Shortly after midnight on the first day of , five paper lanterns floated over the Krefeld Zoo, in western Germany. The lanterns drifted from a nearby neighborhood, where three women had lit their wicks and watched them lift into the stars. In the morning, the police recovered four lanterns from the trees around the ape house.
They believed that the fifth landed on the roof. Dressen and his wife were ringing in the New Year with old friends in a city called Bielefeld when he received a call, at around half past twelve, from a keeper living at the zoo.
The keeper said that the ape house was in flames. Bielefeld is around a hundred and twenty miles from Krefeld, and the Dressens left immediately for home. While his wife drove, Dressen watched videos of the fire on social media. Flames engulfed the roof of the ape house.
The smoke was blacker than the sky. Some of the younger apes, such as a chimpanzee named Limbo, had been born at Krefeld, whereas the oldest, like Massa, a forty-eight-year-old silverback, had lived at the zoo longer than Dressen or any of his staff had worked there. The zoo is near homes that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had designed for industrialists nearly a century ago.
It was four-thirty in the morning when Dressen arrived. He passed through a perimeter of armed police officers, which had formed around the ape house in case any panicked animals suddenly escaped through a collapsed wall or window.
