The dogs of war

How did dogs taught to respond to Hebrew commands come to serve the German army in the 1930s? The surprising answer can be found in the life's work of Prof. Rudolphina Menzel, a world-renowned trainer and ardent Zionist.


Ofer Aderet
Haaretz
12 April '10

(Both interesting and fascinating! Special thanks to Michal Dar-El for bringing this article to my attention)

The writer Max Brod ends an old letter to his friend, the philosopher Samuel Hugo Bergman, with the following words: "Maybe you know something about the guard dogs that Dr. Menzel and his wife are breeding in Linz? The dogs were trained to obey orders in Hebrew and so far have been used by the Austrian police, producing amusing incidents... I want to help them both." The letter was written in the summer of 1938, after the Anschluss - the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.

How did Hebrew-speaking dogs come to be serving the Austrian police - and in Linz, of all places, where Adolf Hitler grew up? A visit to the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, where the estate of Prof. Rudolphina Menzel is kept, supplies the surprising answer.

Menzel's estate consists of hundreds of letters, diaries and articles written in German, English and Hebrew, scattered among hundreds of folders. In perusing through the material, a picture of a pioneering woman begins to take shape - one who developed groundbreaking methods to train dogs for security tasks; who worked for the Austrian police and the German army in the 1930s, and for the British army and the Haganah (the pre-state underground Jewish militia) in the 1940s; and who for years trained guide dogs for the blind in Israel.

Click here for the story of Oketz - IDF Special Forces - K-9 Unit


Rudolphina Menzel was born in 1891 in Vienna to a well-to-do Jewish family. When she was 4, she was bitten by a puppy she had been playing with, an incident that actually served to heighten her interest in dogs. "Other children developed a constant aversion and fear of dogs. I developed ties to and a fondness for them," she related years later. As a girl, she gave her allowance to neighbors who agreed to take care of stray dogs she had found on the street. Her parents, however, "refused to allow these dirty, contaminating creatures to stain their expensive carpets with mud from the street."

Menzel obtained doctorate degrees in psychology, biology and biochemistry at the University of Vienna, where she was also active in the Zionist-oriented Herzl student union and established the Viennese branch of the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss (Blue-White). After marrying the physician Rudolph Menzel in 1915, the couple moved to a luxurious villa with a large garden in Linz.

Financially, their situation was sound: He worked as a doctor of internal medicine, she as a psychologist. Her great love, though, was for dogs. In the 1920s, the Menzels established in their home the first school of its kind to train attack, defense, guard and tracking dogs. They also carried out joint research on canine psychology.

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