The Tiger of Sabrodt (Tiger von Sabrodt)

For a long time, no wolves had been known in northern Upper Lusatia. Most people believed they were long gone. Hoyerswerda then lay in the Prussian province of Silesia, Regierungsbezirk Liegnitz. A country of forests, small villages and foresters' districts. Then, at the start of the 20th century, something began to kill.

Poultry. Young goats. Game. Reportedly a foal. The first kill was found at Sabrodt, a village known in Sorbian as Zabrod. Nobody could say what had done it. People first suspected an escaped circus animal. Some claimed they had seen a tiger.

The locals called it a predatory monster. The press reached for "Ungeheuer", "Bestie" and "Satan". Soon it had a name of its own. The Tiger von Sabrodt. Few ever saw it clearly. Erwin Strittmatter, in his semi-autobiographical novel Der Laden, recalled it through the memories of an old miller from Sabrodt. "Some people had glimpsed it flitting past, but never really seen it." And: "One saw only the damage it did."

District forester Dommel of Neustadt reported sure signs of the animal to the Royal Prussian forestry office. Several organised hunts were mounted. The animal slipped past them all. A newspaper later put it plainly: "Its caution and speed mocked every attempt to hunt it."

27 February 1904. Fresh snow lay over the forest district of Tschelln, near the village of Tzschelln on the Spree. A fresh track in the new snow let the hunters surround it. The press called it a large police hunt. Many shooters and beaters took part.

Head Forester Dutmer-Bohla got a shot from a long distance and wounded it. The wounded beast turned toward an open area. Forester Brehmer-Weißkollm hit it from about 30 metres. The animal fled as far as a nearby thicket. There it was soon found dead.

It was no tiger. It was a very large wolf, 1.60 m long, 80 cm at the shoulder, 41 kg in weight. Most sources record a female, though the Saxon state wolf office records a male. An unnamed Prussian official was the first to recognise it as a wolf. Brehmer-Weißkollm received the 100-mark bounty.

The carcass was shown for several days in the Hoyerswerda Schützenhaus. More than 500 people came to see it. Robert Aedtner of Hoyerswerda photographed it. The hunting magazine Wild und Hund was unimpressed: "That four years had to pass before the devil was stopped is unforgivable." According to Strittmatter, newspapers as far away as Berlin mocked the tiger story.

No hoax has ever been alleged. The tiger was a good-faith misidentification of an animal rarely seen, in a region that believed wolves extinct. The circus theory died with the carcass. Some questions remain open: the sex of the animal, whether the hunt lasted two years or four, and whether it belongs to Sabrodt, which gave it its name, or to Tschelln, where it fell. Tzschelln itself is gone, dug away by the Nochten opencast mine.

For decades it was called the last wolf in Germany. More precisely, it was the last free-living wolf shot inside Germany's present borders before 1945. At least 28 wild wolves have been shot since 1948, including the Würger vom Lichtenmoor, and wolves settled in Lusatia again from 1998. The mounted animal is on display in the Stadtmuseum at Schloss Hoyerswerda. Sabrodt was renamed Wolfsfurt from 1936 to 1945, its volunteer fire brigade carries a wolf on its coat of arms, and Powerwolf recorded "Tiger of Sabrod" on Lupus Dei in 2007.