Cold Angel: Murder in Berlin 1949

by Horst Bosetzky

  “And who created these faulty connections?”

  “Certain childhood stimuli, and especially life during the Nazi period.”

  Bacheran laughed. “Somehow this sounds like the Freudian theory again: the super ego has holes in it.”

  She did her best to sound as sarcastic as he was. “Why don’t you come to the forensic lab and show me a super ego the doctors are preparing to extract.”

  They couldn’t agree and they fought until, shortly before 9:30AM, they found their seats in the court room.

  “Tragedy, Act II,” Bernhard said. “Or better: Clear the ring for round two.”

  The first witness was Kurt Gehring, the second hand shop owner. The police had found out about him because Annemarie Gruschwitz had sold some items belonging to Seidelmann and Merten’s clothing on her behalf in his shop.

  “Sir” the presiding judge said, “do you know the defendant?”

  Gehring said he did and bowed slightly toward Dr. Korsch. “I met the defendant on May 21, 1949. She sold me a vacuum cleaner. In December she showed up again and asked me to come to her home to look at a rug she wanted to sell.”

  A murmur went around the room, everyone thought or whispered the same thing: Was he lucky not to have ended up being the third victim!

  The thought made the consignment shop owner sick and he needed a few seconds before he could go on. “When I told her I wasn’t interested in the rug, she became angry and complained. She told me she had three children and that she was a nurse. I found her attitude strange.”

  The president now turned to the defendant who had been vaguely listening to the unimposing shopkeeper’s words. “Mrs. Kusian, is it correct that you visited this consignment shop?”

  Everyone expected Kusian to oppose the same refusal as she had before and to answer any question with the same words: “I refuse to make any statement.” But to everyone’s surprise, she jumped up and spoke in a fever of excitement.

  “Yes, certainly, I sold a vacuum cleaner there, but I don’t know anything about a rug. I do not own a rug, so I cannot have sold one.”

  But Gehring was in no way cowed by her outburst. “I can swear that she asked me to come to her home to see a rug.”

  “That’s not true, I didn’t have a rug!” Kusian exclaimed.

  Helga whispered that this was just a trivial detail but Bacheran thought the president was right to dwell on this point. If she really tried to lure Gehring to her house with this trick, then it would be much easier to accuse her of premeditation and that would be a decisive factor in the length of the sentence. So he found it absolutely correct that Gehring had been called to the stand.

  The next witness belonged, in Bacheran’s estimation, to the strange bird category: he was a prison chaplain called Stromberg. The chaplain refused to make any statement out of principle although Elisabeth Kusian had released him from the secret of the confessional.

  Finally Walter Kusian was called to the witness stand. He took faltering steps across the courtroom. His dark brown suit looked very worn. His movements seemed unsure and abrupt, with something of the soldier still. He seemed to draw at least some strength from that, some last strength. He lowered his head, ducking as if the public’s eyes could hit him like stones. He was in any case rather frail but this made him even more unimposing. “Look at that little wimp,” someone whispered behind Bacheran. “And he had a woman like her!” meaning Kusian.

  Walter Kusian gave his name and particulars. His voice was low and strangled and his body was so contracted that he could barely lift his hand up to be sworn in. His fingers shook. Although, as husband of the defendant, he had the right to refuse to answer questions, he needed no time to think it over: “No, I will say everything I know.”

  “He’s an ex SA group leader and an old party member,” Helga reminded Bacheran again. “He wore the golden party insignia…” It was obvious that she thought such a man was capable of anything.

  Bacheran too had the same reflex reaction and he felt a dark suspicion: could it be that old scores were being settled here…?

  The presiding judge finally came to the point. “Mr. Kusian, would you please be so kind as to describe your married life with the defendant…?”

  Kusian nodded and Bernhard almost thought he heard a “Sir! Yes Sir!” “Well, how should I start…? My wife… when I met her, she told me she was the daughter of a major who died in the First World War. During the last war she had relations with many other men. One night when I came home, my oldest daughter said to me: “We had to call Mommy Aunt all the time when the uncles came.”

  Dr. Korsch leafed through his files and seemed a little absent. “Right, right… Your marriage ended in 1947. You did not see each other for a long time, then one day your wife wrote you a letter asking to resume contact… When was the first time you noticed she was taking drugs?”

  “She already used to take large doses of sleeping pills when we were married.”

  “Do you know why she did?”

  “No, but she is an unfortunate person, she has two souls. She attempted suicide again and again and I was always her caregiver. She was always short of money and in ‘48 some guy took advantage of her. And also, yes, that was the time when she said to me one day: ‘Look here,’ and lifted her skirt and injected herself with morphine, in the thigh.”

  “So you took care of your ex wife, you brought her wood, coal and food… How touching…”

  “I did, yes, I still love her.” He seemed close to tears and Bernhard couldn’t help changing his mind about him.

  “As a sort of gift in return, she gave you a few things, in December 1949,” the president continued. “A pair of striped pants, a black jacket and a briefcase.”

  Walter Kusian nodded. “Yes, they are among the things here.” And when a court officer showed him each piece of clothing, he confirmed his answer again very clearly.

  “They belonged to the murder victim, Hermann Seidelmann,” said the State Attorney.

  Dr. Korsch then turned to Elisabeth Kusian. “Did you give him these things?”

  “No!”

  Walter Kusian shook his head silently. He didn’t shout, he didn’t accuse her of lying, instead he recounted, in a calm and sober manner, the events of the day in December when they had met. “Around Christmas time my wife was very depressed. When I asked her what was wrong, she answered: ‘Walter, I’ve done something horrible!’ And when I prodded her to say more, she said: ‘Only on my death bed will I tell you.’ At that time I thought she was just trying to make herself sound important. On Christmas Eve I brought her a rucksack full of coal and then another on the second day of Christmas. On both occasions, she didn’t let me inside her room. I asked for the rucksacks back but she said she had lent them to someone.”

  As Walter Kusian spoke in a monotone, Bacheran kept his eyes on Elisabeth Kusian. She wasn’t hunched over on her seat anymore, she stood straight, she looked like an athlete just before the start signal, he thought. Her eyes were fixed on her husband. As if she wanted to hypnotize him.

  But he wasn’t disturbed. “On New Year’s day I was allowed into her room,” he continued. “I saw both rucksacks lying on the floor so I wanted to take them with me. She only gave me one. She said she used the other to carry skinned rabbits and she still had to clean the blood…”

  The court room was silent. Everyone could imagine how she had carried Seidelmann’s and Merten’s severed limbs and then thrown them into the ruins of the bombed out houses.

  As her husband was speaking the last few words, Kusian started pitching to the side in an agitated way, she reeled sideways and looked as if she would fall to the floor but then got up suddenly and took a few long, quick steps toward the judges’ desk. Her face was almost green. Such was the strength of her emotions that it seemed to impair the regular flow of blood in her veins: her hands, as she steadied herself against the president’s desk, were blue.

  “I wish to speak.”

  The presiding judge
signaled to Walter Kusian to stand to the side and let his wife speak.

  At first her voice was so low that even the people in the front rows could barely understand what she was saying. “I have been in custody for a year. I cannot express all I’ve been through and I wish to explain to my husband how much I have suffered.” She proceeded to recount, for three quarters of an hour, her voice growing louder and louder, the events of her married life: it had been, she said, a long martyrdom. Her husband beat her and he raised the children with inhuman cruelty.

  “That’s not true!” Walter Kusian exclaimed again and again.

  “It is true,” Waldemar Weimann, who was sitting right behind Bacheran, whispered. “He admitted as much to me, several times. He beat them to ‘extirpate their mother’s wickedness from them.’ That’s how he justified it.”

  Elisabeth Kusian started breathing with difficulty, intermittently and her whole body began to shake. Bacheran noted: ‘like an electroshock’. In the end she spoke as if in a state of hypnosis.

  “My husband says he didn’t beat the children. But there were instances when the children themselves said he had: they said he put the younger one’s head under the bed covers so the neighbors wouldn’t hear him screaming when he hit him… Once, when our second one had to get undressed for a medical exam at school, the nurse saw her back full of bruises. The school doctor asked me how it had happened. I said I had beaten her. The Child Welfare Agency gave me an official warning. I had to let them take a look at the child every day for eight days. But my husband knows what really happened. I took the blame because he was a member of the Party and I was afraid he would have to go to the police…”

  Bernhard and Helga were inclined to believe her in this instance. For one thing, Walter Kusian really came across as the very image of the dull sadist, and second, such punishments had been the norm in certain circles. Elisabeth Kusian went on washing the family’s dirty linen and recounted many things Bacheran had known for a long time. Still he kept his ears peeled throughout because he somehow sensed that this was just laying the ground work for the bombshell to come. And he was right…

  “And then, it came to this horrible crime…” She lowered her voice and it almost seemed as if she wanted to whisper something to the presiding judge only. “I want to say how it happened. I want to be in peace, I have had enough now… Mr. Seidelmann was not a stranger to me.”

  A ripple of sound went through the room. Everyone knew that she had always asserted that she had first set eyes on this man from the Eastern zone on December 3rd, the day of his death. And she had always denied that she was the famous ‘Beautiful woman at Zoo’ written on Seidelmann’s cigarette pack. Now she was saying: “I met Mr. Seidelmann at Zoo station where he was exchanging money. I used to take the train from that station every day to go to work, so after a while you start recognizing the faces of the people who are there daily. ‘Why in such a hurry, Nurse?’ Seidelmann often called out to me. Then we said hello and finally he came up to me at the streetcar stop: “How about a cup of coffee?’ Since I was with Mr. Muschan, I answered: ‘No time.’”

  “And when did Mr. Seidelmann visit you at home for the first time?”

  “On Saturday, December 3rd. My husband wanted to meet me at Zoo station the day before. He was going to exchange a big sum of money. Whether it was for his employer or for a colleague from work, I don’t know anymore. But he didn’t show up. When I came home from work late in the evening he was standing in front of my door with a sack of coal or wood. He wanted to come up to my room but I said: ‘It’s too late, my landlady is already sleeping.’ Then he threatened me: ‘I have enough of that. I always give you money and you never ask where it comes from. You just take it and you never ask if maybe that’s not my last penny I’m giving you. I don’t want to wait any longer…’ I had to promise him that I would come to his apartment the next day. That was on the Saturday in question…”

  Bacheran knew what this meant in clear: Walter Kusian had supposedly threatened his wife to stop supporting her with money and gifts unless she let him into her bed again. And this means: ‘He was still in love with me!’ with an exclamation point.

  Dr. Korsch now asked Mrs. Kusian to describe in detail the events of that December 3, 1949.

  “I will.” She proceeded to spin a really fascinating scenario. “As a matter of fact, I was to meet Mr. Muschan. But since I had to go to my husband’s I phoned him to say that I couldn’t see him. I went to the hospital, I intended to take a bath. Mr. Seidelmann was at Zoo station. “Beautiful woman, why so sad?” he asked. And so it ended up that we made an appointment to meet and go to the movies that night. He was going to pick me up… He came around five. ‘You don’t know me at all and still you come to my house,’ I said. ‘I’m divorced, I have children…’ I also told him that my ex husband… was persecuting me. Then there was a knock at the door. It was my husband… ‘I don’t want to detain you, Nurse Elisabeth,’ Seidelmann said. He felt embarrassed and made to leave. But my husband growled: ‘No need to pretend. Go on saying ‘du’ to each other for all I care.’ My husband thought Mr. Seidelmann was Kurt Muschan, my Kurt. I only said: ‘We didn’t say “du”.’ To avoid any kind of scene between the two men I went to my closet and took out some clothes to change out of my uniform and I said to Mr. Seidelmann: ‘I’m coming with you to the movies.’ Then I went to the bathroom to change and fix my hair. When I came to the door of my room, it was locked. I couldn’t think why. I knocked. ‘Just a moment,’ my husband answered from inside. Finally he opened the door, and locked it again as soon as I was inside. The light was out but my room is never completely dark: I noticed the sofa had been moved, the table was upended, magazines lay on the floor. My husband came up to me and stood very close. ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘You made me kill a man, it’s your fault.’ Poor Seidelmann was lying behind the desk, throttled with a clothes line.”

  That landed like a bomb. Now this was exciting. The people in the room were not the only ones to breathe freer, later the whole city felt relieved. What could not have happened, did not in fact happen. It was unthinkable that a nurse could be such a bestial killer. Everyone’s intuition had been right after all.

  Even Bacheran couldn’t resist the feeling. “Look, as far as I know from reading the files her depiction of Seidelmann’s murder cannot be disproved. As for Walter Kusian, there’s a lot that speaks against him: he was jealous of his wife and he’s a registered nurse and was a sanitary orderly for six years during the war.”

  “Shush…!” Helga stopped him because Elisabeth Kusian was not done.

  “Then I had to get a knife from the kitchen for my husband and he started to dismember the body. I did what my husband told me to do. We worked until morning. Then we packed the limbs in the rucksacks and hid them at Knie and Stettiner station. I was never a morphine addict. But I did have recourse to morphine after this horrible thing happened.”

  Dr. Korsch looked at her doubtfully. He was going to turn 70 in a few days and nothing could shake him anymore. Although Bacheran often had the impression that the presiding judge could no longer follow everything entirely, in this case he reacted very fast: he immediately asked about Merten.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Kusian, Dorothea Merten was murdered on December 26: your husband killed her too…?”

  “Yes, he did. He showed up at my place without warning when Mrs. Merten brought me the typewriter. The three of us drank some wine and some liqueur. I don’t know but the two of them seemed to know each other. All of a sudden my husband pulled a noose around her neck from the back and strangled her. I was unable to stop it. He threatened to kill me too if I opened my mouth. And the children, what if they found out… So we tied up the corpse and stuffed it into a sailor’s bag and my husband put the bag in a taxi and drove off. Finally, I went to get Kurt who had been waiting in a restaurant and we celebrated Christmas together in my room.”

  “Is that all, Mrs. Kusian?”

  “Yes. Up
until now I lied, I lied all the time. Now I can’t do it anymore, I want to rest, finally.” She seemed totally exhausted.

  Dr. Korsch knew that it was now time to return to Walter Kusian. “What do you have to say to this…?”

  “It’s a lie from beginning to end!”

  The presiding judge sounded harsh. “Mr. Kusian, isn’t it odd that you are so often with your ex wife?”

  Walter Kusian did not hesitate. “No. Why shouldn’t I be? As a matter of fact we intended to move in together again to spare the rent money.”

  Bacheran thought that was fairly silly. Didn’t the man realize that saying this made him look even more suspicious? If he admitted that he and his ex wife were a couple again, then it would seem plausible that they had worked together to dispose of the two corpses – exactly as Elisabeth Kusian had described it.

  She seemed to know instinctively that this was an opportunity to seize and she looked at him pleadingly. “Walter, it’s time you told them it’s you, tell them how it happened. I beg you! Think of the children!”

  State Attorney Kuntze thought this needed an explanation. “Defendant, if he committed these crimes, how do you explain the fact that Walter Kusian stayed in Berlin?”

  “He told me to pretend I was addicted to morphine and then I would benefit from Paragraph 51.”

  “And why didn’t you denounce Mr. Kusian as the perpetrator during the investigation?”

  “Because I wanted to keep him out of it so he could take care of our dear children while I was in jail. We decided that the first one to be arrested would say he alone was guilty.”

  Bacheran had to admit that Kusian was an extremely good actress. The whole thing sounded heartfelt and real: you couldn’t help but believe it. And it sounded logical as well.

  “I still can’t understand why she didn’t turn him in immediately,” Helga said.

  “The wheels of justice don’t turn that fast. But maybe Kuntze isn’t entirely convinced yet and he wants to wait and hear what Kurt Muschan has to say.”