Ostland, page 4
The last few words were all but lost as Lüdtke was hit by another consumptive outburst of coughing. He looked up at me with bleary, watering eyes and then, as if reading my mind, said: ‘Yes, I know, you’re quite right, my bodily hygiene is a disgrace. But when I am working on a case, that’s the last thing I worry about. My whole mind is focused on the need to catch the killer and prevent more deaths. Everything, absolutely everything else is forgotten. And this case, this big, fat shit-sausage of a case … Ach! Look over there, Heuser …’
Lüdtke pointed across the room to the far wall on which a large map of one segment of Berlin’s eastern suburbs was pinned. It was covered with small coloured flags and pinned threads that radiated from those flags to collections of photographs and drawings that surrounded the map itself. A black-board, propped on an easel just in front of the wall, was covered with notes in white chalk, interrupted by occasional sweeps of an eraser.
‘There, that’s our case,’ the chief of the murder squad said. ‘Give me five minutes to clean myself up and I’ll tell you all about it.’
5
It was actually closer to fifteen minutes before Lüdtke returned to the squad-room, but the time had been well spent. His transformation was remarkable. His face was clean-shaven, his hair brushed and his white shirt clean and crisply starched. Now he looked like a detective under whom I could be proud to serve.
Lüdtke’s dirty clothes were bundled up in yesterday’s shirt. ‘Take that lot to the laundry,’ he said, giving it to Tietmeyer. ‘Then see if you can rustle up a couple of coffees, or whatever they’re passing off as coffee this morning, for Heuser and me. And when you’ve done that, get off home. You need a break.’
‘Thank you, Commissar.’
Lüdtke and I may have been police officers, but we were also men, so we both watched Tietmeyer leave the room. There seemed to be a new spring in her step, even the hint of a swing to her hips. For the first time I saw her as a young woman who might almost be deemed attractive.
‘She’s a good girl, that one,’ Lüdtke said, and then turned his attention back to me. ‘Come,’ he said, leading the way towards the map on the wall. ‘Welcome to a very sick, benighted corner of the Reich.’
Lüdtke paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Still chastened by my earlier embarrassment, I waited silently to hear what my boss had to say.
‘Now,’ Lüdtke began, ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how important it is that you familiarize yourself with the details of the case as soon as possible.’
‘Of course, Commissar.’
‘In my view we are dealing with six murders, and at the very least another six serious sexual assaults and attempted murders.’
The moment Lüdtke began to speak I was struck for the first time in my life by one of the most intoxicating sensations that anyone can experience: being at the heart of events and privy to secrets that are hidden from everyone else. The S-Bahn murders had been the topic of gossip, third-hand misinformation and wild theorizing from the most humble to the mightiest in Berlin. Even at the Leaders’ School, though we had discussed the case incessantly over the past two or three months, none of us had really known what it involved. The realization that I was about to find out was absolutely thrilling. My fatigue, my nerves and my self-consciousness were all forgotten and my attention was absolute as Lüdtke continued: ‘These offences can be divided geographically into two main groups. The first group of attacks, of which only one proved fatal, took place here in the Friedrichsfelde district.’ He pointed to a cluster of flags in the top left-hand corner of the map. ‘Do you know the area at all?’
I was delighted to be able to say: ‘Yes, Commissar, I grew up in Lichtenberg, very close by. When I was a small boy my parents used to take me for walks past all the gardens and allotments there. Many of the little lanes were just dirt tracks. I used to like finding loose stones and kicking them along the road.’
I fell silent, uncomfortably aware that my enthusiasm had got the better of me. I’d given way to an uncharacteristic display of nostalgia when a simple yes or no would have sufficed. ‘I’m sorry, Commissar. I didn’t mean to say so much.’
‘That’s quite all right, Heuser. And you do not have to call me Commissar every time you say a word to me. We will be talking a lot: it might get wearing. So if I give you a direct order, fine. Otherwise, don’t bother.’
‘Yes … Commissar.’ I waited a second then added: ‘You gave me an order,’ by way of explanation.
Lüdtke managed a tired laugh. ‘So I did! Now, these flags in Friedrichsfelde mark attacks on women, none of them fatal. The first took place on 13 August 1939: Lina Budzinski, age forty-three, hit over the head and stabbed four times in the back. Then four months later on 14 December, Hertha Jablinski, twenty-one, stabbed four times in the neck and the head. Then there’s a gap, I don’t know why, until 27 July 1940 when Gertrud Nieswandt, twenty-six, is stabbed in the neck and the thigh. Less than a month goes by and then Julie Schumacher, forty-one, is attacked in a tunnel here, near Rummelsburg. A man shines a torch in her eyes then hits her over the head. All the attacks occurred at night. None of the women, therefore, has been able to give us a detailed description of her assailant. Of course, there is no proof that the man who perpetrated these attacks is the one now known as the S-Bahn murderer, but keep the nature of the attacks in mind: the victims are all women and they are hit over the head or stabbed. As we consider the actual S-Bahn crimes, you will see why both the targets selected and the methods used incline me to believe that we are only talking about one man.
‘So now let me take you to the No. 3 S-Bahn line from Rummelsburg, here…’ Lüdtke pointed towards a point just below the previous cluster of flags. ‘… to Friedrichshagen, here.’
Now his finger was at the bottom-right corner. The railway line traced a diagonal line across the map from one corner to the other, dotted by more flags along the way, indicating scenes of crimes.
‘As a local, you will doubtless know all the stations on this stretch: Rummelsburg … Rummelsburg Depot … Karlshorst … Wuhlheide … Köpenick … Hirschgarten … Friedrichshagen …’
‘Yes, Commissar,’ I said – the title had slipped out automatically. I waited for Lüdtke’s rebuke, but he wasn’t paying attention to me. He was looking across the room and saying, ‘Ah … the magnificent Miss Tietmeyer has returned.’
She approached us bearing a tray on which stood a pot, two mugs, milk, sugar and a blue packet of French Gitanes. The unmistakable smell of real coffee filled the room like a memory of a bygone age. Lüdtke closed his eyes, breathed in the delicious aroma and sighed.
‘We’re in luck,’ Tietmeyer said. ‘A black marketeer was arrested last night and all the contraband goods he was selling were seized.’ A knowing smile played around the corner of her mouth as she placed the tray down on the nearest desk, sweeping a pile of papers out of the way to make room for it. ‘In order to determine precisely what charges should be brought, it has been decided that experienced senior officers will be required to sample and test the goods in question.’
‘But there are only two cups,’ Lüdtke said. ‘The accuracy of this test would surely be assisted by the help of a woman’s sensitive palate. Get yourself a cup, Tietmeyer.’
‘Thank you, sir!’ she said, with a smile that lit up her face, reinforcing the good impression that the sight of her departing backside had already made upon me.
Tietmeyer fetched herself a cup, then served us all. I wondered at the propriety of consuming black-market coffee that was now the property of the state. Officers senior to myself had obviously commandeered it for their own use. But was that a justification for drinking it or did it merely compound the offence?
It wasn’t for me, however, to criticize Lüdtke’s behaviour: not to his face, at any rate. So I said, ‘This is wonderful, thank you,’ to Tietmeyer as she handed me my cup and was intrigued to see the rather startled pleasure that she took in my words and the warm smile with which I’d accompanied them. Perhaps she, like me, was reconsidering her first impression.
We all relaxed, savouring our drinks. For months now it had been virtually impossible to obtain anything that even resembled real coffee. We’d all been making do with an appalling substitute known as Muckefuck. It was said to contain malt, barley, acorns, figs, chicory, and even the occasional dandelion root. Anything, in fact, but an actual coffee bean, or a single milligram of caffeine. Now here was this magical brew, and as it slipped down my throat my concerns about its origins seemed absurdly nitpicking and naïve. The Kripo played a vital role in society, working long hours, sometimes in circumstances of great personal danger. Surely they were entitled to enjoy an occasional perk of the job?
For a couple of minutes no one spoke, not daring to break the spell that the coffee had cast. Lüdtke quietly occupied himself transferring the Gitanes from their packet to a battered gunmetal case. That task complete, he emptied his cup in one, placed it back on the tray and in a businesslike voice made harsher-sounding by the mellow silence that had preceded it said, ‘Thank you, Tietmeyer. You may go. Drink up, Heuser, we must get back to work.’
He returned to the map. This time, there was no stopping to look at Tietmeyer. Lüdtke was all business now.
‘The first assault that we know of on the S-Bahn occurred on the night of 20 September 1940, at 23:35 hours. A man attempted to throttle a young woman called Gerda Kargoll in a second-class compartment of the train between Karlshorst and Wuhlheide. The attack was completely unprovoked and there was no sexual element. The man then forced her out of the door of the train, which was moving at approximately sixty kilometres-per-hour. But Fräulein Kargoll had luck on her side. She wasn’t seriously injured by the initial attack. And, even more fortunately, she is by profession a school sports teacher. Thanks to this, she was able to keep her balance, and then roll forward when she hit the ground, minimizing the impact.’
‘Like a parachutist,’ I observed, thinking back to my Luftwaffe days.
‘Quite so … Unfortunately, however, both for Fräulein Kargoll and for us, her nimbleness and agility were so great and her injuries so few that when she first went to the Serious Crime Office and reported the incident some idiot there refused to believe her story. He accused her of making the whole thing up. He thought she’d had some fight with a boyfriend and just wanted to get him into trouble. So there was no follow-up investigation.’
I was appalled. ‘My God, if anyone had known then …’
‘Yes, we might have caught this bastard before he killed anyone. But that wasn’t the only time we overlooked him. Let’s go back to Friedrichsfelde … You will doubtless recall from your childhood walks all the small buildings that litter the place. Most of them are just weekend retreats, or a place to go for a bit of fun on a summer’s night. But some people live there full-time. On 4 October one of them was found dead, stabbed in the throat, in one of those shacks. That’s a picture of the murder scene.’
He pointed at a black-and-white photograph pinned to the board next to the map. It showed a woman slumped on her knees amidst the detritus of a poor family’s kitchen. She was slightly hidden behind a wooden stool on which a white enamelled basin was filled with dirty dishes. Her body was leaning against a large basket that might have contained laundry. Behind it stood a wooden kitchen dresser. The woman’s dress was riding up over her stockings. It was drenched in blood, as was the basket behind her. There were blood spatters, too, over the front of the wooden dresser. Her head was horribly tilted to one side, as if it could no longer be supported by her mutilated neck.
‘My God,’ I whispered, thinking of my mother and sister. I felt a fierce determination to ensure that neither they, nor any other women in Berlin, would suffer so terrible a fate.
‘Her name was Gerda Ditter,’ said Lüdtke. ‘She was a war widow, only twenty, had two little children.’
‘How awful for them, losing their mother and father so young,’ I observed.
Lüdtke shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But you mustn’t waste time or mental energy feeling sorry for those children. The best thing you can do for them is to catch the man who orphaned them … Now, it was assumed that Frau Ditter had interrupted a robbery. The thief, or thieves, lashed out with a knife and that was the end of her.’
‘Was anything taken?’
‘Good question. No, there was no evidence of any theft and Frau Ditter lived in such poverty that there was very little of any value to steal. Nevertheless, until very recently no one made any connection between the Ditter killing and the incidents along the S-Bahn, the second of which occurred precisely one month later.
‘On November 4th a thirty-year-old woman called Elizabeth Bendorf was beaten about the head and thrown from the train, and this time no one could possibly think she was making it up, because she was lying unconscious on the ground, seriously injured and in desperate need of hospital treatment.’
‘But she lived?’ I asked.
‘Yes, this one did.’
‘Then could she not describe her assailant? And what about the sports teacher. Kargoll? Surely she provided a description.’
‘We spoke to them both and they were able to give us some information. Both agreed that the man wore a uniform of some kind, with a cap pulled so low over his eyes that they were unable to get a clear sight of his face. But they disagreed on the details of his uniform. Kargoll thought he was wearing a black jacket without any buttons. Bendorf swore it was blue and with buttons. These differences are not significant: there is almost no light on an S-Bahn train, making colours very difficult to distinguish, and the traumatic nature of the women’s experiences clearly affected their memories. But there is something very important about the uniform. Can you tell me what that might be?’
I thought for a moment. It was obvious now that Wilhelm Lüdtke was far from the drooling, drunken tramp he’d seemed on first encounter. I was beginning to understand how he’d acquired such a fine reputation and I wanted to earn his respect.
‘Well, neither woman was alarmed when she first saw the man,’ I said cautiously. I was relieved to see Lüdtke’s silent nod of agreement, encouraging me to say more. ‘Therefore there must have been something about him that made them trust him. The women saw the uniform and assumed that they were safe.’
‘Very good, Heuser,’ Lüdtke said, with a warmth that greatly cheered me. ‘And who is the most likely person to wear a uniform on the S-Bahn?’
‘Someone who works on it?’
‘Exactly. So when considering the evidence – just the evidence, alone – where would you look first to find a suspect?’
‘Among S-Bahn staff,’ I said, the logic of my argument leading me to that conclusion before I had time to consider its ideological implications.
‘Good man,’ said Lüdtke. ‘I thought so too. That is why I had more than three thousand men, out of a total of eight thousand workers, interviewed, without any success. We were unable to isolate any suspects.’
‘What if the killer does not actually work for the S-Bahn?’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps he stole a uniform, all the better to impersonate a respectable employee.’
‘That’s a possibility. The killer could be an impostor. The women wouldn’t know it and would respect the uniform just the same.’
‘So he could be anyone – a foreign worker, for example. There are tens of thousands of them in the city and few of them have much love for our Fatherland.’
‘I agree,’ Lüdtke said. ‘That is why we have already leafleted many of the largest labour camps in the city, offering rewards for information. Unfortunately none has yet been provided. Nor have there been any reports of stolen S-Bahn uniforms.’
‘And the Jews? Our instructors at Charlottenburg were always saying that they have an inherently criminal nature.’
That wasn’t a reflection of my opinions, simply a statement of fact. The entire legal system was predicated on the notion that race, political opinions and personality types were crucial factors in antisocial behaviour.
Lüdtke gave a weary sigh. ‘My superiors have made the same point, repeatedly, but there is no evidence to suggest any Jewish involvement. Think about it, Heuser: Jews are banned from working on the S-Bahn and find it almost impossible to travel on trains or buses. If a Jew wanted to kill women, wouldn’t he do it somewhere else?’
I said nothing. Lüdtke’s logic was hard to refute, even if it did diverge so markedly from the racial theories I’d been taught.
Lüdtke had turned back to the map on the wall. ‘I want to move on to the night of Tuesday, 3rd December. There were actually two murders that night, and in my opinion our man committed both of them. Neither of the bodies, however, was found until the Wednesday morning. One was in Prinz-Heinrich-Strasse. It was very close to the tracks on the southern side of the line – in other words, near the track leading out of the city – about four hundred metres from Karlshorst station. The victim was a nineteen-year-old girl called Irmgard Frese. She had been sexually assaulted, too, very brutally.
‘The second victim was a 26-year-old nurse: Elfriede Franke. Her body was barely two hundred metres away from Frese’s, towards the centre of the city, on the north side of the railway line. She was lying between the track and a wooden fence approximately two metres high, over which she certainly could not have climbed. So she must have been thrown from a train. She also had injuries to her skull, consistent with being hit over the head. So it was clear that her attacker was the same man who had previously assaulted Bendorf and Kargoll.
‘Commissar Zach – he’s a good man, you’ll meet him soon enough – took initial charge of the investigation because I was already at work on the Prinz-Heinrich-Strasse case. But our police pathologist Dr Weimann conducted the post-mortems for both bodies. He established that Irmgard Frese had been killed by blows to the head that were very similar to those suffered by Franke, the nurse. Given the proximity of the two bodies, the timing of their deaths and the method used to kill them, it was reasonable to suppose that both deaths were the work of the same man. And that man had to have been the S-Bahn murderer.’
