In 2011, a non-fiction book published in Great Britain by Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities led to interest in the English-speaking press.
[3] Near the end of the war, in 1945, the villa was occupied by increasingly large numbers of refugees and Margarethe Schmidt closed the school and moved to West Berlin.
In his essay, Müller reports that the dogs can reproduce a series of words aloud and use them meaningfully, but were limited by the structure of their vocal apparatus.
[4] Müller also mentions that Margarethe Schmidt had offered Adolf Hitler "to make herself and her dogs available for the purposes of Wehrmacht use" and had received an affirmative response from the Führer's office.
He expressed his hope that "according to the Führer's instructions, the members of the Wehrmacht will have the opportunity to convince themselves of the independent thinking of these animals and their direct and indirect ability to speak as part of the KdF (Strength Through Joy) program."
According to an article published in Psychology Today, the Rolf case proved influential in the acceptance and development of the Nazi talking dog program using Hundesprechschule Asra.
[13] In early 2011, Swedish-British author Jan Bondeson mentioned the Hundesprechschule Asra in his Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities as an example of Nazi experiments in animal-human communication.
"[8] In the chapter 'Some Canine Intellectuals,' he briefly mentions the Asra dog-speaking school, based on von den Berg's dissertation.
Bondeson also told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Hitler had recommended that senior SS officials take a look at the talking school and find out whether the communication techniques could be used for war.
'"[18] Bondeson told the German Süddeutsche Zeitung that Hitler had ordered the SS to investigate the possible military utility of the training, and the newspaper labeled a picture of a Munich telepathy experiment from the book as having been taken at Asra.
[20] As recently as 2019, a Russian-language website from Ukraine reported that at the school, experts had tried to give the animals a sense of poetry and fine literature; that there had been experiments on telepathic dog-human communication; and that Eva Braun's terrier had learned foreign languages there.
[21] Margarethe Schmidt's nephew and contemporary witnesses vehmently denied that Hundesprechschule Asra was sponsored by the Nazis, saying that if it had been, she would have been punished after the war.
[1][4] The performances were the only source of income for her and her mother, and although there were many committed party members in the town, Schmidt "complained over and over again about chicanery on the part of the authorities.
In a postcard dated May 3, 1943, Schmidt complained that she no longer received any food for her dogs because she did not pay taxes and was neither breeding her animals nor doing "scientifically notable" training."