History of the Doberman Pinscher
Karl Dobermann
Father of the Doberman Pinscher
The Doberman Pinscher is a relatively new breed, not even 150 years old. It was created by man for man’s purposes of protection and companionship. In the late end of the 18th century in a town called Apolda in the province of Thueringia in East Germany, lived a man named Karl Fredrich Louis Dobermann (1834-94), after whom the Doberman was eventually named. Only a few breeds, such as the Jack Russell Terrier, Cavalier King, Charles Spaniel, Gordon Setter, Saint Bernard, and the Keeshand, have been named after a person.
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Doberman Gene Pool
What Breeds the Made Doberman Pinscher ?
So which breeds of dog went into the original Doberman of Dobermann’s? We don’t know. Dobermann kept no records and his breeding was haphazard, based more on his experienced intuition than any planned calculation. He was also uninterested in uniform confirmation. What we do know about Dobermann’s first Dobermans are some of their names; we also have a few surviving pictures and descriptions from those close to Dobermann as well as speculations from experts of the time.
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Dobermann's Dog
The first Doberman Pinschers
A German dog magazine, after Dobermann’s death, reported that in 1860 he had purchased dogs from Christian Dietsch, a butcher from Schoeten and gravel pit owner in Apolda. Dietsch breed a blue-grey female Pinscher to a black butcher’s dog which produced offspring ideal for guard duties. Doberman crossed some of these to a black and tan German Pinscher.
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Dobermann’s successors
Dobermans after Karl Dobermann
After Karl Dobermann, the two men responsible for establishing the Doberman breed were Otto Goeller (1852-1922) of Thueringin Kennel and Goswin Tischler (1859-1939) of Groenland Kennel.
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Doberman Crosses
Further Refinement of the Doberman Pinscher
Before the Doberman breed was formalized, there where many stud books and they were not particularly well kept. In 1908 a black female appeared in the books. Her name was Stella and she was whelped in Ried of the province of Hessia in Germany. Stella was the product of a black English Greyhound sire and a black Doberman dam. She then went on in 1910 to produce two prominent offspring, a red male named Roland vd Haide and Sybille v Langen, a black female. Sybille had the look of a Greyhound with
the lacking underjaw.
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World War I
Doberman Advancement Held Up
The onset of WWI, in 1914, put a temporary hold on Doberman production. For military dogs, it was time to go to war. Germany had established in 1884 the first organized Military School for training war dogs at Lechernich, near Berlin, and in 1885 wrote the very first training manual for Military War Dogs.
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