An early Rex-type cat from Germany was
Kater Munk, a cat of the family of one Erna Schneider, that was born 1930 or 1931 in a village near then-
Königsberg,
German Reich (today's Kaliningrad,
Russia).
Munk was the son of a mahogany
Angora cat and a
Russian Blue. There were one (some sources say two) other curly cat(s) in the litter which was castrated early.
Munk spread his genes plentifully among the village's cat population till his death in 1944 or 1945. The Schneiders valued the strong tom with a penchant for catching fish from the family's garden pond for himself, not for his curly coat; he was, it seems, referred to colloquially as a
Preußig Rex ("Prussian Rex", in local dialect). German Rex researchers do not consider Kater Munk to be related to the German Rex breed and state that he was never bred.
Munk (left) and
Lämmchen (right) --> In the summer of 1951, a doctor in
Berlin-Buch (
Pankow borough), Rose Scheuer-Karpin, noticed a black curly-coated cat in the
Hufelandklinik hospital garden. The clinic's personnel told her that they had known the cat since 1947. The doctor named the cat
Lämmchen (
German for "little lamb"). Her supposition that she must be the result of a mutation, was shown to be correct. Thus
Lämmchen was the first breeder-owned Rex-type cat and the maternal ancestor of all current German Rex cats. The first two German Rex deliberately bred were two Rex kittens from a 1957 litter of four, offspring of
Lämmchen and the straight-coated son
Fridolin she had with a stray black tom
Blackie adopted by Scheuer-Karpin.
Lämmchen died on December 19, 1964, or in 1967, indicating she had been very young when first sighted in 1947. She left a number of Rex and
crossbred descendants - the last one of her offspring was born in 1962 - most of which were used to improve other breeds such as the
Cornish Rex which was suffering from skin problems due to being descended from genetically impoverished thoroughbred stock. In 1968, the lineage hinged on the efforts of the
GDR cattery
vom Grund who acquired the last 3 Rex offspring of
Lämmchen not sold abroad, and amplified the lineage with
European Shorthair and mixed-breeds. A stock was established in the West through the efforts of the
FRG von Zeitz cattery in 1973 which in the previous year had acquired their sample of the allele with the white female
crossbred Silke vom Grund. After some years, the breed slowly became more plentiful. Another Rex cat turned up in Berlin-Buch, apparently in the late 1950s. The tom named
Schnurzel eventually contributed to German Rex breeding; it is not known how he related to
Lämmchen but presumably he was a grandson of hers, as Scheuer-Karpin would let her cats roam free through the gardens and forests of Buch. Even in more recent times, the genetic legacy of
Lämmchen if not
Munk manifests itself on occasion in the Berlin area, such as
Pumina, found as a stray inage of
Preuss from Siegburg which turned up in 1979 in the
Rhineland town of
Siegburg does not appear to be related to be a German Rex proper; it is almost certainly not related to
Lämmchen. Nonetheless, his descendants may have contributed to the German Rex lineage of today. == Genetics ==