Earlier in our series about the wolf, the Utrecht historian Maarten van Rossum talked about what the Iron Curtain has meant for the animal. “Wolves are living in the Netherlands again and that is a very special thing. Who could have thought that fifty years ago? And that is because the number of wolves is also increasing elsewhere in Europe. That is again the result of the Berne Treaty, which was closed in 1979, effective from 1982. Then the wolf became a protected predator. Anyone who shot it at that time was punishable.”
In East Germany, therefore, these laws were not observed until after the fall of the wall. Van Rossum: “At the end of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain disappeared. So wolves that lived behind it and were actively hunted there could then migrate to Western Europe. And so the end of the Cold War was not only a blessing for European man, but especially also a blessing for the European wolf. That Iron Curtain was not passable for man, but also not passable for the wolf.”