The Lady from Zagreb (7 page)

T
he irony of being introduced to the audience at an international crime commission conference by a man who had not long finished murdering forty-five thousand people did not escape me, or indeed Nebe himself. Arthur Nebe, who was ex–political police, when such men had still existed, had never been much of a detective. He colored a little around the ears as he talked, a little, about the Murder Commission, almost as if he recognized that the commission of murder was something in which he was rather more expert. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who could have looked death in the face more often than Arthur Nebe. Not even Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. I still remembered something Nebe had told me back in Minsk, about experimenting with blowing people up in the search for a more efficient and “humane” method of mass killing. I wondered what some of the Swedes and Swiss in our audience would have said if they’d known anything of the crimes that were being committed by German police in Eastern Europe and Russia, even as we spoke. Would they have cared? Maybe not. You could never quite predict how people would react to the so-called Jewish question.

When he finished his introduction there was a ripple of polite applause and then it was my turn. The bare wooden floorboards creaked like an old leather coat as I walked on jelly legs to the lectern, although that might have been the sound of my nerves pulling at the muscles of my heart and lungs.

I’ve seen a few tough-looking crowds in my time but this was the toughest. At least five or six of them only had to raise a finger to have me face a firing squad before morning coffee was over. Galileo had an easier job with the Inquisition, trying to persuade them that the algebra in the Bible doesn’t add up to a month of Sundays. The audience at the Café Dalles on Neue Schönhauser Strasse used to throw chairs at the piano player when they were bored. And I once saw a tiger get a bit rough with a clown at the Busch Circus. Now, that was funny. But the faces I was looking at would have given Jack Dempsey pause for thought. Anita Berber was wont to piss on the customers when she decided that she didn’t like them, and much as I should like to have taken a leaf out of her book, I thought it best if I just read what was written on the pages I’d spread on the lectern in front of me, although a lot of what I said had been added onto my speech by Leo Gutterer and stuck in my throat like an S-hook from a burglar’s cigar box.

“Heil Hitler. Gentlemen, criminologists, distinguished foreign guests, colleagues, if the last ten years have proved anything at all it is that many of the frustrations the German police experienced under the Weimar Republic have diminished to the extent that they no longer exist. Street fights and the threat of communist insurrection that characterized the time before the election of a National Socialist government are a thing of the past. Police manpower has been increased, our equipment modernized, and, as a corollary, the institutions of state security are considerably more efficient.

“From a time when Germany, and Berlin in particular, was virtually run by criminal gangs and cursed by one ineffective government after another, a strong centralized, classless state now exists where factionalized politics ensured that only anarchy existed before. When the National Socialists came to power, one or two policemen such as myself remained mildly skeptical of the party and its intentions; but that was then. Things are very different now. A healthy respect for the law and its institutions are now the natural inheritance of every true German.”

As I spoke, Himmler—who moments earlier had removed his glasses to polish the lenses with a neatly folded handkerchief—smiled and put a mint in his mouth. He showed no signs of having remembered our first and only meeting, at Wewelsburg Castle, in November 1938, when he kicked me on the shin for being the bearer of some unwelcome news about one of his SS colleagues. Even wearing boots, it was not an experience I was keen to repeat. Meanwhile, Kaltenbrunner scowled and inspected his manicure; he had the look of a man who was already craving a drink. I put my head down, and pushed on.

“My name is Bernhard Gunther and I’ve been a Berlin policeman since 1920. For more than fifteen years I’ve been a member of Berlin’s Murder Commission, which as General Nebe has explained is a group of detectives assisted by experts such as a medical jurisprudent and a photographer. The cornerstone of the commission is the criminal commissars, several of whom are also German lawyers. Under each commissar is a staff of about eight men, who do all the work, of course. The commission is controlled by Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Ludtke, whom many of you will know. Anyone who wishes to discover more about the Berlin police and in particular its famous Murder Commission, should perhaps read a book called
Continental Crimes
by Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg—who was himself the director of Kripo until his death last year—and criminal director Otto Trettin. Writing about the stories that appear in this book, George Dilnot, the celebrated English crime reporter, said, ‘There is enough drama and excitement in these tales to satisfy the most voracious appetite.’”

(This was a lie, of course: the truth was that Dilnot hated the book, considering it clichéd and naïve. The book’s many failings were perhaps hardly surprising given that it had been subject to the censorship of the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda, and many of the more interesting cases the commission had investigated, including the Fritz Ulbrich case, were deemed to be too sensationalist for public consumption. But Dilnot, an Englishman, wasn’t exactly around to contradict me, or more accurately, Gutterer.)

“I’m afraid I can’t promise to provide much in the way of drama and excitement. The fact is that Liebermann von Sonnenberg or Otto Trettin would almost certainly do a better job of speaking to you, today; as would Commissioner Ludtke or Inspector Georg Heuser, who recently and cleverly apprehended Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer, here in Berlin. The fact is that, even by the blunt standards of this city, I’m a plain speaker. But I’ve always believed that a certain amount of straight talk comes with the job, so if you’ll forgive my lack of rhetorical flourish, I will do my best to describe one particular crime which, at the time I took over its investigation, had become a cold case and was generally symptomatic of the devastating lack of morale that affected the Berlin police under the previous government.

“Indeed, back in 1928, five years after the events I’m about to describe to you, the case was almost forgotten, and when it was assigned to me by the then Berlin police commissioner, Ernst Engelbrecht, at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, it was with the expectation that I would come up empty-handed. In truth, this case had almost become a means of putting arrogant young detectives like me firmly in their place, as more experienced policemen are wont to do. And the fact that I eventually apprehended the perpetrator owes as much to my own good luck as to any forensic judgment on my part. Luck is not something that should ever be discounted in a criminal investigation. Most detectives rely on good luck a lot more than they would have you believe—including Engelbrecht, who was something of a hero and a mentor to me. Engelbrecht once told me that a good detective has to believe in luck; he said that it’s the only explanation why criminals ever get away with anything.”

(My speech neglected to mention that Ernst Engelbrecht had been obliged to leave the Berlin police force because of some things he’d said about the SA in his nonfiction book,
In the Footsteps of Criminality
, published in 1931.)

“Beyond a few bare facts that appeared in the newspapers at the time, the full details of this case have never been made known to the public. So soon after the sensational case of Fritz Haarmann, the Düsseldorf Vampire, it was held by the government of the day that the details of the Gormann case were much too unpleasant and salacious to lay before the general public, although some might legitimately say that these murders were the inevitable corollary of carelessly liberal policies pursued by a whole series of ineffectual Weimar governments.

“Fritz Gormann worked as a bank clerk agent for the Dresdner Bank on Behrenstrasse. He was a quiet, unassuming sort of man who lived with his wife of fifteen years and three children in Berlin West. Highly thought of by his employers, and well paid to boot, he appeared to be a respectable member of the community and was a regular worshipper at his local Lutheran church. He was never late for work, he didn’t drink alcohol, he didn’t even smoke. There are detectives I know—myself included—who could not have measured up to the apparently high moral standard of Fritz Gormann.

“Gormann’s uncle was an amateur cinematographer and when he died in 1920, he left his nephew his film studio and camera equipment in Lichterfelde. Gormann knew nothing at all about filmmaking but he was interested enough to take some night classes in the craft, and before very long he was making short, silent films. Having cut his teeth filming and editing harmless little movies, Gormann now turned his attention to his real interest, which was making erotic films. To this end, in 1921, Gormann placed an advertisement in the
Berliner Morgenpost
inviting aspiring models to tea at the Café Palmenhaus on Hardenbergstrasse.

“His first applicant was Amalie Ziethen, aged twenty-five, recently arrived in Berlin from Cottbus; she had a good job at Treu and Nuglisch’s perfume shop on Werderstrasse and was considered an excellent employee. But like a lot of young women of her age, she entertained ambitions of becoming a film actress. Gormann appeared to be benign, even avuncular, and explained that studios like UFA-Babelsberg were looking for girls all the time but because the competition was so intense, it was necessary that she arrange her own screen test. He explained that this same screen test should attempt to answer as many questions as possible, including what a girl looked like naked and when she was enjoying ecstasy. Cleverly, he added that this was why he always met girls at the café, instead of at the studio, so they would feel no pressure and had time to properly think things over. Amalie didn’t really need to think twice about what Gormann was proposing. She’d wanted to be in pictures all her life and had already done some nude modeling for a couple of magazines, including the cover of a naked culture magazine called
Die Schönheit
.

“She and Gormann left the café in Gormann’s car and drove to Lichterfelde, where, after appearing in Gormann’s pornographic film, she was strangled with a length of electrician’s wire. The body was subsequently dumped in the Grunewald Forest, not very far north from where we are now. If this was all that had happened to poor Fräulein Ziethen that would have been bad enough. It was only much later on, after we had finally arrested Gormann, that a viewing of his film collection revealed just what agonies Amalie and several other girls had endured before Gormann took their lives. Suffice it to say that he was a modern Torquemada.

“As is typical of the lust murderer, with each girl the script was horribly the same; Gormann would film her in the studio at Lichterfelde until she had gone as far as her own sense of modesty allowed, at which point he would drug her and then subject her to a pedal-operated sex machine which he had manufactured especially for him in Dresden. Then he would torture the girl for some hours, before finally having sex with her, and it was during the very act of intercourse that finally he strangled her with a ligature made of Kuhlo wire. He even devised an ingenious clockwork device to enable him to crank the camera and which allowed him to appear in front of the lens so that he could film himself in the very act of committing murder—a device which he later patented and sold to a German movie company.

“At least nine girls disappeared in this way between 1921 and 1923, and their strangled bodies were found dumped in sites as far afield as Treptow and Falkensee. The Murder Commission knew that all the dead girls shared one thing in common: they were all strangled with Kuhlo wire, which was why at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, for a long time these murders were known as the Kuhlo killings.

“Several good detectives—Tegtmeyer, Ernst Gennat, Nasse, Trettin—all tried to solve the Kuhlo killings. Without putting too many details before the public, the Murder Commission sought to enlist the huge public interest there was in this case. On one celebrated occasion a couple of Berlin furniture shops—Gebruder-Bauer on Bellevuestrasse, and J. C. Pfaff on Kurfürstendamm—each donated a window where various exhibits from the murders could be displayed in the hope that a member of the public might recognize them: clothes, a length of curtain material one of the bodies had been wrapped in, the wire used to strangle the girls, and photographs of the places where the bodies had been found. But the displays caused huge crowds to collect in front of the windows and the police were obliged to intervene with the result that the shop owners requested that the articles be removed, as they were interfering with their businesses. Other appeals for information were no more successful. Detectives were even invited from Scotland Yard in England and from the Sûreté in Paris to help, all to no avail.

“Meanwhile the particular batch of wire used to strangle the girls was tracked down to UFA film studios, Babelsberg; this and the fact that two of the murdered girls had told friends they were going to meet a Rudolf Meinert for a casting session caused the Murder Commission to focus for a time on the film industry. In order to meet some of his victims, Gormann had used this name, knowing that there was a real Rudolf Meinert who was head of production at UFA. Meinert was in fact interviewed by detectives several times. As were other producers and directors at UFA film studios. After a while, anyone who had anything to do with German cinema was interviewed. Detectives even saw Gormann’s advertisement in the newspaper and spoke to him; but he seemed like no one’s idea of a suspect in a murder case. He was a church elder; a man who had won the Iron Cross and been wounded during the war; he even gave money to the Prussian Police Benevolent Fund.

“Gormann also showed detectives some of the movies he had made—innocuous casting films that were a million kilometers away from the kind of film he preferred to make; and he directed detectives to some of the girls he had filmed who testified to his kindness and generosity. Those girls he hadn’t strangled, that is. But what no one thought to check was Gormann’s relationship with the film studio; there was no relationship. As far as the studio was concerned, Gormann was just another supplicant in a long line of supplicants that were, more often than not, ignored.