The Hundesprechschule Asra or Tiersprechschule Asra (Asra school for talking dogs or Asra school for talking animals) was an institution for performing dogs that existed in Leutenberg, Thuringia, Germany, from 1930 until near the end of World War II. The founder, Margarethe Schmidt taught her dogs a number of tricks, including vocal expression, and had them perform in public. In 2011, a non-fiction book published in Great Britain by Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities led to interest in the English-speaking press. The book used it as an example of Nazi-sponsored animal research. However, there is no evidence of a connection to the Nazi war effort, and the school was privately run.
History The Hundesprechschule Asra was founded in 1930 by Margarethe Schmidt, whose father was the owner of the Leutenberg paper mill. She lived in Villa Viola, a house on the edge of the town of Leutenberg with her mother. The school was named Asra after an alleged particularly talented Great Dane,2 who was the mother of five of the six dogs at the school. Another dog, a terrier, was added later as a rescue. Near the end of the war, in 1945, the villa was occupied by increasingly large numbers of refugees and Margarethe Schmidt closed the school and moved to West Berlin. Schmidt regularly demonstrated the dogs' alleged abilities in public in Leutenberg and the surrounding area. A printed brochure stated that "the animals not only add, subtract, multiply and divide, but also know the time ... . They read, ... judge colors, characterize those present precisely." A 13-year-old child evacuee described such a performance in November 1944, saying that the dogs could tell the time, describe people, and correct misspellings. He stated in a letter that the dogs "could speak and calculate and think" and expressed themselves by repeatedly ringing a bell. He stated that it was "not nonsense". Another contemporary witness, however, called the performance, which he saw as a child in the winter of 1945/46, "clearly a fraud". A different witness at the time, who was a frequent visitor to Villa Viola as a teenager in the 1940s and saw the performances several times, spoke of "artifices" or "tricks". They said the dogs could neither speak ("a drawn-out Maaamma was the only thing you could halfway understand") nor calculate; it was more a "trick" in which the dogs scratched at a block with a bell until the desired number was reached and they received a reward. Max Müller, director of the municipal veterinary service in Munich and honorary professor at the veterinary faculty of LMU Munich,2 visited the school in 1942, at which time there was also a cat. He wrote an article about it in the Tierärztliche Mitteilungen. As "one of the greatest advocates of 'tapping-speaking' animals during the 1930s", Müller was firmly convinced that dogs were capable of independent thought. In his essay, Müller reports that the dogs can reproduce a series of words aloud and use them meaningfully, but were limited by the structure of their vocal apparatus. Furthermore, he reported that they could solve arithmetic problems, tell the date and read words by repeatedly barking or pressing an electric bell. He said they responded more fluently using a code of a number of barks (or rings of an electric bell in the case of the terrier) for each letter. However, according to some contemporary accounts, the training was only a show; the dogs' utterances were largely incomprehensible and their counting was a trained response. Another person who had attended a performance compared it to the circus, and recalled that the dogs did not speak, supposedly because it was too cold. Müller also mentions that Margarethe Schmidt had offered Adolf Hitler "to make herself and her dogs available for the purposes of Wehrmacht use" and had received an affirmative response from the Führer's office. He expressed his hope that "according to the Führer's instructions, the members of the Wehrmacht will have the opportunity to convince themselves of the independent thinking of these animals and their direct and indirect ability to speak as part of the KdF (Strength Through Joy) program." However, there is no evidence that Schmidt actually appeared with her dogs for the Wehrmacht. There had been work in Germany on teaching dogs to reason and communicate throughout the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1910 a German pointer named Don became famous for being able to say that he was hungry and ask for cakes.56–64 The 'New Animal Psychology' (German: neue Tierpsychologie) had been developed by Karl Krall and others to characterize the reasoning abilities of animals, particularly canine examples such as the Airedale Terrier Rolf. This line of thought had many adherents in Germany in the 1920s.35–53 The 'New Animal Psychologists' believed that certain animals, such as dogs and horses, were nearly as intelligent as humans and could be trained to unlock their intellectual potential. According to an article published in Psychology Today, the Rolf case proved influential in the acceptance and development of the Nazi talking dog program using Hundesprechschule Asra.46–47
Public reception In her 2008 dissertation The "New Animal Psychology" and its Scientific Representatives (from 1900 to 1945), Britt von den Berg, citing Müller's 1943 essay, mentions the Asra dog-speaking school as a "curiosity" and places it in the context of the great interest in speaking, calculating or thinking animals and in animal psychology in general that existed in Germany in the first half of the 20th century and was originally triggered by the case of Clever Hans.
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