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Hans Feldmeier received a can of lard from supplies distributed to Germans by the United States after World War II. He stashed it away and never opened the can. Feldmeier, who lives in Warnemünde, Germany, near the Baltic Sea, recently found the can and took it to authorities to see if it was still edible.
“Overall, the product has a degree of freshness and material composition necessary to be assessed to be satisfactory after 64 years,” according to the State Office for Agricultural, Fisheries and Food Security.
The authorities did, however, find minor deficiencies in the lard’s smell and taste, discovering that it was slightly gritty and appeared old, meaning it could not compete with the quality of a fresh sample. Still, it appeared to be fit for human consumption, they said.
The office credited the air-tight US can and preservatives for maintaining the lard in such pristine condition over the years.
Feldmeier was delighted to hear of the unusually successful preservation, but when he requested his can back from the agency, they gave it back to him empty. Link
Air Force lieutenant Gail Halvorsen flew supplies into Berlin during the Berlin Airlift in 1948 and ’49. On one run, he met a group of children near the landing strip.
“They could speak a little English,” he recalled later. “Their clothes were patched and they hadn’t had gum and candy for two or three years. They barely had enough to eat.”
Halvorsen gave them two sticks of gum and promised to drop more candy for them the next day from his C-54. He said he’d rock his wings so that they could distinguish him from the other planes. Then he returned to the base and spent the night tying bundles of candy to handkerchief parachutes.
Not only did Halvorsen deliver he candy, but when word of his caper leaked out, Americans sent lots more candy to be dropped over Berlin. And Halvorsen did just that. Fifty years later, he encountered one of those children on a trip to Berlin, which you’ll have to go to Futility Closet to read about. Link -via Fark
You can read more about Halvorsen at Wikipedia. Link
In English, that’s Who’s Coming? which was a kinderbuch (children’s book) from 1910 showing all kinds of people who come to the house. The illustrations are by Julie Conz, and you can see eleven of them at BibliOdyssey. Not only are they beautiful, but they also highlight how differently goods and services were provided 100 years ago. Link
Artist He Xiangyu created a life-sized sculpture of activist Ai Weiwei lying face down as though he were dead. While it’s a great work of art with a powerful message, you can be certain that the police in Bad Ems, the German town that plays home to the gallery where the exhibit is shown, are not huge fans of the sculpture. That’s because multiple people have called the police to report the “dead body.”
The Eh`häusl in Amberg, Germany bills itself as the smallest hotel in the world. It is only eight feet wide! The structure was built on a property of only 20 square meters, between two other houses. The history of the hotel is interesting, as told by Metafilter member woodblock100:
So here’s the story: it’s 1728 and you live in Amberg, a little Bavarian town somewhere north of Munich. You and your lady friend really, really want to get married, but there is a little snag; the council laws permit only homeowners to marry, and you’re still stuck renting a place. But all is not lost! You pick up a little strip of empty land between two other buildings – just 2.5 meters wide. You run up a quick wall on the front, another on the back, slap a roof on top, and presto – you’re a homeowner. The council falls for it, and allows you to get married.
But now what? Well, it’s not liveable, so you head back to the rental place to live, but you recoup your investment by selling the Eh’häusl (Little Wedding House) to the next couple with the same problem.
Link to story. Link to hotel site.
(Image: Google Street View)
3D printers have been used to create some amazing things, from robot parts to minecraft models to flexible solar panels, but nothing compares to being able to print out body parts for surgery!
In Germany, researchers have created artificial blood vessels by putting a mix of synthetic polymers and biomolecules, so that the vessels aren’t rejected, into the 3d printer ink reservoirs, and the results are a finely detailed set of transplant worthy capillaries precisely detailed in every way.
Now that they have succeeded in creating blood vessels, researchers are looking at ways in which to print out internal organs and bones. I wonder how much those ink cartridges cost to replace?
Link -image via Fraunhofer IGB
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As the largest engineering company in Europe, Siemens has decided to abandon its investments in nuclear power in response to political aversion towards nuclear power. Despite having built all 17 of Germany’s nuclear power plants, they plan on setting 35% of their electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.
Siemens, the largest engineering conglomerate in Europe, announced Sunday that following the German government’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022, it would stop building nuclear power plants anywhere in the world. “The chapter for us is closed,” Peter Löscher, the chief executive of the Munich-based conglomerate, said in an interview with Der Spiegel, the weekly news magazine. He emphasized the company’s commitment to the rapidly growing renewable energy sector.
He said the decision was also “an answer” to political and social opposition to nuclear power in Germany.
Link -via TreeHugger | Photo Credit Topato
It was 50 years ago today, August 13th, 1961, that East German soldiers began cordoning off the western part of the city. This was the beginning of the Berlin Wall. Germany marked the occasion with a ceremony earlier today. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Christian Wulff, and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit were all present to remember those who died attempting to cross the barrier from East Berlin to West Berlin.
Addressing the ceremony on Bernauer, a street famously divided by the Wall and now site of a memorial, Mayor Wowereit said the capital was remembering the “saddest day in its recent history”.
“It is our common responsibility to keep alive the memories and pass them on to the next generation, to maintain freedom and democracy and to do everything so that such injustices may never happen again,” he said.
Earlier, Mr Wulff told Die Welt newspaper that the modern Germany could take pride in “East Germans’ irrepressible desire for freedom and West Germans’ solidarity with them”.
The wall was finally opened in 1989. Link -via Fark
Previously: Read more about the history of the Berlin Wall in The Fall of the Wall.
A car was pulled over in Plattling, Germany, when police officers saw it was being driven by a skeleton! However, the driver was found to be a 23-year-old Brit named Martin Williams.
He told police he’d snapped up the plastic life-size model at a local flea market but strapped it into his front passenger seat because he thought it would be damaged in the boat.
A police spokesman said: ‘It was only when we stopped the car that we realised it was a British right hand drive car – and the skeleton was therefore in the passenger seat.
“We could not make any charges against him as it is not illegal to have a plastic skeleton in your car.”
This urinal was photographed at Rheinfels Castle in Germany. I would think that most men would prefer to just take it outside.
(Image credit: Flickr member klaas koopmans)
Ludwig II of Bavaria died under mysterious circumstances 125 years ago. The death was ruled a suicide, but many don’t buy that explanation.
Today, Ludwig remains famous for the castles he built and attempted to build, most notably Neuschwanstein Castle, perched high in the Alpine foothills. The king was a romantic, a friend and suporter of composer Richard Wagner, and he hired theatrical set designers rather than architects to design his castles. More absorbed in his personal world than state affairs, Ludwig spent most of his time on his own projects — emptying his personal coffers — and left his ministers frustrated by his inattention.
What is left is a mystery -and those castles! The Atlantic has a collection of 30 photographs of the king’s life and those gorgeous palaces that still grace the region. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: AP/Christof Stache)
Move out of the way, police dogs! German police have a new best friend–the vulture. A team of three carrion-seeking birds have been trained to help officers find bodies. The only hitch is that the birds tend to peck at their finds. Um, yeah. That could be a problem.
Named Sherlock, Miss Marple and Colombo, the three vultures all have keen eyesight and an acute sense of smell. The idea is that birds could do a better job in handling rough terrain and scanning larger areas. Which is great and all but I hope the police remember that vultures are scavengers. So don’t be surprised if a body is missing a couple eyeballs and has more flesh wounds than it should because of the vultures.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.
The East German government called the Berlin Wall “the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier.” But the machine guns along its length were pointed inward, toward East Berlin, not outward.
Shortly after midnight on August 13, 1961, the city of Berlin was cut in two. Soviet and East German troops moved in and ringed the city. Train service between the two cities was stopped. Telephone lines were cut. Streets connecting East and West were sealed off. The construction of the Berlin Wall had begun. The people of East Berlin were being locked in.
EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE
At first, the wall consisted of barbed wire, concrete barriers, and tanks. When complete, it was 100 miles (161 km) of pure concrete, 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) high. It extended 28 miles (45 km) through the heart of Berlin and some 70 miles (113 km) around the city to isolate West Berlin from the rest of East Germany, which surrounded it.
The wall was painted white, not to make it prettier, but to make it easier for border guards to see and shoot at anyone attempting to climb over it. A second wall was built 100 yards (91 meters) to the east of the first wall. In the no-man’s-land (known as the Death Zone) between them were 293 watchtowers along with searchlights, killer guard dogs, self-firing guns, and land mines. Over the years, the wall was rebuilt three times to make it harder and harder to breach.
THE GREAT ESCAPES
more …
The former butchering facility in Dresden, Germany featured in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 book Slaughterhouse Five is a real place that you can visit. The book is a work of fiction, but Vonnegut was really held prisoner in Dresden’s Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) during the city’s fire bombing in World War II. Read more about the underground meat locker that saved the lives of POWs like Vonnegut at Atlas Obscura. Link
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Police officers in Pforzheim, Germany were called Tuesday to investigate an owl that appeared to be sick.
“A woman walking her dog alerted the police after seeing the bird sitting by the side of the road oblivious to passing traffic,” Frank Otruba, spokesman for the police in the southwestern city of Pforzheim, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
The Brown Owl didn’t appear to be injured and officers quickly concluded that it had had one too many. One of its eyelids was drooping, adding to the general impression of inebriation.
“It wasn’t staggering around and we didn’t breathalyze it but there were two little bottles of Schapps in the immediate vicinity,” said Otruba. “We took it to a local bird expert who has treated alcoholized birds before and she has been giving it lots of water.”
The owl will be released when sober. Link -via Arbroath
Heidi the Cross-eyed Opossum lives at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany, where she is set to be a part of Gondwanaland, a new area of the zoo which will open in July. The two-and-a-half year old opossum has already inspired a song and a plush toy.
It is a long way from home. According to the zoo, Heidi and her sister, Naira, originally came from the US state of North Carolina, where they were turned over as foundlings to a facility for wild animals. The sisters then made their way to the zoo in Odense, Denmark, before ending up in Leipzig.
The reason for Heidi’s crossed eyes is unclear, but zoo officials speculate that it might be because of fat deposits behind her eyes, caused by a bad diet early in life. The eyes might look off, but they cause the animal no pain, and don’t affect her ability to get around, according to the zoo. She is, aside from her looks, a normal opossum.
See more pictures of Heidi at der Spiegel. Link -via J-Walk Blog
We consider a nutcracker shaped like a human to be a Christmas symbol because of Peter Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet The Nutcracker. That’s about all that most of us know about nutcrackers. The wooden icon we recognize traces its beginnings to the German mining town of Seiffen.
By the mid 1800s many mines had played out and shut down, and the unemployed miners had to find another means of support. Their woodworking skills, and the increasing use of water-powered lathes, saved their schnitzel. The men began to produce items in quantity—tops and dolls, farm scenes with barns and livestock, Noah’s arks with lines of paired animals, angels and pyramids bearing candles, miners carrying lamps, and the nutcrackers that they had once created only for their own families. The finished pieces were transported by horse cart to markets in Dresden, Leipzig, and Nuremberg, where they sold well and gained a reputation for quality as well as charming simplicity.
According to local legend, Seiffen woodworker Friedrich Wilhelm Füchtner created the prototype of the modern nutcracker in about 1870—a king wearing cavalry dress and a crown reminiscent of a miner’s hat. This inspired other caricatures such as soldiers, forest rangers, and policemen. The nut-cracking function of these ersatz officials symbolized the unpleasantness with which real authority figures often treated the townspeople.
The popularity of those nutcrackers really took off during World War II. Read the rest of the story at Nat Geo Pop Omnivore Blog. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Flickr user Hugh Buzacott)
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In 1966, a beluga whale swam the wrong way up the Rhine -and wound up paving the way for environmental reform in Germany.
When World War II finally came to an end, Germany was in shambles. Its cities had been transformed into forests of twisted steel and broken concrete, and the German people were suffering from food shortages and rampant unemployment. Within a few years, however, things were looking up. Production of steel and coal were fueling remarkable growth in West Germany, and the country was positioning itself as the industrial powerhouse of Europe.
But this “economic miracle” was wreaking havoc on the environment. Careless mining and manufacturing turned the Rhine into what amounted to an open sewer, and soon, the international waterway contained millions of gallons of toxic waste. By the 1960s, the river was striped with red and green steaks of sludge. The water’s oxygen level had plummeted, and fish were dying en masse. Germany tolerated the pollution because food, jobs, and a sense of progress came along with it, but everyone knew that something had to change.
The catalyst for that change appeared unexpectedly on the morning of May 18, 1966, when a fisherman on the Rhine spotted a large, white creature swimming alongside his boat. Dr. Wolfgang Gewalt, director of the nearby Duisburg Zoo, was called in to identify the animal, which he recognized as a beluga whale. Intrigued, Dr. Gewalt quickly put together a team of whale hunters to trap the animal and bring it to his aquarium.
That was easier said than done. For all his expertise, Gewalt had little idea how to capture a whale without harming it. He tried trapping the animal using tennis nets, but the whale swam right through them. Several more failed attempts followed, and the whale began to garner more and more attention. Before long, the newspapers had nicknamed him Moby Dick. But as the German people continued to watch Dr. Gewalt’s attempts to capture the whale, it became impossible to ignore the unfortunate side effects of post-war progress. As Moby Dick proceeded to swim up the Rhine, journalists noticed that the whale’s skin went from soft and white to bumpy and splotchy. Concerned citizens began to fear that the river’s water would harm the animal, if not kill it outright.
After a couple of weeks, Moby Dick finally left the Duisburg area and traveled downriver. It was only a few yards from the North Sea when a strange thing happened. The whale suddenly stopped, turned around, and went back upriver. A few days later, Moby Dick appeared outside the German parliament building in Bonn -150 miles south.
This caused quite a scene. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the river, and a group of nearby politicians even suspended their NATO news conference so they could get a glimpse of the whale. Meanwhile, the press went wild, with newspapers suggesting that Moby Dick’s plan all along had been to raise awareness of the environmental plight of the Rhine.
Although the whale eventually escaped to open water, its presence remained. For four weeks in 1966, Moby Dick captured the nation’s attention and highlighted the country’s ecological desperation. Not coincidentally, environmental politics soon became a pressing national issue. The German people began forming grass roots organizations, and in 1972, the influential Federal Association of Citizen’s Initiatives for Environmental Protection was formed. That same year, the German parliament passed the first two laws that effectively regulated waste disposal and emissions in rivers. And in 1979, 
Germans formed the first successful political party to focus on ecological concerns, Die Grünen Partei, literally “the Green Party.” It’s from their name that we get the term “green politics.”
Today, the Rhine is the cleanest it’s been in decades. Germany is still an industrial powerhouse, but it’s also one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world. Yet the river might still be a sewer today if it hadn’t been for one lost whale that tested the waters.
__________________________
The above article by Michael Ward is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Der Spiegel has an image gallery of “Trummerfrauen,” or “rubble women” who were charged by the occupying Allies with cleaning up the wreckage of German cities bombed during World War II. There weren’t enough German men left to do the job, and the women had to use their bare hands and whatever equipment they could round up on their own. The job still took years. Recovered materials were sorted to be reused. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
In this era of global economic downturn, two countries, Germany and China, aren’t doing too shabbily. Now they can’t be further apart: Germany is a stable democracy with a mature economy and China is an authoritarian government with a nascent yet rapidly growing economy.
So, why are they surviving the recession better than the rest of us? Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post suggests an interesting answer: It’s The Factories, Stupid.
What sets them apart from the world’s other major powers, purely and simply, is manufacturing. Their predominantly industrial economies meet their own needs and those of other nations, and have made them flourish while others flounder. [...]
For the past three decades, with few exceptions, America’s CEOs, financiers, establishment economists and editorialists assured us that the transition from a manufacturing to a post-industrial economy was both inevitable and positive: American workers would move to more productive jobs, and the nation’s financial security would only grow. But after rising steadily during the quarter-century following World War II, wages have stagnated since the manufacturing sector began to contract.
Harold went on to explain why most Americans are wrong when thinking that we can’t compete with China’s cheap labor (after all, Germany’s labor cost is even more expensive than ours): Link
Robots in industry are pretty much the coolest things ever, from car-assembling robots to dishwashing robots, there’s nothing quite like automation. Take this robot for example. Input disorganized salami and the robot will produce beautiful, orderly rows of salami, keeping track of the status of the salami. Considering how important salami is, I’m amazed we ever trusted anyone other than robots to sort it.
– via mentalfloss
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nmiller.
When a restaurant couldn’t pay for its purchases, a German meat supplier decided to repo the merchandise … including steaks that are already cooked:
A furious argument erupted in the kitchen after the man made his daily delivery Wednesday evening but was told the restaurant didn’t immediately have the euro400 ($535) in cash to pay his bill.
The vendor then took back the meat he’d delivered — including steaks already being cooked or marinated. That still didn’t cover the bill, so he continued collecting meat in the dining room.
Police arrived at the scene after he left but said they believed no offense was committed.
The boar in the photo is a life-size model weighing 150 kg – part of a test conducted by Germany’s ADAC automobile club in response to a growing number of roadkill incidents involving large mammals. Hundreds of thousands of wild boars roam freely in Europe. If you encounter a boar in the road, the appropriate response may be counterintuitive:
Unfortunately for the animals that stray onto roads, ADAC recommended that drivers do not swerve to avoid them. Trying to spare the animal’s life by shifting to the opposite lane entails the far greater danger of smashing into an oncoming car, it said.
That recommendation will be music to the ears of a variety of scavengers, including perhaps some humans. Two years ago poachers in England were leaving jam sandwiches in the roadways in order to lure deer into roadkill situations.
Link. Photo credit ADAC.
Several days after purchasing a highly venomous cobra, a German teenager discovered that it was no longer in its terrarium.
What followed was one of the lengthiest and most expensive pet-hunts Germany has seen in recent years. The walls, floor and ceiling of O’s attic apartment were dismantled and the two units on the ground floor below were also carefully searched. Flour was strewn on the floor in the hopes of collecting tracks. Strong, double-sided tape was installed to perhaps trap the cobra baby. The fire department even brought in mini-cameras to search the tightest and most inaccessible corners.
After the fire department removed and examined all the furniture, a construction company was called in to demolish the apartment. The house has now been sealed, and other renters in the building have been told they will need to live elsewhere for two months while the cobra (hopefully) starves. The cost of these interventions is well above €40,000; German authorities will apparently send the bills to the young snake enthusiast.
Link. Credit for photo of the redecorated apartment to ddp.
Many Americans know the V-2 rocket mainly as the beginning of the space program. That was Wernher von Braun’s dream from the beginning, but the Nazi war machine saw it as a very important weapon. During World War II, the rockets were built at a concentration camp called Dora, where prisoners were used for slave labor.
The system of exploiting slave labor to assemble missiles began in 1943. It expanded dramatically after the August 1943 bombings of Peenemünde by the British Royal Air Force. The widespread destruction led the Nazi leadership and the missile staff to move underground and use forced labor. The chosen site was a mine/fuel depot near the town of Nordhausen in Thüringen. Slave laborers from the Buchenwald concentration camp came to extend the tunnels for an underground V–2 factory called Mittelwerk. The new concentration camp outside the tunnels was code named Dora and was later renamed Mittelbau. More than 60,000 prisoners were interred at Dora. Some of them built 6000 V–2 rockets between August 1943 and April 1945. They experienced squalid housing, starvation diets, and draconian discipline with frequent executions.
Tens of thousands of prisoners died at Dora. Others were sent off to death camps as their usefulness faded. When the US Army liberated Dora in 1945, they found 750 workers and 3,000 corpses.
Following combat units were teams associated with various American intelligence groups intent on capturing German technology and experts. The US Army collected parts of 100 V–2s from the underground factory and, under a larger program best known as Paperclip, brought more than 125 German V–2 missile engineers, scientists and technicians to America. The Army interrogated them to determine their involvement in Nazi organizations and war crimes. However the Army wanted their expertise for the Cold War, so officers sometimes consciously overlooked or buried incriminating information.
Similarly, the US–led Dora war crimes trial at Dachau in 1947 led to no heightened American understanding, in large part because the US media had lost interest in such trials. The Dachau proceeding tried guards, kapos and the Mittelwerk general director, but its convictions narrowly focused on individual cruelty to prisoners. US Army Ordnance shielded its German missile engineers from public scrutiny by preventing Wernher von Braun, the leader of the group, from traveling to Germany to testify. Afterwards the Army classified the trial records as secret to guard information about Mittelwerk.
The story of slave labor at Dora accompanies a photographic exhibit at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The extensive website also includes many links to outside sources. Warning: some photographs may be disturbing. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Walter Frentz)
Is it luck or a curse that causes German speed skater Daniela Anschutz-Thoms to finish in fourth place? Not once, not twice, but fifteen times in the Olympics, the World Championships, and the European Championships. At each competition, medals are awarded to the top three only. It happened again in Vancouver.
Right up until the last lap, Germany’s unluckiest Olympian looked set to break the mold and grab silver in the women’s 3000 metre speed skating race.
But eventually the 35-year-old fell short, losing out on third place by just three hundredths of a second.
No matter how hard poor old Daniela tries, she just can’t escape fourth place.
Anschutz-Thoms will have one more chance at a medal, in the 5,000 meter race next week. Link -via Digg
Photo: Snorky [wikipedia]
In the coal stripmine Hambach in Germany, there was a machine so big that it boggles the mind.the Bagger 288:
This is the 45,000 ton Bagger 288 digger built by Krupps in Germany, and it is the largest land based machine built by humans on the face of the planet.
It’s not fast, moving at about 2 meters a minute, but boy can it shift rubble.
It can dig up 240,000 cubic meters of dirt a day. That’s about the same as a football field sized hole that’s 30 metres deep.
And why do you need a machine so absurdly big? So we can strip mine coal out of the ground, transport it hundreds of miles on massive trains and take it to power stations where we burn it to make electricity. And where does quite a chunk of this electricity go? Strangely back to the digger, as it requires 16.56 megawatts of electricity to operate. You’re not going to find a lot of solar panels on this leviathan.
Once it starts digging, it literally will not stop. Anything in its path will be chewed up, including this 60 ton bulldozer. How, I ask you, do you miss a 60 ton bulldozer?
But what is the true purpose of such a machine? Let’s all welcome our new digger overlord, as explained by Rathergood.
The oldest remains yet of a member of English royalty are thought to have been found in Germany. Queen Eadgyth (pronounced Edith) was the sister of King Athelstan and married the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I in 929 AD. She died in 946. The bone fragments from a lead coffin in Magdeburg will be analyzed by a team of forensic specialists.
Professor Mark Horton of the Bristol University’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, who is coordinating this side of the research, explained the strategy: “We know that Saxon royalty moved around quite a lot, and we hope to match the isotope results with known locations around Wessex and Mercia, where she could have spent her childhood. If we can prove this truly is Eadgyth, this will be one of the most exciting historical discoveries in recent years.”
Eadgyth is likely to be the oldest member of the English royal family whose remains have survived. Her brother, King Athelstan is generally considered to have been the first King of England after he unified the various Saxon and Celtic kingdoms following the battle of Brunanburgh in 937. His tomb survives in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, but is most likely empty. Eadgyth’s sister Adiva – also offered to Otto as wife, but he choose Eadgyth instead – was also married to an unknown European ruler, but her tomb is not located.
(image credit: Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, Juraj Liptak)
You’re familiar with historical re-enactment groups who get together to stage battles from history. Here’s one with a twist: a group of woman who portray the German Red Cross, or Deutches Rotes Kreuz (DRK) of World War II. Aachen Stadt I does not endorse the politics of the Nazi party; in fact they say right up front that they will not tolerate racist ideology. They participate in WWII battle re-enactments and attend educational events to tell about the role of the Red Cross. And they have a 2010 calendar for sale as well! Link -Thanks, Erin!
Life isn’t easy for a long-legged wading bird with only one leg, but this one got help to live a relatively normal life. A stork named Dietmar has become the world’s first stork with a prosthetic wooden leg. The stork is under the care of a bird sanctuary in Saxony, Germany. Medical specialists crafted a new limb after sanctuary workers raised a £1,000 to finance the venture.
“He gets on very well in the sanctuary with his new leg but he can’t live in the wild any more so he’s here with us for the rest of his days,” said keeper Rolf Arensberg.
