Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949

by Horst Bosetzky

After the delegation from the East had left, Menzel and Bacheran were invited into the good room by the owner: she offered them a cup of tea.

  “This whole thing is so awful!” Mrs. Stöhr broke out in tears. “Here I was sitting with my mother on the sofa listening to the radio… while someone was being murdered next door. But I swear to you, Inspector, we didn’t hear anything. I wouldn’t want you to think that we… My mother is deaf so we have to turn the volume all the way up on the radio.”

  “For God’s sake, Mrs. Stöhr, you are under no suspicion whatsoever.” Bacheran tried to calm her down, he patted her on the sleeve of her silk blouse, like a son.

  “And Mrs. Kusian was an angel to me… in her nurse’s uniform. But no one can see inside a person’s heart.”

  “That’s true.”

  Menzel now thought he should justify his outburst to Bacheran. “I’m really not a cold warrior but… Dieter Friede was a good friend of mine.”

  “Who is he?” Bacheran asked.

  “One of the five thousand people in Berlin who have vanished since the end of the war: they were jailed or kidnapped by the East. Dieter was a journalist with Abend, he was lured to the Eastern sector on November 2, 1947 and never came back. According to ADN, the Eastern news organization, he was convicted by the Soviets of spying for the United States and Great Britain. Moscow denied it all. Now you know why not even ten horses could drag me over to the East. They must hand over Kusian to us, I will under no circumstance go to Alex to examine her.”

  Bernhard reflected that the Kusian case was hopelessly entangled. Seidelmann’s body, the GDR showman, lay in a morgue in the West while the body of Dorothea Merten, a citizen of West-Berlin, was being kept in a morgue in the East. Even stranger, Nurse Elisabeth Kusian, who was closely suspected of the double murder was being held in the East although she was from West Berlin and had killed in the Western sector. To top it all off, Homicide West was sitting on the evidence that was urgently needed in the East to convict Kusian.

  “What do we do now?” he asked Norbert Menzel.

  “We show Seidelmann’s brother the clothes we found in Kusian’s room. We question all her woman friends and acquaintances to find out what she may have given away and to whom; same thing with her husband. And we visit all the dry cleaners in her neighborhood to see if she brought them anything.”

  Bernhard was a little surprised. “Do you really think she didn’t immediately throw everything in the garbage? If I murdered you, I would have to be incredibly stupid to take your things to a second hand dealer … or to have them cleaned first.”

  “Well, yes, but women like Kusian were brought up never to throw anything away. For them, scraping and saving is a way of life, they’ve always had too little money and too many debts, the ‘shit of a pfennig’ as we say in Berlin. For them, wasting anything is a mortal sin. They would rather risk a life sentence than throw away a suit, a hat or a pretty blouse. No… they prefer to bring it to the second hand shop and make some hay out of it.”

  “But that would be completely irrational. “ Bacheran couldn’t imagine such a way of seeing things.

  “And what would you call killing Mrs. Merten in your bedroom when other people knew she was there?”

  “You’re right: her mind must have been completely clouded.”

  “Killers like her think that they’re more clever than everyone else put together and that they’ll never be found out. If they didn’t believe that they might be able to stop themselves.”

  They talked as they were going down the stairs, then they walked to Zoo station. After this bout of psychological speculation they had to get down to the nitty-gritty of police work. Many police officers were dispatched and by the evening of January 7, Kripo West had impounded all of Seidelmann’s and Merten’s clothing.

  “Should I bring all this to the Eastern sector?” Bacheran asked, hoping to see Helga again too.

  Menzel tapped his finger to his temple: “Are you out of your…?!” No, the comrades on the other side can find out for themselves how to proceed. The sooner they hit a wall, the better for us: then they’ll deliver Kusian to us. Plus there are rumors: Seidelmann may have been doing more than just changing money in Berlin…” He gave Bacheran a meaningful look and said no more.

  In those days in Berlin, agents from the East and the West hired each other: everything was possible.

  31.

  Sitting at her desk at the Vopo headquarters, Helga Leupahn was feeling so depressed that she did not hesitate to pour a drop of Steffen’s Nordhäuser Doppelkorn in her instant coffee. She had spent the entire weekend stuck in Rostock because an aunt of hers was celebrating her sixtieth birthday. She missed Bernhard terribly. Life was not worth living without him. She needed him like a drunk needs his bottle. That’s how attached she had become… She tore a page off the calendar. Today’s date was January 8, 1950, a Monday. The first half of the twentieth century was definitely over and now it was on to the next fifty years. Hard to believe. If she lived to the year 2000, she would be… She tried to count… 74 years old. And her name would no longer be Leupahn but Bacheran. No it wouldn’t. Yes it would. She would bring Bernhard around, she would manage to make him move to the GDR. She had talked to her father about it. He thought that if Bernhard left the SPD and became a member of the SED of course, he could conceivably be offered a position as a law professor. But no, that only happened in the movies… He wouldn’t budge and he would prefer to give her up and give up the professorship rather than come over to the ‘Eastern zone’. The only thing she could do was to tie a rope around her …

  Steffen walked in: he was also in a terrible mood. “This thing makes me puke! Venceremos! Aah… when this is all we have.” He waved the tie in the air. “And we had to steal it…” He examined the tie with the yellow and red stripes. “But who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and this thing here will open Kusian’s emotional sluice gates. Come, I had her brought in.”

  “I’m not feeling so well,” Helga said.

  “Don’t worry: if you faint we have a nurse on hand. We’ll see to it that she doesn’t cut you up in pieces.”

  Helga pulled herself together. In the interrogation room, Kusian, sitting across from her, seemed cheerful and gay, as if they were getting together for coffee and cake or a game of Rummy. Evidently she felt no connection to the murders of Seidelmann and Merten. In her mind, another person must have done these things, not she. But of course it was impossible to know another person’s mind. And yet Helga would have liked to find a way of doing just that. At least with murderers.

  Inspector Steffen kept to his tactic: he looked disengaged and gave Kusian the impression that they had all the time in the world before she made her confession.

  “Ah, Mrs. Kusian, did you sleep well in our Vopo Grand Hotel.”

  The reply was immediate. “A clear conscience makes for a good night’s sleep.”

  “Good, I’m glad. So it won’t be difficult for you to explain why this tie happened to be in your room…”

  “You searched the whole place?”

  “Yes. Together with the Western Police.”

  Kusian calmly smoothed her skirt and blouse. Today she wore her nurse’s outfit from Robert-Koch Hospital again. “Oh dear, Inspector… I’m a single woman – a man’s tie in my apartment, it’s bound to happen.”

  “What about this one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know whose tie it is…?”

  “No, how should I…?”

  “It belongs to a certain Hermann Seidelmann.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name.” The smile on her face as she spoke was even and serene: she could have been a Salvation Army singer standing in front of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church.

  Steffen looked over at Helga and nodded, which meant: ‘You take over now.’ She did. “All right Mrs. Kusian, you don’t know him but you do know Doris Merten, Dorothea…?”

  “Yes, she was at my place because of the typewriter.
And again on the second day of Christmas when I walked her down to the street…”

  “Yes: in your backpack – on your back, cut in pieces.”

  “For God’s sake, will you stop trying to stick me with this!” Kusian banged the table with the flat of her palms. “I know exactly what’s going on here: You need a murderer from the Western sector to show the world how bad the West is. All criminals.”

  Helga had to admit that her surprise attack had failed. Kusian wouldn’t let herself be taken by surprise so easily. The reason could be that at that moment she saw herself as a different person, that she ‘was’ a different person from when she had killed. She wasn’t even, in a sense, really lying as she spoke now.

  Seen from that angle the chances that they might break her were nil. To storm such a fortress they would need weeks. All they could do was attack again and again even if the walls seemed unbreachable.

  “Let’s examine the facts, Mrs. Kusian. The evidence team – not the team from the Democratic side, but the team from your side – have found substantial evidence of blood in your room in Kantstrasse.”

  “Mrs. Merten did not bleed in my room.”

  “Are you also going to deny that today is Monday?”

  “Listen, all this is just a trick. In reality Mrs. Merten is still alive. I would like to see her.”

  Steffen got up. “That you can do, Mrs Kusian, this very evening as a matter of fact, at the morgue.” He signaled to the guard. “Please take her away.”

  Helga sat still for a long time after Kusian had left. She saw the whole thing as a kind of protracted suicide on the part of the nurse. Kusian had killed Seidelmann first and then Doris Merten, so that she could die too afterwards. Maybe she didn’t know that capital punishment had just been abolished. At least in West Germany. Not in the GDR. Was that the reason why she had disposed of the bodies mostly in the East? No, that was too farfetched. Another thought struck her: maybe she had acted like an ancient Mongol warrior, taking another man’s life for company on the journey to the far side. To avoid dying alone. No, that wasn’t it either. But Helga couldn’t stop speculating. In Seidelmann’s case, it could have been a garden variety robbery and murder, but with Merten… the chances that she would eventually be found out were so obvious. And in her subconscious, she seemed to have accepted that. Well, that was all well and good, but why then didn’t she admit to her crimes, why didn’t she make a full confession? Helga asked Steffen.

  “Ah, well, child…” He had no ready answer either, nothing really convincing. “We know more about the cosmos out there than we do about the person sitting next to us, that’s a fact. Our deepest motivations remain obscure. All we can do is try to guess at them. As for Elisabeth Kusian, I would guess that she is two different people that fate has brought together in one body. One of them does things while the other is shut off in a sense and isn’t aware of what the first one is doing.”

  “I’m only one person.”

  “But you too are acting as if you were two people. Helga number one would like to become a cadre in the GDR leadership while Helga number two is consorting with a class enemy.”

  She blushed deeply. “I always assume that Bernhard will eventually come knocking at our door.”

  Steffen could sometimes be pretty wild. “I’m sure he’s pretty good at knocking up… but let’s forget about him. Back to Kusian. Let’s see if she breaks down when she’s confronted with the corpse.”

  And later that evening, she was in Hannoverschenstrasse, but, as she stood in front of Merten’s body which had been rolled out of the cold chamber, she was totally composed. Of course, being a nurse, she was used to seeing dead people, but in this case… Steffen had seen to it that the limbs were a little separated from the torso.

  “How can human beings do such terrible things.” Kusian sounded like a politician making a speech. Moved, sincere, full of revulsion and righteous anger.

  “Congratulations, Mrs. Kusian.” Steffen bowed before her. “Great work you did there. And the same with Seidelmann. Where did you learn to dismember a corpse in such a professional manner – was your father a surgeon?”

  “No, an internist. We had a clinic in Gera.”

  “That’s a fantasy.”

  “That’s politics. My parents were expropriated and sent to Siberia. You want to destroy everything: my parents first, then the files – and now me. Now you want to saddle me with these two murders.”

  Steffen knew that RIAS and the Western yellow press would lap up Kusian’s version of events. That was why he had to be very careful. Maybe he would ask the State Attorney’s office to send her over to the West as soon as possible. Let them get a taste of her. But no, not until she had made a full confession. They would all see which side had the best law enforcement.

  So the next morning he questioned her again and he asked Helga to be present. There was no better opportunity to learn. “Now, Mrs. Kusian, should I again run through all the evidence against you?” Steffen began: “The bloody kitchen knife, Mr. Seidelmann’s tie…”

  “I won’t say another word.”

  “Fine, then let’s not mention the rest.”

  Steffen wanted to let her stew, let her simmer on a low flame. He rubbed his hands together because they felt cold and sat slumped and relaxed on his chair, like a coach driver slumped on his seat, waiting. Luckily for Helga the Tägliche Rundschau of January 10, 1950 was on the table in front of her. The main story’s headline was printed in particularly thick type: the National Front is the only way to save the western zones. Gerhart Eisler had declared that after the reunification of the city it would take Berlin six weeks to resolve the unemployment situation in the Western sectors. Professor Kuczynski supported this thesis with convincing numbers. In the middle section on the left was a smaller headline: The Ruhr is and will remain German! Max Reiman, Head of the KPD communist party in West Germany had argued during an international rally for the population of the Western zones with progressive peoples. He had thundered against the Ruhr statute and remilitarization. Some ads caught her eye: GEMOL soaking first for an easier wash. 25 pfennig. Fewa respects colors. UVB SAPOTEX, Chemnitz. HALBZEIT CIGARETTES – The product of a year’s research at the factory branches of UVB Tobacco. The best for 15 pfennig. The Theater and Film Calendar of events for 1950 presented a cross section of German and Soviet films and plays with 60 pages of pictures. Price: 1,40 deutsche Mark. Maybe she and Bernhard would go to the theater on Sunday.

  Steffen didn’t seem to be enjoying his little game anymore. He got up, reached for his coat, searched for his cigarettes and swore under his breath when he found nothing but an empty packet. He needed a smoke badly. So he changed his tactic.

  “Ah yes, Mrs. Kusian, love, that’s something else…” he sighed, sat down again and looked at her intently. “I’ve been wounded too… her name was Conchita… We marched through the mountains together for days, at night we lay next to each other and made love… and when we encountered the Francoists I saved her life more than once. And then, do you know what happened…then she betrayed me. To save her own life she turned me in. The commando was ready to shoot me…” He closed his eyes. “Ah well, let’s forget that… But, do you know, it makes me think of you a little, of your Kurt, your baby, our colleague Muschan…”

  “Why, what happened to him?” she was talking again. Steffen had hit the right spot.

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “But he’s not here, he’s in the Western sector.”

  “No, he’s here, just a few meters away from you.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s true. Our Attorney General’s office is holding him because they want to indict him as a perpetrator. Because of you, Mrs. Kusian, because of you he has to suffer so much.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Yes of course you can.” Norbert Steffen picked up the telephone. Two minutes later the door to the next room opened: Kurt Muschan was standing there. Handcuffed and chained.r />
  “No!” Kusian screamed and she fainted to the floor.

  When she came to, she fell into a crying fit and then it all came out.

  “Let my Kurt go, he’s innocent. I did it, alone.”

  32.

  Bernhard Bacheran had asked the Press Section of the State Attorney’s office to cut out and paste all the news clippings pertaining to the Kusian case. At home, he always drew the short straw in the fight for subscriptions and most of the time he didn’t buy the paper on the way to work since he could have everything for free at the office. The story was covered in detail although it never rose to the main topic. He found the biggest headline in the Abend of January 9, 1950: Nurse indicted in a double murder – Did the Charlottenburg surgical nurse dismember her victims? The Abend, which in spite of its name came out in the morning, not the evening, considered itself a tabloid, still it had published a thorough and very factual report. What caught Bacheran’s attention was the last sentence: ‘The police have not been able to ascertain the origin of all the things found in the apartment. They suspect that Elisabeth Kusian may have committed more crimes. A cynic might hope that, thanks to Kusian, Berlin would be able to boast its own world class serial killer again. The Tagesspiegel’s January 10, 1950 headline was somewhat more sensational, particularly for a ‘serious’ newspaper: Nurse serial killer? – Heinous death of Hermann Seidelmann and Doris Merten under investigation. Most of the article was written in a straightforward style – but the third paragraph, entitled A cry in the night reminded Bacheran of an Edgar Wallace piece: It was one of the last nights of December – no one can remember the exact date - when a piercing cry tore the tenants of 154a Kantstrasse from their sleep. Many remained awake for ten, twenty minutes. But all was quiet after that cry and the tenants went back to sleep. The last two sentences of the report were more interesting: The Homicide division of Friesenstrasse Police Department headquarters will ask the State attorney’s Office to order a transfer to the Western sector. This transfer is expected to go through since the crimes were committed in West Berlin. In its January 11, 1950 issue, the Tagesspiegel reported on Kusian’s confession with a passport size photo. The headline read: She breaks down at the sight of the victim’s tie. Bacheran was surprised since Helga had presented the events quite differently. According to her they had concentrated more on the murder of Doris Merten than on Seidelmann’s and they had broken down Kusian’s defenses by confronting her with her lover in chains. Mm… all in all they had questioned the nurse for 37 hours. The questions were always the same. “Where were you on the night of December 3rd” “Don’t you remember? It was a Saturday.” “I don’t know,” Mrs Kusian kept answering. “You were seen at Zoo station,” the officers bluffed. ‘Why don’t you admit you were there?” According to the paper, it was the sight of the tie that had finally broken her. G.J. Prinz, the author of the article demonstrated his very remarkable gifts in a section entitled The Murderer describes Seidelmann’s death. She collected the blood as it flowed from the body in a bowl and later emptied it into the toilet bowl. Then she dismembered the corpse, she packed the severed limbs in a rucksack and a suitcase and carried them into the ruins, where they were later to be found. A fairly sober description, but what the Berliner Zeitung, the Eastern sector newspaper, wrote in its January 11, 1950 issue was very dry: Elisabeth Kusian confesses to the double murder – Two bloody crimes solved/thanks to good team work, the headline went. Of course the article could not refrain from scoring a point against the Western police: After Mrs. Merten’s husband reported her missing, Mrs. Kusian showed up at the Friesenstrasse Police Headquarters to counter any possible suspicion. Unfortunately Mrs. Kusian was then allowed to go free. Right, Bacheran thought: who could be more stupid than the police? But luckily the comrades from Vopo were there and they rushed to the rescue.