Science: The Rape of the Ants

“The meanest thing the Germans did in Holland is known at Maastricht as ‘the rape of the ants.’ . . . Even quisling Hollanders resented the theft of the greatest collection of ants in the world.”

Thus cabled New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Lewis Gannett. A suburban book critic turned war correspondent, Gannett is himself an amateur formicologist. When he arrived in Maastricht last fortnight, the burghers poured into his sympathetic ears the whole ant story.

The collection was the work of the late Jesuit Father Erich Wasmann, known as the “Fabre* of the ants.” His studies of ant psychology (hermaphroditism, agricultural cooperation, etc.) are the basis of modern theories about ant society. Beginning as a specialist in the red ant, Father Wasmann eventually gathered specimens of most of the 3,500 known species of ants. When he died in 1931, he left the collection to another Jesuit entomologist, Father Schmitz, who added to it his own great collection of phorid flies (a species of hunchbacked insect).

One day in October 1942, a Professor

Dr. Bischoff, curator of the Berlin University zoological museum, marched into Father Schmitz’s cloister and demanded to see the collection. Father Schmitz showed him the phorid flies (the ants had been sent to Maastricht’s natural history museum for safekeeping). Snapped Professor Dr. Bischoff: “From today on all this belongs to me. And I want the Wasmann ants, too.” “Give Up.” This was too much, even for the quisling burgomaster of Maastricht. He helped patriotic Dutch formicophiles hide the ant collection in the cellar of the Town Hall. But Professor Dr.

Bischoff, only temporarily foiled, soon returned from Berlin, this time with a tough SS trooper and a formal paper demanding the surrender of the ants. The Professor announced that, since Father Wasmann was born in the Tyrol, the ants were German property. The burgomaster retorted that Father Wasmann’s birth place was actually in Italian territory. He appealed to the quisling Minister of Fine Arts at The Hague. Said the Minister: “Give up the ants.” So the Professor carried them off to Berlin, after ostentatiously signing a receipt.

Last week Maastricht’s citizens, wondering about the fate of their ants in bombed Berlin, were not very hopeful of ever getting the great collection back. As for Father Schmitz, when last heard from he was in the Tyrol collecting phorid flies, had already collected 1,000 species.

*France’s Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915) was the father of modern entomology.