“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 the 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.