For a while I was back in Homicide. Berliners were still killing each other, although there wasn’t a moment passed when I didn’t think it risible that I should continue to believe that this mattered very much, knowing what I now knew about what was happening in the East. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t remember the sight of old Jewish men and women being herded toward execution pits where they were dispatched by drunken, laughing SS firing squads. Still, I went through the motions of being a proper detective, although it often felt like I was trying to put out a fire in an ashtray when, down the road, a whole city was the scene of a major conflagration.
It was while I was investigating the several homicides that came my way in early September 1941 that I discovered some new motives for murder that weren’t in the jurisprudence books. Motives that stemmed from the quaint new realities of Berlin life. The smallholder in Weissensee who drove himself mad with coarse, home-made vodka and then killed the postwoman with an axe. A butcher in Wilmersdorf who was stabbed with his own knife by the local air-raid warden in a dispute about a short ration of bacon. The young nurse from the Rudolf Virchow Hospital who, because of the city’s acute accommodation crisis, poisoned a 65-year-old spinster in Plotzensee so that she might have the victim’s better-appointed room. An SS sergeant back on leave from Riga who, habituated to the mass killings that were going on in Latvia, shot his parents because he could see no reason not to shoot them. But most of the soldiers who came home from the eastern front and were in a mood to kill someone, killed themselves.
I might have done it myself but for the certainty that I wouldn’t be missed at all; and the sure knowledge that there were many others – Jews mostly – who seemed to soldier on with so much less in life than I had. Yes. In the late summer of 1941 it was the Jews and what was happening to the Jews that helped to persuade me against killing myself.
Of course, the old-fashioned sort of Berlin murders – the ones that used to sell newspapers – were still committed. Husbands continued to murder their wives, just like before. And on occasion wives murdered their husbands. From where I sat most of the husbands who got murdered – bullies too free with their fists and their criticism – had it coming. I’ve never hit a woman unless we’d talked about it first. Prostitutes got their throats cut or were battered to death, as before. And not just prostitutes. In the summer preceding my return from the Ukraine a lust-killer named Paul Ogorzow pleaded guilty to the rapes and murders of eight women and the attempted murders of at least eight more. The popular Press dubbed him the S-Bahn Murderer because most of his attacks were carried out on trains or near S-Bahn stations.
That is why Paul Ogorzow came into my mind when, late one night in the second week of September 1941, I was called to take a look at a body that had been found close to the line between the S-Bahn stations at Jannowitz Bridge and Schlesischer. In the blackout nobody was quite sure if the body was a man’s or a woman’s, which was more understandable when you took into account that it had been hit by a train and was missing its head. Sudden death is rarely ever tidy. If it was, they wouldn’t need detectives. But this one was as untidy as anything I’d seen since the Great War, when a mine or a howitzer shell could reduce a man to a mangled heap of bloody clothes and jagged bone in the blink of an eye. Perhaps that was why I was able to look at it with such detachment. I hope so. The alternative – that my recent experience in the murder ghettoes of Minsk had left me indifferent to the sight of human suffering – was too awful to contemplate.
The other investigating detectives were Wilhelm Wurth, a sergeant who was a big noise in the police sports movement, and Gottfried Lehnhoff, an inspector who had returned to the Alex after having retired.
Wurth was in the fencing team, and the previous winter he had taken part in Heydrich’s skiing competition for the German Police and won a medal. Wurth would have been in the Army but for the fact that he was a year or two too old. But he was a useful man to have along on a murder investigation in the event that the victim had skied onto the point of a sword. He was a thin, quiet man with ears like bell-pulls and an upper lip that was as full as a walrus moustache. It was a good face for a detective in the modern Berlin police force, but he wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked. He wore a plain grey double-breasted suit, carried a thick walking stick, and chewed on the stem of a cherrywood pipe that was almost always empty but somehow he managed to smell of tobacco.
