Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949

by Horst Bosetzky

  In the afternoon Walter comes by and he wants to take both his rucksacks back, but I have only had time to clean one.

  “What’s wrong with the other one?” Walter asks, lifting it from the floor. “It’s all bloody.”

  “I carried rabbit skins in it: I still have to clean it.”

  He believes me and says he’ll come pick it up some time next week. I really have something that makes men eat out of my hand.

  That’s ME and nobody can beat ME. I’d like to meet the man who tries!

  Part Four

  Homicide!

  24.

  Helga Leupahn was sitting at her desk her eyes riveted on the daily calendar. January 4, 1950. She couldn’t believe it. The first half of the twentieth century was over – and what a half century it had been! First the Kaiser, then the First World War, then worldwide depression and inflation. 1926: the year she was born. Then Adolf Hitler, the Second World War. Bombs over Berlin. She had survived. Then the atomic bombs over Japanese cities. The end of the Third Reich. The world needed new strength and a new order: it needed Socialism. The sun was rising in the East. The first Workers and Farmers’ State on German soil was being born. Rising from the rubble. A better Germany. And she was a part of it.

  The latest issues of the Täglicher Rundschau lay next to her on the in tray. They would be used at Karolinenhof. All that was needed was to soften the old newspapers in a pan, then you could knead the pulp and use it to fill in the cracks in the roof tiles. Was there any article she should read first? She leafed through them, stopping now and then. The time for success has come! Walter Ulbricht had said. Finally, according to the article, there would be swaddling clothes and underwear for babies. She shrank. “Hey, sooner or later, it happens to everybody,” Steffen often said. The name Walter Ulbricht came up everywhere. He was only second in command as Minister President and head of the SED, but he was certainly an up and coming personality. A Saxon. That was hard to like. But in any case… What did Ulbricht say…? The main task at hand is to convince the masses. The Oder-Neisse border: the fundamental condition for peace. Friendship with the USSR. No concession to the Social Democrats. And Bernhard Bacheran was a convinced Social Democrat… Helga sighed as she continued to leaf through the paper she was reading: it was dated Sunday, December 11, 1949. At that date, on her calendar, she had written big question marks. It was the day of her first rendezvous with Bernhard, the day when he had gotten his feet wet on purpose and, thanks to that ruse, stormed his way into the fortress on Lübbenauer Weg. She had been really upset at first but now she was glad he had. Although… Only time could tell. Her father had been very angry. Not just because of the unexpected visitor from the West but most of all, because she had missed the Women’s Union Development Sunday. She read the article: Women work for peace – Women are the building blocks of friendship between Germany and the USSR. “Don’t you see,” her father said, “that too is an attempt on the part of the class enemy to sow disunion?!” And he had quoted Walter Dehmel, the worker poet: This is a time of change/Hope is your star/These times need your help,/Don’t stay away! Full of regret, she promised to apply as soon as possible for party membership in the SED. She made herself a cup of coffee. Lensing-Kaffee: wonderful. A gift from Bernhard. Oh well… she was a good gymnast after all, she could do a good balancing act. Children sing songs of friendship between peoples, as the Tägliche Rundschau would say. Maybe friendship with people from West Germany too… Although Bernhard didn’t quite belong to them since West Berlin was not part of the Federal republic. And the German Reich was no more. She had probably watched too many Western films, it made her think in their words: I’m in love with a stateless man. Did she love him? Him and his SPD. She knew from Neue Deutschland and from what her father said that the SPD party was falling apart. At least in the Western sector. One faction was subservient to England and stood with Franz Neumann, Kurt Mattick and Louise Schröder against the American faction led by Ernst Reuter and Otto Suhr. But the whole bunch were nothing but lackeys of capitalism.

  The phone rang. She grabbed the receiver. But it wasn’t Bernhard, only Gisela from Schmöckwitz, her old school friend. She sounded totally out of breath. “You know what, today was my housework day and I went to the coal merchant’s. Do you know what he wanted to stick me with? Coal dust instead of briquettes. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I can’t get anything else’. Now your father should write about that.”

  “But he’s not a journalist you know, he’s an economist.”

  “Well then he should go and talk to the guy who writes and pressure him.”

  “Please, don’t say things like that on the phone. This is my office line.”

  “But I am allowed to ask if you slept off your hangover, right… or not?

  “Yes…” Gisela was referring to the fact that she and Bernhard had celebrated New Year’s Eve together with Gisela and her husband in Ebertystrasse in Friedrichshain.

  “And…did it glide in smoothly…?”

  “Will you stop that.” Gisela was a manager in a hat maker’s workshop on Prenzlauerstrasse, very close by in Berlin C2 and she loved to talk dirty. “Anyway, I have to hang up…”

  Siegfried Steffen had just walked in. Her superior smoked like a chimney even though he had vowed to stop in the New Year. His favorite cigarettes were Josettis. “Casino-Club – with imported tobacco,” he explained.

  “I’m so happy, my little one…”

  “What is it that makes you so happy?”

  “That under Socialism criminals are such good progressives that they deposit the bodies of their victims right on our doorstep.”

  Helga Leupahn did not like it much when people said such disrespectful things. Murder was not funny, and six years after Hitler, people should not be acting like a character in one of his UFA films. Even if, like Steffen, you were close to retirement. She chose to answer in a very formal way. “Has there been another capital offense?”

  “What…?” Steffen sounded as if he had found a left over bottle of champagne and drank it all. “For people like you anything that has to do with capital-ism is a crime anyway.”

  “Chief Inspector, please get to the point.”

  Steffen dropped down on a chair and exhaled deeply. There was an odor of food on his breath. A sweet and sour odor that filled the room. “The point is a woman. Children found the corpse. Memhardstrasse, corner of Prenzlauer Allee. Vamos!” Steffen had fought in the Spanish civil war, hence the Spanish. He thought that having fought there made him untouchable. He always said whatever entered his mind and, up to now, nobody had dared reprimand him. But everybody knew that the higher ups were not going to allow him to make constant fun of Ulbricht, Pieck, Grotewohl and the whole nomenklatura.

  The headquarters of the Volks Police were located on Neue Königstrasse, which would later be renamed Otto Braun Strasse: the place where the body had been found was a mere five hundred meters from there. From a bird’s eye view at least, since between the police station and that particular corner there were mountains of rubble, the rows of bombed out houses had collapsed in huge piles like peaks in a mountain chain. On Memhardstrasse, which ran almost parallel to the Stadtbahn viaduct, almost everything was destroyed. The first house that still stood, slightly pockmarked, was down at the corner of Munzstrasse and Liebknechtstrasse, later renamed Rosa Luxemburg Strasse. It led to the Schönhauser Tor U-Bahn station, formerly known as Horst Wessel Platz and soon to become Rosa Luxemburg Platz. Parts of Tietz department store were still being used too. Number 3, Memhardstrasse stood at the intersection with Prenzlauer Allee.

  “The corpse was dismembered,” Steffen said as they were climbing down from the rubble. “Which means that in this case too, we are not at the scene of the crime.”

  A spot light was set up and you could have thought a film was being shot. “‘The Killers are among us’ Part II,” Steffen joked. He would of course.

  The torso had been wrapped in under garments, feminine underwear. The head and the limbs
lay next to it.

  “This is very much like the Seidelmann case, “ Helga said.

  “Correct, Comrade Leupahn. Although it looks like we have everything here this time.”

  “Perhaps that’s because a woman is not as heavy as a man.”

  “Probably right. But, if the killer is the same as for Seidelmann, why not put some pieces of the body in the West and some in the East… in the hope that the Stumm Police and the Markgraf Police will refuse to cooperate and never uncover the culprit?! That’s the question.”

  Helga thought about it. “Yes, well… Maybe the killer realized that there is some contact between the two police organizations.”

  Steffen laughed. “Could he have seen you arm in arm with the class enemy, Bernhard Bacheran?”

  “We only meet on official business,” Helga answered stiffly and formally. She was completely unaware that she was lying.

  “How, I wonder, does one manage to have only official contact with someone? Do you both hold your badges high as you carry on together?” Steffen laughed and with his cracked voice, sang the Ernst Busch song, The Double: ‘We are the bog soldiers and all we use is shovels…”’

  Helga tried her best to steer her boss’s imagination in another direction. “Well, at least it’s not a case of cannibalism again, like the one in Chemnitz two years ago.” A man named Bernhard Oehme – another Bernhard – who was 66 years old had killed his sister. And then… ‘He cut her up like a professional, just like wild game. And then he ate her flesh…’

  Steffen started singing: ‘Baby, you’re the apple of my eye/ Baby, I just want to eat you…” He stopped. “Aah, please no incest. Murder is not as bad.” He looked back at Helga. “And then what…?”

  “Oehme then tried to sell his sister’s flesh on the black market. The West German press learned of it and they wrote: Now, they are eating one another in the Eastern sector!”

  “Nice…” Steffen turned to the officers in charge of securing the prints at the scene, but he didn’t learn anything that he didn’t already know or suspect. “We’ll see what Doctor Weimann says tomorrow morning when he returns to Hannoverschenstrasse and examines the body.”

  The Chief Medical Examiner came to a conclusion very rapidly. “Without a doubt, the same perpetrator as with Seidelmann. Here too the separation of the joints points to a professional. And up here, the same firm, fine horizontal strangulation marks in a continuous line around the neck.”

  Helga made a few notes about the victim: Female, average height, between 1m60 and 1m65 tall. Slim but of strong build. About 40 years old. Brown eyes, hair dyed reddish brown. A gold tooth in the left upper jaw.

  “Should I inform the Western Homicide Division of our new discovery?” Helga asked.

  “Send dear Mr. Bacheran a telegram.”

  25.

  Bernhard Bacheran was sitting at his desk waiting for the work day to end. The State Attorney’s administrative offices on Fehrbelliner Strasse were quiet. Many of his colleagues, men and women had been given two days’ vacation between the New Year and the following weekend or had called in sick. The first Thursday of the year was dark, light broke out rarely in the gloom and the rest of the time a light snow drizzled down. The temperature was just below zero Celsius and even at night it was not terribly cold. That was a good thing because even though this was the first winter after the blockade wood and coal remained in short supply. Bacheran was bored. He reopened the folder where he kept all the material regarding the Seidelmann case. The search for the perpetrator was going nowhere. Three weeks before, on December 16, they had hoped to nail the murderer but they had not come any closer to doing so: not with the money changer Rudolf Doberschütz nor with beautiful Dorothea Stetzsch, ‘Thea The Whip’. Thanks to their attorneys, both had been able to celebrate Christmas at home.

  Bernhard closed the folder. Reading the file a third time would not give him any new insights. So he decided to go to the toilet. Sitting inside, he noticed there was no toilet paper. Instead there was a Telegraf on the dispenser. Bacheran read the date: January 5, 1950. Today’s paper. Even though the temperature was barely above 10 degrees Celsius, he sat there a while. He loved reading the paper in the toilet, a habit he must have inherited from his father. “He never could hide his proletarian origins.” Oh well… Bacheran browsed the headlines: Conny Rux run-in... What was that about? The famous boxing champion had been riding in car that rammed into the police Superintendent’s car on Sonnenallee, corner of Erkstrasse in Neukölln. She jumps from the fifth floor... 35 year old widow, Karoline K. from Wilmersdorf, jumped from the fifth floor window of the building where she lived, at 7, Jenau Strasse, in an attempt at suicide. Opium dealers at the exchange booth... 37 year old amputee Paul L. from Ölsnitz in Voigtland had been apprehended as he attempted to sell 25 grams of opium at the corner of Schlossstrasse and Schildhornstrasse: he said the opium came from old Wehrmacht supplies. Corpse found in ruins of a house... Bacheran started, he could not believe his eyes. He carefully read every word: Yesterday afternoon, children playing in the rubble at the corner of Memhardstrasse and Prenzlauerstrasse uncovered parts of a corpse, that of a woman between the ages of 35 and 40. The limbs and the head were separated from the trunk which was itself wrapped in underwear. The investigation showed that the body parts had been brought to the location separately. The crime itself had been committed eight to ten days ago. The Eastern sector police posted a missing persons inquiry: the woman is 1m60 to 1m 65 tall, strong, brown eyes, hair dyed a reddish brown. She has a brown lentil sized birthmark above the navel. Blue woolen underpants, size 44, brand name AKA Moth Free with I.G. DDT found nearby.

  Bacheran forgot why he had gone to the toilet, jumped up and hastily pulled up his pants. He felt terribly angry at Helga Leupahn. They were a pair now and yet she didn’t think it necessary to inform him. But he calmed down just as fast: Come on, you’re being unfair, who says this corpse has anything to do with Seidelmannn…? All right … but still… The key word “rubble” had triggered the connection and his love for corny jokes: ‘Uncovered’ in the rubble… He hurried back to his office to call Helga. As he reached for the receiver he noticed that someone had left a telegram on his desk. He picked it up and read it. It was from Homicide East. They were informing him of the discovery of the corpse near Alexanderplatz. It was signed Helga Leupahn.

  He was immediately relieved. She probably had not been able to send the telegram any earlier. He had to talk to her. But there were not that many telephone lines between the two sectors and, surprising as it may seem, he had to try eleven times before he finally reached her.

  “Finally… But you’re not the dismembered woman from Alex.”

  “Stop that, don’t make fun of such things!”

  “I only thought that since…” He thought she was such a square when she took things so seriously, so he tried to fight back with more black humor. “I only thought, because of the blue panties… Yours too are moth proof. My sweet little moth, you.”

  “This is an office line,” she warned him.

  “Okay, as our Neukölln occupation forces say: has the well known modus operandi been used in this case?”

  “The corpse in Alex was dismembered in the same professional manner as the one in Schillerstrasse, just like Seidelmann’s.”

  “But this time the victim is without a doubt a woman?” He insisted.

  She showed him she could use cabaret humor. “We weren’t altogether sure. Can you tell me how to make sure…? Maybe it’s not the same over on your side, in the Western sector.”

  He made a loud kissing sound. “You’re a darling. I love you when you’re like that. But let’s try and figure out what this means for the Seidelmann case… First, that there is probably no connection to Seidelmann.”

  She disagreed. “Why do you say that? We still don’t know whether Seidelmann and the dead woman are not in some way connected. First we have to identify her.”

  “And you haven’t as yet?”

&n
bsp; “No.”

  “You really haven’t or am I not allowed to know?”

  “We haven’t. No one has brought any useful information. And among the women listed as missing here, in the Democratic sector, no one matches her description.”

  It made him angry that she should use the term “Democratic” for the Eastern sector but he refrained from saying it should be called the “autocratic” or the “totalitarian” sector. “Then I’ll inquire at the Missing Persons’ Bureau here or I’ll ask someone to do it.”

  “That would suggest itself if the same perpetrator is at work and he uses the same modus operandi: killing in the Western sector and disposing of the body parts in the Eastern sector.”

  “If it’s the same perpetrator…” Bacheran repeated. “If. But isn’t it the case that usually serial killers kill only women – like the Berlin S-Bahn killer Paul Orgozow for instance – or only young men- say like Haarmann in Hannover?”

  “There always are exceptions to the rule.”

  “But everything seems to indicate that we are not dealing with a sex killer. It looks more like robbery and murder, like murder for money…”

  “If both Seidelmann and the woman from Alex are involved in some kind of network then they could have been killed in an attempt to cover up. We have to be very careful what we conjecture.”

  “Or else it’s a madman who enjoys cutting people up.”

  “We’ll see. Well, we have to end it there.”

  “I hope you don’t mean end our relationship, only our conversation.”

  “I have to go home, I don’t feel so…”

  “Being a man, I can’t really empathize, still, I hope you have a good rest.”

  “Talk to you soon!” Helga hung up immediately. ‘Short and painful’ as she always said.

  Bacheran kissed the black telephone receiver before he set it down. Then he called Herbert Menzel and informed him of the telegram from the eastern sector and of his conversation with the police over there.