She nodded in grateful assent. “Doctor, you are on the right path…”
But the doctor did not pursue his questioning, he froze, as if something had hit him. A thought must have struck his mind and thrown him off balance. But which one? Finally, he managed to articulate what had so disturbed him: “Mrs. Kusian, it just struck me, I think I recognize you: Did you perhaps attend the presentations I made at Robert-Koch Hospital?”
“Yes, of course I did!” she exclaimed in a joyful tone of voice.
“Were you also present at my slide show presentation on the subject of forced strangulation. On throttling and other methods?”
She eyed him suspiciously and thought for a long time. Then she shook her head and answered in a strangely artificial, low tone of voice: “At the time of the terrible events, I wasn’t at all aware of that.”
Bacheran thought that was a clear yes. So it meant that in effect Dr. Weimann, the Chief Medical Examiner, who helped the police solve crimes and assisted the law in its search for the truth, had inadvertently played a significant role in the education of a murderer. A distressing thought.
The thought, at any rate, left the professor speechless. And since Menzel and his colleagues were looking down on their note pads taking notes, it was left to Bacheran to keep the exchange with Kusian on the front burner so to speak. “We know that you have a good heart, that you have a lot of feminine warmth… and we simply cannot imagine how on December 3rd you would have been able to sit calmly in your room waiting for Mr. Seidelmann, intent on…robbing him of his money…”
“When I came back from work I injected some morphine, two cubic centimeters, not in the muscle but subcutaneously, in my thigh… When Seidelmann arrived I was tired because of the M. He noticed it and asked what was wrong with me. In order to suppress the effect of the morphine I then took some Pervitin. How many tablets I can’t say. But I did succeed, mostly, in suppressing the M effect…”
Dr. Weimann had regained his composure by then and was able to take over. “As the visit went on, did you take anything more?”
“Only coffee and Pervitin. You know that: had I injected more morphine I wouldn’t have been able to carry it out.”
Bacheran noticed how she was trying to establish a dialog between peers… not realizing how in doing so she was implicating herself more and more deeply. Menzel’s next question struck her as a highly unwarranted disturbance.
“Mrs. Kusian, how did you come to the idea of killing Mr. Seidelmann? What happened in your mind?”
She gave him an angry look, as if to say: what else do you want from me? Leave it alone, enough! “I cannot give you any explanation for it. I cannot and I do not want to. I’ve already incriminated so many people… I want to take responsibility for everything…”
Bacheran was struck by those words. Was she trying to imply that she had signed a false confession over in the Eastern sector, that she had not in fact committed both crimes? Her calling, as a nurse, was to help people and so in this case too, she was helping someone and was prepared to take the blame for them? Out of love maybe? That could mean only one thing: that Kurt Muschan was the killer… Nonsense, or at least, highly improbable. But was anything truly impossible in this world?
Inspector Menzel was not interested in metaphysics, he preferred to fly close to the ground: he pursued his line of thought.
“Mrs. Kusian, you are an attractive woman. Seidelmann visited your apartment to change money but one can assume that he was also attracted to you as a woman. Did he make a pass at you?”
Kusian looked at him coldly. “No. That does not have to happen every time a man comes to my apartment.” She then started to describe the encounter in detail. “He had taken his coat off because it was raining hard outside. We changed the money. He saw the newspaper rack with some magazines and asked me if he could leaf through them. I went to the kitchen and put some water on to boil, then I went to the bathroom to freshen up. I brought him some coffee…”
“Did you put something in the coffee?” Menzel wanted to know.
Kusian protested loudly. “No! Who do you think I am?! He was very interested in the magazines. ‘We don’t have anything like this in the East.’ He enjoyed the coffee. He told me that he had spent the previous night in train stations. He thought: ‘Now, for the first time, I can say that I really know Berlin.’ Then he wanted to know if I went out a lot. And he told me about the Casablanca Club… I got up, I wanted to turn the radio on but it didn’t work too well. The rest of the time I sat on the lounge chair…”
“Did you also listen to the news?” Menzel asked. Bacheran figured that he was trying to find out on what day Seidelmann had been at her place and whether she was saying the truth.
But she didn’t let herself be pinned down. “I came and went a lot. I don’t know if there were news in the meantime. No, there was only music.”
Menzel turned around to a table behind him on which the evidence was arrayed. He opened a bag, took out a neatly coiled clothes line and put it on the table in front of Kusian. She looked at it impassively. “You cut a section of this line each time to kill and you used it on Mr. Seidelmann and Mrs. Merten.”
“Yes.”
“When you killed Seidelmann did you make a noose with the line and did you pull it tight?”
“Yes.”
“How long did you hold it around his neck? Did he clutch at his neck to pull the noose away?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Did he scream?”
“No, absolutely not,” Kusian said in a tone of regret and she described her victim’s death as she would have described the natural death of one her many patients. “I had walked up to him from the back and I flipped the noose over his head. Seidelmann jumped up from his chair. He turned around to face me. But a few seconds later he had already lost consciousness. And then he died…”
“Wait a minute, it couldn’t be that fast! How long did it take until Seidelmann fell to the floor?”
Kusian was silent. Menzel showed her the statement she had made to the Eastern Criminal Police. Bacheran had read it and he could have shot the scene in a film:
Kusian knows from Dr. Weimann’s slide show that throttling can provoke death extremely fast if the cord is pulled against the nerve reflex zone. But at the crucial moment she hesitates a little. A last inhibition against killing. Seidelmann is still able to turn around. She’s not prepared for that. He looks his murderer in the eyes. She sees infinite surprise in them. They plead for mercy. Then he resists, he fights for his life. He threatens to wreck all her plans, to jeopardize her life’s happiness. She hates him for that. If he dies he can’t speak, if he remains alive, he will go to the police – and she’ll end up in jail. She will be able to dismember the corpse and dispose of it. There are dozens of bombed out houses on every street. Seidelmann is now her enemy. She has to get rid of him if she wants to survive. She is, in any case, an athletic woman. But now, hatred and fear lend her superhuman strength. She holds the noose tight until Seidelmann loses consciousness, she lights a cigarette, sticks it in her mouth and examines him carefully. Will he draw a few more breaths, could he regain consciousness by any chance? No. She kneels next to him and feels his pulse. This is what she does every day, it’s routine. No doubt: he is dead. Now she starts to go through his pockets looking for money.
Kusian meanwhile had decided to talk and after a few empty phrases took up her story exactly at the point Bacheran had reached in his thoughts. “There I found a wallet, dark leather I think. In it there were a 50 mark West bill and 135 DM East. I put the money in my handbag. There was also an identity card in the wallet. I burnt it together with the wallet in the stove.”
“Did you look at the identity card?”
“No. I didn’t want to know the name of the man I had killed.”
Bacheran could not suppress a soft “Mm…” since it was unthinkable that the man had not introduced himself when he came into the apartment. Obviously, Kusian was tr
ying to repress the memory of what she had done. What Dr. Weimann whispered to him confirmed his idea.
“You see, Bacheran, this is typical of the murderer’s mind as I know it. On the one hand, he wants to prevent the discovery of his crime and so admits to himself that he has killed, but on the other hand, he tries as hard as possible to deny to his other, better self, that he has committed a crime.”
Bacheran acquiesced. “Yes: ‘it wasn’t me, it’s not possible, it can’t be me.’”
“From the moment they discard the victim’s body, they start distancing themselves from the crime and pushing the memory further and further down into the deepest zones of their consciousness. It’s easier to do that when you don’t know the victim’s name.”
“Quiet please,” Menzel admonished them: Kusian was describing how she had managed to carry the body out of her room.
Bacheran took notes: K has two backpacks in her room; her husband had used them to bring her coal. Plus two cardboard boxes. No large suitcase. She throws a blanket over the dead man and goes to her friend Anni Gruschwitz’s to borrow one. She has none, so she borrows one from one of her neighbors. Later in Kantstrasse she goes to work. X number of times she goes down the corridor to the kitchen and the bathroom with a bucket full of water, and the Stöhr ladies don’t notice anything. By 3 AM she’s gotten rid of the traces of blood and has packed the dismembered corpse into the suitcase and the two backpacks. Menzel asks: “Did you plan where you would dispose of the body parts?” Answer: “I thought of nothing in advance, I didn’t think at all. You don’t know how the mind of a person who takes morphine and Pervitin works.” She carries the heavy suitcase and one backpack to the S-Bahn and rides from Zoo to Friedrichstrasse. Walks across Weidendammer bridge. Has to put the suitcase down several times. Right and left, ruins. But each time she tries to throw the body parts in, somebody is coming up the street. Afraid of being noticed. Friedrichstrasse turns into Chausseestrasse. Kusian goes right, in the direction of Stettiner Station. Does not know these parts. Finally she throws the head and the limbs into the cellar of a bombed out house and rides back home with the empty bags. Throws the second backpack over her shoulders and carries it to the U-Bahn station at Knie. She deposits the torso in the rubble on Schillerstrasse. It’s almost dawn.
“Did you purposefully divide the body parts between the Eastern and Western sectors?” Menzel still wanted to know.
“No, I didn’t think of that.”
“All right. That’s it for today. Tomorrow we’ll talk about the Merten case. Thank you, Mrs. Kusian, thank you all. Enjoy your lunch.”
Part Five
A Sensational Trial
33.
Bernhard was enjoying the first summer of the new decade. Even though the weather forecast for July 8, 1950 didn’t look that good: shifting clouds, some thunder, a high of 20 degrees during the day, 15 at night. Fooling around with Helga outdoors might mean catching nephritis or getting inflammation of the bladder - but where else could they go, they were never alone, not even for a short hour, in Fuldastrasse or in Karolinenhof. So, what?
He sat in his office and leafed through the Telegraf. His eyes were automatically drawn to the word ‘Neukölln’: Yesterday afternoon the police had to take four reporters from the Soviet-German Berliner Rundfunk radio into protective custody at the Hermannstrasse station in Neukölln : the population was harassing and threatening the journalists as they were trying to report on the lack of water in the neighborhood. What else was there? At the corner of Berlinerstrasse and Uhlandstrasse two communist agitators had been beaten. In a garden colony in Friedenau a 49 year old woman had drowned in a rain tank. On Bayerischen platz the search for 6 year old Petra Koch had gone on for hours, unfortunately without result. On Tegeler lane, the Central Berlin District Courthouse steeple had been erected.
He remembered his grandmother’s favorite saying: “Children, how time goes by!” The year 1950 was already half over. And it had brought so many things: the number of unemployed in the Federal Republic had risen to two million, 13.5 percent of the working age population, an all time high and the government had declared West Berlin a disaster area. Air France had taken over the Berlin-Frankfurt-Paris route out of Tempelhof. In Tegel, Borsig, after having been dismantled by the French, had resumed production. Konrad Adenauer had visited West Berlin as Chancellor for the first time in mid April. On May 1st, there was the biggest ever political demonstration in West Berlin, on the Square of the Republic in front of the Reichstag with the motto Against Unity in chains, for Peace and Liberty. Naturally, Bacheran was there with his mother and aunt. At the end of May there had been a ‘really big thing’ in East Berlin: they had staged the Meeting of the German Youth organization, the FDJ, with 700 000 participants. For the first time since the end of the war a German soccer championship game had taken place in the Olympic stadium and VfB Stuttgart had won 2 to 1 against Kickers Offenbach before 100 000 spectators. The regional broadcasting stations had become part of the ARD broadcasting organization. The Maison de France had been inaugurated on Kurfürstendamm and the KA-DE-WE department store on Wittenbergplatz reopened. Three men belonging to the Gladow gang, whose members had perpetrated more than fifty assaults and robberies between 1948 and 1949 were sentenced to life in prison in a trial by jury in East Berlin. The trial against Elisabeth Kusian would not start until January 1951.
Kusian was not the main topic of conversation between him and Helga, as they sat in her father’s fishing boat on the river Dahme; the main topic was “potato beetles.” The GDR had set up systematic searches in order to put an end to the American onslaught against the food source in the East German sector. In the border region of Niedersachsen large groups of FDJ young people gathered to agitate in the countryside and convince the farmers on the Western side to join the fight.
“You’re lucky they haven’t sent you too to collect the beetles,” Bernhard said. “But no one will ever find such a pretty little beetle as you here.”
Helga did not respond to such banter. “I think there’s some truth in this. If you’re capable of throwing atomic bombs on people’s heads, why would you hesitate to destroy potato crops with beetles?”
“Isn’t that a little far-fetched?” Bernhard asked. How was it going to work out when they were married and living together? Probably the way his old class mate Rüdiger advised. He studied Sociology and Ethnology and he used the example of the Dobu people. They lived on an island off the Eastern tip of New Guinea and were considered to be lawless, deceitful and thoroughly mean. They were all enemies and each settlement was in a state of constant warfare with the others. They destroyed each other’s fields and used magic to bring sickness and death to their enemies. But, in order to avoid the social and physiological damage brought in time by inbreeding, the clans, headed by women, were obliged to find their partners in another clan. When a man from clan A married a woman from clan B and went to live with her, it meant he was taking his workforce away from his own family and so their enemies would gain. That could not be. It was just as unthinkable that the woman might move to the man’s village. What do to then if they wished to thrive? Well, the Dobu solved the problem in a very ingenious way: from their wedding day until the day of their death, the pair lived one year in the man’s village and the next in the woman’s village. It was then possible to properly humiliate and bully each respective ‘foreigner’ according to the dominant cultural code.
Helga was somewhat skeptical of this model when he told her about it. “How could that work for us? We have to register where we live. I can’t very well live in Neukölln and work in the Volks Police.”
“See how ‘primitive’ people are more progressive than we are for certain things.” Bernhard could not think of anything else. It was the famous squaring of the circle. “Oh well, why should we worry about it? Love conquers all, as they say.”
They rowed into the reeds and since the fishing barge had a fairly wide bottom, they could hide from any voyeurs and it was
also hard to capsize, they were able to make love as exuberantly as they wished. It was absurd: he was a fervent Nazi hater and yet her body, like the hard, steely bodies idolized in photographs and sculptures by the Nazis was what he loved, and she, a self avowed Socialist or even a Communist, was the perfect example of Nazi womanhood. Her body was hard all over, only the inside of her thighs was like soft moss – and he was crazy about that, crazy to get into that. The contrast was what made him wild.
Afterwards they lay on their backs and gazed silently into the bright blue sky where a few small clouds drifted occasionally. Like feathers or cotton balls. The water rippled softly. Only when a motorboat or a steamer sailed by did the waves hit the sides so that they swayed softly as if in a hammock.
“Can you see the stars?” Bernhard asked.
“In bright daylight?”
“They’re there in the sky, where else would they go? You can’t see them because the sun outshines everything.” He was silent. “And what does that tell us?”
“No idea, what?”
“That often the sun – meaning what’s bright and good, meaning the life force – can turn us away from some other things. And you, in the East, you have the sun on your FDJ flag…”
She shut her eyes. “Must we talk politics now?”
“That’s what you people always do. And I think you need it.”
“Right now, I need something very different. Come…”
Dreams did come true then; but, later they had to go and have coffee at her parents… Just like the Dobus.
Helga’s father held him responsible for the fact that there were so many ex Nazis in key positions in the Western zone. “And among them, the worst are your fellow jurists. They had blood on their hands under the Nazis – and today they continue to hand down their decisions in the name of the people. And what about the officers of Hitler’s criminal Wehrmacht, where are they? They’re at the head of companies. Adenauer welcomes them all. So what are you doing to fight that, Mr. Bacheran? Nothing.”
Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949 Page 24