman “Can you wag your tail?”

Another dog, a German pointer named Don, impressed his handlers by imitating a human voice to bark in German: “Hungry! Give me cakes.”

The ultimate Nazi hound, however, may have been the dog that barked “Mein Führer” when asked who Adolf Hitler was.

Jan Bonderson, a lecturer at Cardiff University and author of a number of history books, claims the Nazis viewed dogs as being almost as intelligent as humans and believed that only physical limitations prevented them from interacting as equals.

The dogs were being trained to act as guards at concentration camps working alongside human members of the SS.

The Tier-Sprechschule was set up by a woman called Margarethe Schmitt in the 1930s and continued throughout the war years. Her protégés included a dachschund named Kurwenal who became such a celebrity a delegation of 28 uniformed members of a Nazi animal protection organisation paid him a visit on his birthday. He was said to communicate using a different number of barks for each letter, and apparently told a biographer he would be voting for Hindenburg.

Dr Bondeson said: “In the 1920s, Germany had numerous ‘new animal psychologists’ who believed dogs were nearly as intelligent as humans, and capable of abstract thinking and communication.

That Airedale terrier called Rolf: the Nazi scientists must have thought he was really popular with all the other dogs, the way they kept calling his name.