The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 2

by Orlando Pearson

  “I am sure that Knie is better placed to investigate a missing person than we are. Höhler may be lying low here in Germany and one of his associates will know where he is, or he will have fled the country and it is likely that his identity will have been recorded at a border crossing. In either case there will be a trail to follow and it is far easier for the authorities to hunt him down than it is for me.”

  A second appointment was arranged with Knie.

  “It’s no wonder I can’t get results like you, Mr Holmes,” he said somewhat ruefully to us through Schmidt when Holmes had explained the results of his investigations. “I wouldn’t ask my men to go to the tenements in the Alte Frankfurterstraβe unless they were in teams of four or more and no one would talk to them if they tried to conduct an investigation. And as for going to the headquarters of the Communist Party ...” His voice trailed off in awe at Holmes’s audacity.

  “And so how are you going to pursue this lead?” asked Holmes.

  The words hung in the air.

  It was a couple of seconds before I realised that Knie had no intention of doing anything at all.

  Schmidt leant forward and said “I think the authorities would expect some activity from the police when they have gone to the trouble of bringing Mr Holmes and Dr Watson here, and when Mr Holmes has identified such an obvious suspect. It would indeed be unfortunate if the public became aware that the police had a clear line of inquiry but failed to make any attempt to follow it. As you are Head of the Police here in Berlin, people might put the blame on you personally.”

  Knie looked taken aback at Schmidt’s words but, as it turned out, he was perfectly competent at investigating a case when he had no choice but to do so.

  Höhler was tracked down and arrested within a couple of days. He had been lying low with one Karl Godowski, who was, perhaps inevitably, a fellow Communist Party member. Holmes and I had stayed in Berlin at Rumbold’s request and Knie asked us to the police headquarters to observe the interrogation of Höhler.

  When we arrived at the station, Knie spoke to us through Dr Schmidt, who had also come with us to facilitate the drafting of my report. Sweating visibly and exuding unease, Knie confided “We will find two additional people waiting for us outside the interrogation room. One is Herr Thälmann of the Communists, whom you already know, and the other is Dr Joseph Göbbels, who is the NSDAP party leader or Gauleiter in Berlin. Both insisted on being here and I will have to find a way of dealing with this case so that neither of them use this matter as a reason to create further mayhem on the streets. I was wondering, Mr Holmes, if you could speak to them and make them see that further unrest is in no one’s interest?”

  I could see Holmes’s look of surprise at this commission which was quite unlike anything he had been asked to fulfil before, but Knie turned on his heel before my friend had a chance to respond. After a pause, Holmes followed him, with Schmidt and me right behind. We walked down a long corridor. At the end I could see two men standing with a police official. One matched the description Holmes had given of Thälmann while the other I took to be Göbbels. Even from the end of the corridor I could see that the dark, rake-like Göbbels had a problem with his gait. My medical eye enabled me to see that his right foot turned permanently inwards, which made it difficult for him to stand straight. As we approached, we could hear him berating the official so loudly that Schmidt was able to translate what he was saying even though we were still some distance away:

  “He is saying that the one good thing about the Weimar Republic is that it has preserved the death penalty for attempted murder and he can see no reason why this should not apply in the current case,” whispered Schmidt into my ear.

  The detail that I recall with piercing immediacy when I came up close to Göbbels, however, were his eyes, which glowed dementedly out of their orbits. Barely troubling with the normal courtesies, Göbbels fulminated at Holmes, Schmidt and me about the delay in identifying and apprehending a suspect.

  “Why are the authorities so reluctant to investigate a case when one of our people is attacked? We need to press charges to the fullest extent possible under the law. My party will push for the maximum terms.”

  We went into the interrogation room and sat down. Schmidt continued to translate for my benefit.

  Höhler, a thick-set young man with tattoos visible at the wrist even though he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, was brought in and sat down. His hands were cuffed and he put them on the table in front of him. At the other side of the table sat Holmes and Knie while Göbbels and Thälmann set at either end. Schmidt and I sat behind Knie so that we had a good view of Höhler and Göbbels.

  “Tell us,” Knie asked Höhler, “about the events of the evening of 17 January.”

  Höhler looked at Thälmann before he answered. “I had a few scores to sort out with Horst Wessel,” he said. “He was the leader of the local gang of Nazi thugs who led marches through my patch. And he had a girl who had previously worked for me, if you see what I mean. Some of the clients she had I know. Some walk with a quiet determined tread and some are, perhaps, a bit more unstable in one way or the other.”

  To my surprise, he smiled conspiratorially in the direction of Göbbels and between his fore and middle fingers of his right hand, which faced towards Göbbels, I could suddenly see the tip of his thumb which vanished and then re-appeared before vanishing again. Göbbels gave a little start at this gesture and thereafter sat on the edge of his seat with visible unease.

  “And he hadn’t paid his rent to the widow of a party member,” continued Höhler, sitting up straight and looking at Knie. “I wanted to give him a scare and I was going to use a Luger to do so.”

  “Did you plan to do this on your own, or did you act with others?” asked Knie.

  This time Höhler looked at Thälmann and then back at us before he said, “Some of my comrades came to keep guard outside the building.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I rang the bell at the street door and went up to the flat on the second floor. I had my gun with me.”

  “And?”

  “I expected Frau Salm to open the door but instead it was Wessel himself. As soon as he saw who I was, he reached into his pocket and I thought he was going to pull his gun on me. I fired first to warn him off and my shot hit him on the jaw. He went straight down onto the floor and I ran for it.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” said Knie, looking at Thälmann and Göbbels in turn. “This is what comes of having party militias operating in Berlin. We have had a succession of shootings where the police have been unable to find the criminal and now we have this.”

  “It has nothing to do with the Communist Party, as we have already said,” said Thälmann defensively. “Höhler was acting entirely on his own initiative and so were the people who went with him. Put him on trial if you wish. My party will provide him and his accomplices with a lawyer in such an event, but it is clear that the motives behind this shooting were not political. The fact that Höhler acted with other party members is irrelevant as it was clearly private matters he was trying to resolve.”

  Höhler was taken out and Knie turned to Göbbels, who had suddenly recovered his composure now that the prisoner was no longer in our presence.

  “Herr Doktor Göbbels,” said Knie with the whining air of someone asking a favour with no expectation of it being granted, “Mr Holmes has come over from London and has been of great assistance in helping to track down the attacker of your fellow party-member. He would like to put the case to you for a measured reaction to the events before us.”

  Before Holmes had a chance to speak, however, Göbbels broke in. My reader may at this point expect, as I did, a vituperative response from the man who within three years was to be Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich. Instead when he spoke, his voice was entirely reasonable in tone:

  “I would fir
st of all like to point out the tragedy of a man not yet out of his twenties, whom I know well and esteem highly, lying in a hospital bed with a bullet wound to the face. Wessel is a hero of our party and a hero for the workers of Germany. He is a man who gets things done. He can organise and he can inspire others through his deeds as head of his division of the SA and through the power of the words of his song. The police process must take its due course. We do not want any more bloodshed on our streets. I have no desire to make political capital out of this.”

  Holmes raised an eye brow at this statement, but before he could speak, Knie broke in, almost falling over his own words in his relief at what Göbbels had said.

  “I am very pleased,” he stuttered, “to hear the reasoned responses of both the Communist Party and the NSDAP. We will see what we can do to minimise the political storm over this tragedy. We will find a solution that is acceptable to all parties. We will raise a charge of grievous bodily harm rather than the attempted murder charge which might otherwise be justified, and which might have resulted in a capital trial. The confession we have already had from Herr Höhler here will help to minimise any sentence.”

  I had expected Göbbels to argue for the weightier charge, but he acceded to Knie’s proposal without demur.

  Holmes subsequently briefed Sir Horace Rumbold of the above discussions and I assumed that after we had done this we would return to London after this with our mission complete.

  Rumbold expressed his own considerable surprise at the statesmanlike nature of Göbbels’s statements. “My observation of the National Socialist,” he opined firmly, “is that he starts with the assumption that man is a fighting animal and that the nation is a community of fighters. A country or race, according to this assumption, which ceases to fight, is doomed. Accordingly, it is misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity in the foreseeable future. I have the firm impression that the persons directing the policies of the NSDAP are not normal. This can, I fear, only end in one way. I have the greatest foreboding about how matters will turn out in both the short term and the long term and cannot regard Dr Göbbels’s statement as anything other than a manoeuvre rather than as an expression of goodwill.”

  After these remarks it was perhaps not unexpected that the Ambassador asked Holmes and me to stay on in Germany to watch developments. Thus we were still in Berlin on 23 February when the Horst Wessel affair took on an even more tragic turn: Wessel’s death from blood poisoning was announced. Höhler had already been brought before the court on the charge of grievous bodily harm which Knie had suggested. With the death of Wessel, the police changed the charge to manslaughter. Holmes and I were present when this decision was announced to Thälmann and Göbbels. The latter, to Knie’s highly visible relief, reaffirmed his wish to avoid further bloodshed and accepted the police decision, although he did say he would express his misgivings about it at Wessel’s funeral. Knie accepted this offer without, I suspect, realising how the freedom he had given Göbbels might be used.

  Holmes and I attended the funeral in the company of Schmidt on 1 March. Given the amount of attention that Wessel’s shooting and subsequent death had attracted, I had expected the funeral to be well attended, but nothing quite prepared me for the spectacle that met our eyes.

  First, Wessel’s flag-draped coffin was paraded through Berlin on its way to the St.-Marien und St.-Nikolai Cemetery in a long procession. Provocatively, the route of the cortege went past the Karl Liebknecht Haus and scuffles broke out between the SA men and Communist militias as it did so. In spite of pouring rain, rank upon rank of brown-shirted youths filled the cemetery and numberless wreaths bearing ribbons decorated with the hooked-cross symbol of the National Socialist Party were laid out around the grave. There had been rumours that the NSDAP leader, Herr Hitler, was going to attend the service, but instead it was Göbbels who spoke.

  His speech started on the dignified note which had characterised the comments that he made at the police station, but once he had made these measured remarks, the tone changed dramatically. I quote the key sections of his speech below in a translation given to me by Schmidt. I can assure my reader that the delivery of this speech was every bit as electrifying as its content was incendiary:

  “Horst Wessel lived for the Revolution just as he died for the Revolution and I know that the ranks of brown-shirted heroes I see massed before me are willing to do the same. They will, to a man, be proud to rally to the standard of our martyr, Horst Wessel. That our rotten State will not defend us from attack from Communists nor take the necessary measures against them does not surprise us but nor will it cause us to fear.”

  There were shouts from the crowd and Göbbels waited for the noise to die down.

  “There are many who say,” he continued, “that ordinary people cannot grasp big ideas. That the masses cannot deal with weighty concepts. But the masses who have turned out this afternoon show that that is a calumny. We are pursuing the biggest idea of all. We are pursuing the self-realisation of a people while our enemies are pursuing the evils of Bolshevism and international Jewry. Let Horst Wessel be our role model. A fighter to the end against Communism, as he lay wounded from an unprovoked attack from a gun wielded by a Communist, he refused to accept treatment from a Jewish doctor. That is the spirit that informs our movement.”

  There were loud cheers from the crowd and Göbbels went on.

  “And so to you, my fellow National Socialists, I ask you this afternoon, do you want total struggle?”

  There were shouts from the crowd of “We do! We do!”

  “Do you want that total struggle to be waged for longer, with more determination and more totally than we can at present conceive?”

  More shouts from the crowd: “We do! We do!”

  “Then I say to you this: Our struggle is a struggle for the future of this Continent on which we find ourselves surrounded by our enemies. To the West are assembled decadent powers that range in their attitude towards us from barely concealed contempt to outright hostility as they seek to make us a nation of paupers. To our East we are menaced by the Slavic hordes of the Steppes and only the Germans are capable of stemming their flood. If we do not stop them, then two thousand years of civilisation are in peril. Let Horst Wessel’s fanatical will be our inspiration!”

  More shouts from the crowd.

  “And therefore I say to you, from now let the people’s watchword be: “Arise - and let the tempest rage!”

  The crowd cheered wildly before a dozen burly, brown-shirted youths stepped forward and fired shots into the air as the coffin was lowered into the grave.

  Holmes went white at the menace of this spectacle and at a nod from him, the three of us headed for the cemetery gate. We arrived there at the same time as Göbbels, who broke off from an earnest conversation he was having with some brown-shirted party officials to come over and say a few words to us. Schmidt translated for me:

  “Dr Göbbels said ‘If I had told them to jump out of a tenth floor window, they would have done so.’”

  Once back at the hotel, Holmes, Schmidt and I sat in silence in the foyer. Our trance was broken only when a parade of brown-shirts marched past singing “The flag on high, we stride in tight formation, the SA march with a quiet determined tread. And in our ranks marching on beside us, is the spirit of the great Wessel, our leader dead.”

  “What is your government going to do about this, Schmidt?” asked Holmes, breaking the prolonged silence that had continued to envelop us long after the SA had marched out of earshot.

  “What is there to do, Herr Holmes? You have seen the face of the National Socialists. The second verse of that song tells of people flocking to the swastika in their millions. And they are. And those that don’t flock to the swastika, flock to the Communists instead, who are thugs as well. I am not even sure if the National Socialist movement is not the less bad option.” He shrugged.


  Another deafening silence ensued which was only broken when another platoon of men marched past singing lustily.

  “How would the British handle this?” asked Schmidt at length.

  Holmes thought for a long time before he answered.

  “Dear Schmidt, in Britain, we have a long tradition of free speech and of refusing to take anyone or anything too seriously. Irrespective of political affiliations, British newspapers would have no qualms about digging into the private lives of the leading members of the NSDAP and would doubtless find some tawdry secret that would undermine their menace. And our comic writers and performers would be queuing up to ridicule how seriously the NSDAP take themselves. The leaders of the NSDAP would soon appear in a guise that made them both ludicrous and unattractive to the general population.”

  “We have no similar tradition in Germany,” said Schmidt and we lapsed into silence once more.

  “For all the defiance of Göbbels’s speech, there will be an east wind blowing over Germany soon enough,” said Holmes eventually.

  “I fear it will not be only from the East that the wind will blow,” said Schmidt gloomily.

  “For evil to happen, Schmidt,” said Holmes, “All it takes is for good men to do nothing. The fury that will surely come will obliterate Germany as we know it and I would not wish to speculate how many generations will wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind, nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

  A retrospective by Dr John Watson written in 1947

  Holmes and I were back in London soon after 1 March 1930 and I drafted the narrative above while the shocking events I describe were still fresh in my memory.

  Having reviewed my account nearly two decades and a world war after I wrote it, I have felt no inclination to change more than a few words here and there, although I have provided an update on Paul-Otto Schmidt’s career up to 1938 to help jog my readers’ memory of him.