'Hitler's alligator' preserved forever

An alligator rumoured to have belonged to German dictator Adolf Hitler has been preserved forever after dying at the age of 84 at a zoo in Moscow.  

According to the details, the alligator, Saturn, died in May, shortly after the 75th anniversary of the tyrant’s defeat and the reptile’s skin was donated to the Moscow’ Darwin Museum. The alligator will be put on display after work by taxidermists at the zoo in the new year.

Known to have been a pre-war star attraction at Berlin Zoo in Nazi Germany, the story also circulated that the reptile had been in the Hitler’s personal pet collection, as suggested by famous Russian writer Boris Akunin. Dmitry Vasilyev, a vet at Moscow Zoo, said there was no doubt that Hitler admired the alligator.

The alligator was born in the wild in Mississippi in 1936 before being caught and shipped to Berlin Zoo. There is mystery over Saturn’s whereabouts after Berlin was bombed from November 1943.

The reptile  was eventually found by British soldiers in Berlin after the second world war and passed to the Red Army. Later, the alligator was taken to Moscow in 1946 and became an icon of the zoo, Mail Online reported.

One theory is he ‘hid in basements, dark corners and sewage drains’, another that he was in the menagerie of a senior Nazi.

In the early 1990s, Saturn witnessed the Soviet collapse and reports said he had ‘tears in his eyes’ when tanks shot the nearby Russian parliament because it ‘reminded him of the bombing of Berlin’.

The museum said, “The installation of Saturn in the permanent exhibition is the culmination of six months of work by our taxidermists.”

“No reptile of the museum has such a rich biography. He was, without exaggeration, a legend of the zoo and had seen a lot in his lifetime.”

Museum official Dmitry Miloserdov said it was “the second birth of Saturn – the story of how ‘Hitler’s alligator” became immortal.’