The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2

by Orlando Pearson

  “You make yourself very clear. Please continue.”

  “In the late evening of 14 January, the leader of the SA in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin, a Mr Horst Wessel, answered a knock on the door of his flat. When he opened the door, he was shot in the face by an unknown assailant. He lies wounded in a Berlin hospital and his life is feared for.”

  “I appreciate that this is a very serious matter, Sir Horace,” said Holmes, “but is this not something for the local administration to deal with? Is this really a matter that the German Foreign Office, the British Embassy or I need to become involved in?”

  Dr Schmidt broke in:

  “Perhaps I may be allowed to interject briefly, Mr Holmes. There are strong rumours circulating around Berlin that the shooting of Herr Wessel was carried out by the Communists and that our government is unwilling or unable to investigate it. Herr Wessel has a particular following in National Socialist circles, not just because he is the leader of the storm troopers in his district of Berlin, but also because he penned the Party’s song - known by its first line ‘Die Fahne hoch!’ or ‘The flag on high!’ Furthermore, the local party leader or Gauleiter of the Berlin NSDAP is a Dr Joseph Göbbels. He is making great propaganda against the State for its failure to apprehend Wessel’s assailant. We accordingly need an investigator of unimpeachable impartiality and superlative forensic abilities to conduct the case, not to mention ...” - and here Dr Schmidt gave a little bow in my direction - “someone to record the investigation whose word is widely trusted. We are also aware from Dr Watson’s writings that Mr Holmes speaks fluent German.”

  “Pray continue.”

  “I therefore took it upon myself,” said Dr Schmidt, “to approach our foreign minister, Dr Julius Curtius, with your name, Herr Holmes, and that of Dr Watson. Dr Curtius in turn held discussions with the Interior Ministry as to the best way to make an approach to you. It was felt, such is the tension in Germany over the events we are discussing, that it was unwise for anyone from our Interior Ministry to leave the country, since the government did not wish to give the signal that it is not in control of events. I was selected because I am from Berlin and am known in British circles - in particular, by Sir Horace from my interpretation works - and because my departure overseas is not likely to excite comment as I frequently need to travel abroad for my work. As Europe’s foremost detective, we urgently need you and Dr Watson to come to Berlin so that the government can be seen to have spared no effort to hunt down Wessel’s attacker.”

  I could see at once that this commission greatly appealed to my friend and I have always assented when he has done me the honour of involving me with his cases. Consequently, we were on the boat train to Dover by the end of the day and by the end of the next day we were in the Athlon Hotel by the Brandenburg Gate.

  Herr Schmidt had travelled back to Germany on the train before ours, but he was waiting for us in the foyer of our hotel when we arrived.

  We sat over our pipes with him for an hour while he painted a grim picture of Berlin for us.

  “Berlin has a population of four and a half million people and the inevitable problems of a conurbation of that size. These problems are exacerbated by the German State’s obligation to pay heavy reparations for its defeat in the recent war between our nations. This means that the number of impoverished and desperate people is very high and that the city has locales where the rule of law has largely ceased to apply. Instead, there are some districts where the Communists dominate and others where the Nationalist Socialists dominate. The tensions between these extreme groups run high, often leading to skirmishes on the streets and occasionally worse. Poverty is so extreme that accommodation is both scarce and expensive while prostitution and hunger are widespread. At some point there will need to be a reduction in the demand for reparations, but until such time there seems no end to the problems we face.”

  Schmidt seemed anxious to continue with his exposition of Germany’s problems, but Holmes broke in.

  “What can you tell us about the attack on Herr Wessel?”

  “I have arranged for you to meet the Head of the Berlin Police first thing tomorrow and he will, I assume, give you all the details he has and take you to the scene of the crime. Our Interior Ministry has given me some briefing notes about Herr Wessel’s background. He is twenty-three years of age and comes from a middle-class family. His father was a Protestant pastor and he matriculated from school at the age of eighteen. He started to study law at the University, but soon ran out of money and took up work as a taxi driver and as a labourer on the Berlin Underground construction project. He joined the NSDAP in 1926 and is in charge of a storm trooper militia which behaves in a highly provocative manner in Berlin’s Friedrichshain district which is otherwise largely under the control of the Communists. Wessel leads SA marches through the district to show off the bravery and toughness of his troops. Last year he published his poem ‘The flag on high’ in the party magazine, Der Angriff or ‘The Assault’ and this has increased his prominence in the party.”

  “It is certainly a strange development in life for the son of a pastor and a would-be lawyer.”

  “In Dr Watson’s story ‘The Empty House’, Mr Holmes, he quotes you as suggesting that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors. You further posit that a sudden turn, such as that which changed Colonel Moran from an honourable soldier into a murderer, represents some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree.”

  “As I recall,” said Holmes soberly after a brief pause for thought while he reflected on a remark he had made over thirty years previously, “I made a point of not insisting on my theory at the time. In retrospect, I would now wish to avoid any suggestion that our actions are the result of the development of our ancestors rather than being our own responsibility. It is undoubtedly also true that the prolonged beggaring of a land can have as profound an influence on the characters of those that dwell in it as any hereditary deformity.”

  The next morning Herr Schmidt called on us again and we went to meet the Head of the Berlin Police, Reichspolizeipresident Herbert Knie, who was a tall thin man with close-cropped wiry hair and a lantern jaw. Although Knie spoke no English, Herr Schmidt’s linguistic and interpretation skills made communication a simple matter.

  “Wessel lived in a small flat in the Groβe Frankfurterstraβe. He shared it with his girlfriend, Erna Jänicke,” said Knie. “At about ten o’clock in the evening last Friday, there was a knock at the door and Wessel answered it. When he opened the door, the caller shot him in the face. Wessel’s girlfriend ran to the nearest police station about 500 meters away and a detachment of my men bearing a stretcher went to pick up Wessel and take him to hospital.”

  “And how customary would it have been for Wessel to receive a call so late at night?” asked Holmes.

  “As head of a militia, I would have thought that this would not have been an infrequent occurrence,” said Knie.

  “Did you confirm this with his girlfriend?”

  “We have not interviewed his girlfriend.”

  “Can you tell me anything about his girlfriend?”

  “No, Mr Holmes, we cannot tell you anything about her other than her name, which was taken when she arrived at the police station to report the shooting.”

  “What about the SA or local party officials. Have they been able to throw any light on who might have been responsible for the attack?”

  “It is not our practice to have contact with such unofficial bodies. The NSDAP and its militia group, the SA, have only recently ceased to be banned organisations and we are as circumspect about what dealings we have with them as we are about having dealings with the Communist Party.”

  “So what investigative steps have you taken?”

  “We took Wessel to hospital, where we are waiting to speak to him as soon as his health permit
s.”

  “And whom have you interviewed at the house?”

  “Mr Holmes,” said Knie, becoming heated. “You seem not to understand the restrictions that the police operate under here in Berlin. Friedrichshain is largely controlled by the sorts of militia of which Wessel was the head. In some districts it is the Communists who hold the whip hand and in others it is the NSDAP. The police have to be most cautious about what cases they pursue and how they prosecute them.”

  “So in other words,” said Holmes, as he rose in a decided manner from his chair, “you have done nothing to investigate this case and have no real intention of doing so. Knie, either your head or your heart should be used as an ornament for all the use you make of either of them.”

  We retired to the Athlon Hotel with Schmidt.

  “Well, perhaps it won’t be so difficult to investigate this case after all,” said Holmes with his usual resourcefulness, as he, Schmidt and I sat smoking our pipes after a modest lunch. “We are already in February and it is most unlikely that any rental payment will have been paid to Wessel’s landlord for this month. Watson and I are far too old to be looking for accommodation in a tenement, but you, Schmidt, are barely thirty and could present yourself as a minor government functionary looking for lodgings. I could be presented as an aged relative who is paying your deposit and wants to see where you are going to live. I think, with my German accent, you will have to introduce me as your Dutch uncle.”

  “And what do you wish me to do?” I asked.

  “I am afraid, Watson, that Dr Schmidt and I will need to handle this one on our own. Perhaps you could form an impression of Berlin while Dr Schmidt and I are absent.”

  It was hard to argue with Holmes on his suggestion and I spent the rest of the daylight hours of that Saturday afternoon walking around a dreary Berlin. I had no particular purpose in my perambulations and my walk was only enlivened by the regular sight of columns of militia men, some in military-style uniform, some in civilian dress, parading menacingly down the thoroughfares, completely unhindered by any attempt on the part of the authorities to stop them. I was shocked to see militia members occasionally break out of their columns to jostle passers-by as they went about their business. The brown-shirts were often singing lustily as they went and I could make out the words of Wessel’s song: “Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen, SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt,” which translated as “The flag on high! The ranks closed tightly, the SA marches with a quiet determined tread”.

  I returned to the hotel in the early evening with a mounting feeling of foreboding to find Holmes and Schmidt waiting for me. Holmes was in excellent spirits:

  “I would not have missed this case for the world. Schmidt here took on the persona of a low-grade civil servant and we called on Herr Wessel’s flat. His property was rented from a Frau Salm. She was stumping down the stairs to the street at the house in the Groβe Frankfurterstraβe on the way to place an advertisement for a new tenant when we met her. Schmidt told her that he had heard she had accommodation free and she took us up to see the flat.”

  Holmes’s had lit a cigar, something he only did when he had pulled off a particularly daring coup, and as he spoke the tip glowed red. I will tell this episode as he recounted it:

  My experience of dealing with people who have had a genuine shock is to pretend you know nothing about it as they are then all the more anxious to talk to you about they have been through. Accordingly, I had briefed Schmidt to act as though he knew nothing of any issues while I blandly asked Frau Salm how the flat had become free. She was strikingly very reluctant to speak.

  Eventually she said “My former lodger and his girlfriend were always getting behind with their rent. I’ve never been sure what she does.” She cast a baleful look in the direction of a girl whom I took to be Erna Jänicke, who sat with her back to us hunched over the table. “And Wessel, my tenant, was forever going out on his silly parades with his friends. I’d had discussions with him before about it and was going to ask them to leave.”

  “And has he now gone?” I asked ingenuously.

  Frau Salm gave me a suspicious look and hesitated before speaking. Eventually she said “He was shot in January. I heard the shot in the stairwell. He’s in hospital and his life is in danger. A clean house, we always had here. Never any trouble.”

  “Do you know who may have shot your former lodger?” I probed.

  “There’s always trouble in the street with these gangs. My husband would have known what to do. I’m at my wit’s end. I’m a poor widow and have no rent coming in with all these things going on. My lodger’s girlfriend here ...” - again a withering glance at the back of the young girl who had briefly turned her bloodshot eyes towards us - “seems incapable of working at whatever she does for a living at present. Against my better judgement I have let her off the rent for this month but she will have to look for somewhere else by March unless she can somehow come up with the money for the rent.”

  “Is that a picture of your husband?” I asked, looking at a black-framed picture of a uniformed man hanging above the mantelpiece.

  “That was him when he came back from the war.”

  “I see he was decorated.” I pointed at a red insignia on his uniform.

  “You have an eye for spotting detail, sir, but as a Dutchman you would not know the military decorations of the German Imperial army. What you are pointing at is not a decoration for his services at the front. That’s the Communist Party badge he sewed onto his uniform on the day of his return at the end of the war. The Communists get over ten per cent in elections and much more in Berlin and their performance here was largely down to him. He was always organising meetings and knocking up potential voters.”

  “So how long have you been widowed for?”

  “My husband passed away two years ago.”

  “Life can’t be easy.”

  “It’s not sir, but the Party still remembers me and someone comes by most weeks to see that I’m getting on all right.”

  “Would anyone from the Party be able to throw any light on the attack?” I asked as casually as I could. I could see, as soon as I asked this, that I had overplayed my hand.

  Frau Salm gave me a searching look before she said “The parties seem to know everything in this country. And the authorities seem to want to know everything although they are not much good at finding it out. But I don’t know what any of this has got to do with a visiting Dutchman looking to pay a rent deposit for his civil servant nephew.”

  We made our excuses and left. The Communist Party’s headquarters in Berlin is in the Karl Liebknecht Haus, named after the revolutionary who staged a coup in Berlin in 1919. It is near the Alexanderplatz and this was but a small distance away from the Alte Frankfurterstraβe. Anyone reading your books, Watson, will conclude that my card will get me a hearing anywhere. There are many places where the opposite is the case, but it is certainly true that it worked with the Communist Party. I was soon in front of its leader, Herr Thälmann. He is a bald, burly man and was immensely flattered when I noted from his calloused hands that he was a man used to manual labour as soon as Schmidt and I were ushered into his office.

  “We hear of your reputation, Herr Holmes,” he said, “but it is good to have your confirmation of my roots as a manual worker.”

  Given the nature of the crime and the need to solve the case as quickly as possible, I saw no reason to be anything other than direct. I asked Thälmann whether the Communist Party knew anything about Wessel’s shooting. He was very defensive.

  “The Communist Party,” he said, “has already emphatically denied having anything to do with the attack on Wessel. We are a serious political party. Of course we knew who Wessel was and where he lived, but we had bigger fish to fry than to try and kill him. We are likely to have an election again soon and we are concentrating on being ready for that.
”

  “Is anyone from the Party looking after Wessel’s landlady, Frau Salm?” I asked. “She has no income while her flat is unrented and the events must have come as a terrible shock to her. I know her deceased husband was a KPD member.”

  Thälmann consulted with a party worker. “We had a lad called Ali Höhler who used to visit her after the death of her husband,” he finally said. “He lives in the Mulackstraβe.”

  When we got to the Mulackstraβe, we used the same device of Schmidt acting as a would-be tenant to see Höhler’s landlady. She was unsurprised to receive a visit from a potential lodger as her current tenant had disappeared in mid-January and so was already late with the rent for February.

  “Accommodation is so short, word quickly gets around when there’s a vacancy,” she said.

  “Do you know where your tenant has gone?” I asked.

  “There’s permanent chaos in Berlin, sir,” she said. “If it’s not some new racket, then it’s a shooting like in the Groβe Frankfurterstraβe the other day. You’ve probably heard about it. A bad business. Things aren’t what they were when the Kaiser was in charge. Everyone knew their place then and we had some order. My tenant - he disappeared from one day to the next. He was always hanging around with dodgy people and I never knew what he was up to.”

  This was the conclusion of Holmes’s narrative and he sat back in his chair, tipped back his head and blew triumphant columns of smoke into the air.

  “So what are to be your next steps?” I asked.