A Quiet Flame

The elections of July 31, 1932, found the Nazis gaining more seats in the Reichstag but still without the overall majority that would have enabled Hitler to form a government. Incredibly, the Communists then sided with the Nazis in parliament to force a vote of no-confidence in Papen’s hapless government. After that, I disliked the Communists even more than I disliked the Nazis.

Once again the Reichstag was dissolved. And once again an election was called, this time for November 6. And, once again, the republic clung on by its fingernails as the Nazis failed to achieve an overall majority. It was now Schleicher’s turn to take a shot at being chancellor of Germany. He lasted two months. Another putsch was forecast. And, desperate for someone who could govern Germany with any authority whatsoever, Hindenburg sacked the incompetent Schleicher and asked Adolf Hitler, the only party leader who hadn’t had a turn at being chancellor, to form a government.

Less than thirty days later, Hitler made certain that there could be no more inconclusive elections. On February 27, 1933, he burned down the Reichstag. The Nazi revolution had begun. Not long after that, I left the police and went to work at the Hotel Adlon. I forgot all about Anita Schwarz. And I never again spoke to Ernst Ge

It was all there in the box file. My notes, my reports, my police diary, my memoranda, Illma

Most of Herzefelde’s inquiry had been focused on Walter Pieck, a twenty-two-year-old man from Gunzburg. Pieck was Elizabeth Bremer’s skating teacher at the Prinzregenten Stadium in Munich. In summer he was a te

Reading Herzefelde’s case notes, I was reminded that Pieck had maintained Elizabeth had bi

Neither Elizabeth’s own doctor nor any of her school friends knew about a pregnancy. But Grund noted Elizabeth had inherited some money in her grandfather’s will, which she had used to open a savings account, and that the day before her death she had withdrawn almost half of this money and none of it had been found on her body. And he had concluded that even if Pieck had not helped her to procure an abortion, Elizabeth-by all accounts a resourceful and capable girl-must have managed to do so by herself. And that Anita Schwarz might have done the same. And that these abortions had been botched. And that the illegal abortionist had sought to cover his tracks by making their accidental deaths look like lust murders.

I couldn’t disagree with much of Grund’s conclusions. And yet no one was ever arrested for the murders. The leads seemed to dry up and, after 1933, there were only two more notes on the file. One was that in 1934, Walter Pieck joined the SS and became a guard at Dachau concentration camp. The other concerned Anita Schwarz’s father, Otto.

Having joined the Berlin police in 1933, as Kurt Daluege’s deputy assistant, Otto Schwarz was subsequently appointed as a judge.

I got up from my desk and went to the window. The lights were on in the Ministry of Finance. Probably they were trying to work out what to do about Argentina’s rampant inflation. Either that or they were having to work late to decide how they were going to raise the money to pay for Evita’s jewelry. The street below was busy with people. For some reason there was a long line of people outside the Ministry of Labor. And traffic. Buenos Aires was always full of traffic: taxis, trolleybuses, micros, American cars, and trucks, like so many unco

Anita Schwarz must have got pregnant and, fearing the scandal that might result from the discovery of their disabled daughter’s amateur prostitution, Herr and Frau Schwarz must have paid the medicine man from Munich to carry out an abortion on her. Probably that was why she had been carrying so much money in her pocket. Only the abortion procedure had gone wrong and, anxious to cover up his crime, the medicine man had tried to make her death look like a lust murder. The same way he had done in Munich. After all, it was better for him that the police should be looking for some kind of crazed sex-killer than an incompetent doctor. Lots of women had died at the hands of illegal abortionists. They weren’t called backstreet angel-makers for nothing. I recalled the case of one man, a dentist in the Bavarian city of Ulm, who, during the 1920s, had actually strangled several pregnant women for sex while he was supposed to have been giving them abortions.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked my theory. The man I had been looking for was a doctor, or some sort of medicine man, most probably from Munich. My first idea was the jelly doctor, Kassner, until I remembered checking out his alibi: on the day of Anita Schwarz’s murder, he’d been at a urologists’ conference in Ha