by Philip Kerr
“Meanwhile the particular batch of wire used to strangle the girls was tracked down to UFA film studios, Babelsberg; this and the fact that two of the murdered girls had told friends they were going to meet a Rudolf Meinert for a casting session caused the Murder Commission to focus for a time on the film industry. In order to meet some of his victims, Gormann had used this name, knowing that there was a real Rudolf Meinert who was head of production at UFA. Meinert was in fact interviewed by detectives several times. As were other producers and directors at UFA film studios. After a while, anyone who had anything to do with German cinema was interviewed. Detectives even saw Gormann’s advertisement in the newspaper and spoke to him; but he seemed like no one’s idea of a suspect in a murder case. He was a church elder; a man who had won the Iron Cross and been wounded during the war; he even gave money to the Prussian Police Benevolent Fund.
“Gormann also showed detectives some of the movies he had made—innocuous casting films that were a million kilometers away from the kind of film he preferred to make; and he directed detectives to some of the girls he had filmed who testified to his kindness and generosity. Those girls he hadn’t strangled, that is. But what no one thought to check was Gormann’s relationship with the film studio; there was no relationship. As far as the studio was concerned, Gormann was just another supplicant in a long line of supplicants that were, more often than not, ignored.
“Then, in 1923, even as Gormann was being rejected as a suspect, the murders stopped completely. At least, those murders that bore Gormann’s trademarks. Any detective will tell you that the most terrible thing about investigating a series of lust murders is that the murderer stops killing before he is caught. It’s the most appalling feeling on earth to find yourself wishing another murder will be committed in the hope that it might yield up the one vital clue that will crack the case. It’s moral paradoxes like this that make the job so difficult sometimes and which cause homicide detectives many sleepless nights. In circumstances like these I’ve even known detectives to blame themselves for a victim’s death. As paradoxes go, to desire a death in the hope that you might save a life is about as acute a dilemma as you’ll find outside of wartime. It’s no good telling a cop how the philosopher Kant argues that to act in the morally right way people must act from duty. Or—again, according to Kant—that it is not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong but the motives of the person who carries out the action. Most cops I’ve ever met couldn’t even spell ‘categorical imperative.’ And I know I myself fall short of his morally absolute standard every day I go to work.
“But back to Fritz Gormann. When the Kuhlo killings case came my way in 1928, I took the files home with me and spent several nights reading them through in their entirety. And then I read them again. You see, it’s almost invariably the case that when eventually you make an arrest, the evidence was staring you in the face all along; and with this in mind, sometimes the best thing you can do is to arrange a review of all the available evidence in the hope that you may see something that wasn’t seen the first time. You see, a cold case is nothing but all of the false and misleading evidence that, over a period of years, has come to be accepted as true. In other words, you start by patiently challenging almost everything you think you know; even the identity of the victims.
“You might reasonably think that it would be impossible to mistake the identity of a murdered girl. You would be wrong. It turned out that one of the nine murdered girls was someone else: the girl we thought she was had, after a year living in Hannover, turned up safe and well. Meanwhile I was struck by how much work had gone into the investigation and how many people the detectives in the Murder Commission had managed to interview. But by the time I finished I knew the case as well as any detective who’d been in on the case since the beginning.
“Now, before joining the Murder Commission I had been a sergeant working in Vice. Consequently many of my informants were to be found in some less than salubrious places, including a place called the Hundegustav Bar. Previously known as the Borsig Cellar, this was a real dive. At the Hundegustav they had some private rooms where they used to show what were called Minette movies—movies that explicitly featured naked girls on film. Not only were such pornographic films tolerated under the Weimar Republic, incredibly they were actively encouraged as a way of asserting the complete freedom that characterized a modern society—one that had left behind outmoded concepts like morals and accepted standards of behavior. This is one of the reasons why Germany demanded a Nazi revolution in the first place.
“Anyway, I was in there on police business—well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?—and I happened to see one of these films and something about the girl in the film struck me as familiar. I’d seen her before somewhere. But it was several days before I thought to check the Kuhlo case files, and when I did, it turned out that the girl in the film was none other than Amalie Ziethen, the very first girl that Gormann had strangled.
“I went back to the club with my commissar to interview a thief called Gustave the Dog, who owned the Hundegustav Bar. We checked the film and were astonished to find the girl’s name scratched on the film’s leader and also the actual date of her death. Gustave told us he’d paid cash for the film; the man who’d sold it to him hadn’t left a name, of course, but he described him well enough. A respectable man with a bow tie, stiff collar, a limp, perhaps an injured arm, a bowler hat, and an Iron Cross on his lapel. I had an artist friend draw a likeness of the man to Gustave’s exact instructions. Then I went around to some of the other clubs looking for a man like this who might have sold them a Minette movie. But I always drew a blank.
“Doubtless many of you are familiar with the phrase Media vita in morte sumus. I think all homicide detectives have this written on the inside of their hats. And you can hear that sentiment in a poem by the great German poet Rilke, of whom I am fond, which goes, ‘Death stands great before us, We all are his, Even our most carefree laughter to him belongs, and in the midst of the joy that life is, Mortal tears are most immortal songs.’”*
I glanced up as Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller took out a notebook and started to make notes with a silver pen. Was he—I wondered—a fan like me of Rilke? Or was there another, more sinister reason why he was making a note? Was he reminding himself to have some of his thugs come to my flat on Fasanenstrasse in the early hours and arrest me? That was the thing about Müller; as a policeman he was a real wire brush: it was hard to think of him having anything but sinister reasons for doing anything at all.
“Since detectives on the Murder Commission live with death as much as anyone, it’s perhaps natural that they should often believe that murderers stop only because they get caught or because they are dead. Nearly all of the detectives in the Murder Commission who were on the original investigation believed what they wanted to believe: that the killer had been stricken with remorse and committed suicide. But given the fact that the murderer might have been the man in the bowler hat who’d sold Gustave the Minette film, it was now equally possible that this earlier explanation as to why the killer had simply stopped after the last Kuhlo killing—that of Lieschen Ulbrich—was wrong. So I asked myself what other reason might have accounted for the strangler giving up an activity he seemed to very much enjoy? Had something else happened to the Kuhlo killer? Something that had made him stop killing? If he wasn’t dead, had he perhaps left Berlin? Returning to a lengthy list of witnesses who’d been interviewed, I started to investigate what dramatic life events had occurred to any of these men five years ago that might have put a stick in the spokes of a lust murderer’s career. And finally I came up with a list of possible suspects, at the head of which was the name of Fritz Gormann.
“Gormann had been awarded a second-class Iron Cross in 1917, having served as a train transport commander with a field artillery regiment. He had a limp, which was the result of an injury sustained in 1916. As I mentioned, Gormann had been a suspect
until detectives rejected him on the grounds that the bank clerk—now a bank manager—was perceived to be much too mild-mannered ever to kill someone. This was nonsense as his military record clearly demonstrated that Gormann’s medal had been awarded for courage under fire.
“Further research revealed that on the day before his wife’s fortieth birthday in the summer of 1923, Fritz Gormann visited Braun’s jewelry shop at 74 Alte Jakobstrasse. The shop had been robbed twice before—in January 1912 and again in August 1919. Unknown to Gormann when he visited the shop to buy his wife a brooch, the shop was in the process of being robbed a third time. Gormann entered the store to find Herr Braun, the proprietor, lying dead on the floor and a man advancing upon him from a back room with a gun in his hand, demanding the cash that Gormann had brought with him to buy the brooch. Gormann refused and was shot, but not before he managed to hit the murderer with the lead-filled cosh that Braun had kept for self-defense. The robber was subsequently captured and executed while Gormann himself spent six months recovering from his wound in the Charité Hospital.
“But as a result of his wound he lost the use of his right arm, which, I’m sure you will all agree, is a considerable disadvantage for a strangler. And recognizing that his career as a lust murderer was now at an end, Gormann sold his studio in Lichterfelde and went back to being a respectable member of Berlin’s banking community. It seems incredible but it was as simple as that.
“Gormann’s picture as the hero of Alte Jakobstrasse had appeared in the newspapers at the time. And so I took this picture to the Hundegustav Bar, where Gustave himself confirmed that Gormann was indeed the man who had sold him the pornographic Minette film. But was he the killer? It’s one thing selling an erotic film that includes a real murder, but that doesn’t necessarily make the vendor a murderer.
“The next day I went to the Dresdner Bank at number 35 on the south side of Behren-Strasse and Friedrichstrasse to take a closer look at my suspect. I was still not entirely satisfied that we had our man, and this feeling was underlined when, after we arrested him, we searched his house and found—nothing. Not one can of film. Not one length of Kuhlo wire. Nor any curtain material that matched the piece we had. Nothing. And of course Gormann himself denied everything. Back at the Police Praesidium on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz I was beginning to feel like a bit of a fool. Actually it was worse than that. I felt low enough to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a detective, after all. I don’t mind telling you that I almost handed in my warrant disc right then and there.
“These are the dark moments that haunt every detective. The shadows of the shadows, as I sometimes think of them, when things can become easily mistaken for something else. When evil masquerades as good and lies appear to be the truth. But sometimes, after the shadows comes the light.
“Experience teaches patience. You learn to rely on routines. On habits. On trusting your own way perforce of doing several things at once. I often think that being a detective is a little like the traffic-control tower that stands in the center of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz: not only do its lights have to control traffic from five different directions, it also tells the time and, in bad weather, provides much needed shelter for a traffic policeman.
“In Gormann’s neighborhood of Schlachtensee, I spoke to one of his neighbors who told us that several years before, he’d seen Gormann burying something in his garden. Now, there’s nothing unusual about that in Schlachtensee, at least there isn’t when the man has two arms. But a one-armed man burying an object in his garden is perhaps more unusual, even in Berlin just ten years after a terrible war that maimed so many. In short it might reasonably be supposed that a one-armed man who buries an object in his garden might have something important to hide. So we got a court order, dug it up, and discovered a tarpaulin-covered box containing several dozen cans of film.
“Gormann still denied everything. At least he did until we discovered that in one of the later movies he actually appeared in several frames; and with this evidence we finally secured a full and detailed confession. He told us everything—every horrible fact. His modus operandi. Even his motive: he blamed a woman for encouraging him to volunteer for the army in 1914, which, he said, scarred him for life. And he’d sold the film to the Hundegustav Bar so that he could see one of his victims whenever he wished. The rest he had planned to destroy. Three months later Gormann was beheaded at Brandenburg Prison. I attended the execution myself, and I take no pleasure in mentioning that he did not die well. Incidentally, if you’re so inclined, you can see the death mask they made of his severed head in our police museum at Alexanderplatz.
“The exact number of Gormann’s victims cannot be easily calculated. He himself could not actually remember how many he’d killed. He had destroyed much of his film library after the studio was sold. Also the Weimar decade was a time when so-called lust murders were common, and it was a time when bizarre serial murders regularly occupied the front pages of German newspapers. These cases both engrossed and appalled the German public, and it was this collapse in the moral fiber of the country that led many to call for the restoration of law and order in the form of a National Socialist government. Murder of this kind is much less common today. Indeed, it can honestly be said that it seldom ever occurs; Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer whose crimes horrified this city last year, wasn’t even a German, he was a Pole, from Masuren.”
There was a lot more about Paul Ogorzow’s racial inferiority as the reason for his criminality—a simplistically eugenic explanation provided by the state secretary of the kind to which I had no intention of lending my voice; besides, Masuren was part of East Prussia, and Ogorzow, who had grown up speaking German, was no more a Slav than I was. Instead I’d decided to end on a more personal, insightful note—something which, like a tree cake from the famous Café Buchwald, had layers of meaning that were not immediately obvious. I spoke off the cuff, of course, which would certainly have alarmed Gutterer; then again, no one, not even the state secretary of Propaganda, was about to interrupt me now in front of all our distinguished foreign guests.
“Gentlemen, as a detective I can’t claim to have learned very much in my twenty years of service. Frankly, the older I get, the less I seem to know and the more I’m aware of it.”
A little to my surprise, Himmler started to nod, although I knew for a fact that he wasn’t yet forty-two and he didn’t look like the type to admit his ignorance about anything. Nebe had told me that in Himmler’s briefcase there was always a copy of a Hindu verse scripture called the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t read much of that kind of thing myself and I didn’t know if I thought this made him a wise man; but I expect he thought so.
“But what I’m sure of is this: that it’s the ordinary people like Fritz Gormann who commit the most extraordinary crimes. It’s the ladies who play a Schubert impromptu on the piano who poison your tea, the devoted mothers who smother all of their children, the bank clerks and insurance salesmen who rape and strangle their customers, and the scoutmasters who butcher their whole families with an ax. Dockworkers, truck drivers, machine operators, waiters, pharmacists, teachers. Reliable men. Quiet types. Loving fathers and husbands. Pillars of the community. Respectable citizens. These are your modern murderers. If I had five marks for every killer who was a regular Fritz who wouldn’t harm a fly, then I’d be a rich man.
“Evil doesn’t come wearing evening dress and speaking with a foreign accent. It doesn’t have a scar on its face and a sinister smile. It rarely ever owns a castle with a laboratory in the attic, and it doesn’t have joined-up eyebrows and gap teeth. The fact is, it’s easy to recognize an evil man when you see him: he looks just like you or me. Killers are never monsters, seldom inhuman, and, in my own experience, nearly always commonplace, dull, boring, banal. It’s the human factor that’s important here. As Adolf Hitler has himself pointed out, we should recognize that Man is as cruel as Nature itself. And so perhaps it’s the Man next door who is th
e beast of whom we had better beware. For that reason it is perhaps also the Man next door who is best equipped to catch him. A very ordinary man like me. Thank you and Heil Hitler.”
The men seated in front of me started to clap; they were probably relieved that they could get out of that stifling, smoke-filled room and have a coffee on the terrace. Some of the other speakers who were yet to follow—Albert Widmann, Paul Werner, and Friedrich Panzinger—eyed me with a mixture of envy and contempt. The contempt I was used to, of course. As Nebe had reminded me, my own career was stalled, permanently; I was just air and a threat to no one; but they still had their own speaking ordeals ahead of them, and it wasn’t long before I learned that I’d managed to set the bar quite high. As I sat down, Nebe made some long-winded appreciative noises at the lectern and told everyone how I’d modestly neglected to mention the police decoration I’d received for apprehending Gormann and what an asset I was to everyone in Kripo at Werderscher Markt. This was news to me as I hadn’t ever been through the door of the smart, new police building on Werderscher Markt and, other than Nebe himself, knew hardly anyone who worked there. It sounded a lot like praise but he might as well have been giving Ebert’s eulogy on the steps of the Reichstag. Still, it was nice of him to bother; after all, there were some, like Panzinger and Widmann, who would happily have seen me on my way to Buchenwald concentration camp.
