HUNTERS are being hired to prevent a plague of raccoons with Nazi-era ancestry from munching their way through the German wine harvest.

“Raccoons wiped out almost the entire harvest in a matter of days,” Werner Kothe, who runs a small vineyard in Brandenburg, said. The small, bushy tailed animals invaded his attic, cellar and storage sheds.

The area most at risk is around Kassel, where raccoons are in easy striking distance of some of the best white wine harvests in Germany.

Kassel has been regarded as the raccoon capital of Europe ever since Baron Sittich Von Berlerpsch released two of the animals into the wild in February 1934. The move was encouraged by Hermann Goering, the Nazi leader who, apart from being the head of Hitler’s air force, was the chief forester of the Third Reich. The raccoons, known as wash-bears in Germany, were seen by Goering as an enrichment to German woodland.

The first raccoons were brought from North America in the 19th century. Their population grew by leaps and bounds when an Allied bomb hit a raccoon farm in 1945, releasing more into the wild. Since then they have thrived around Kassel, which claims to have a hundred for every square kilometre. The town has appointed a raccoon control inspector, and in outlying villages local residents are urged to tie chicken wire to their dustbins.

Raccoons eat almost anything and are very dextrous, capable of opening dustbins in search of food or turning on water taps. They are also known to raid birds’ nests. Their favourite haunt remains a cool cellar — hence the lure of vats full of grapes or apples being prepared to make wine.

A decision to hire bounty hunters was taken last year, resulting in a cull of 3,471 animals. This year the bounty, and the number of hunters, is to be increased.

Farmers regard the creatures as pests while biologists regard them as an interesting addition to the German landscape. As a result, some are being trapped and others are being tagged by scientists in the same stretch of woodland.

The reproduction rate is high. “They could soon be a presence across the country,” Ulf Hohmann, a wildlife biologist, said. Some studies estimate that there are already a million raccoons in Germany and that the European raccoon population stretches from the Netherlands to the Urals.

MISCHIEF-MAKERS IN A MASK

The name is derived from an Algonquin Indian word meaning “he scratches with his hands”

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