Murder in Munich

By SARAH GAINHAM EVERY newspaper-reader in Germany—and that has been everybody who can read in the last six weeks—has grabbed for the papers in the morning as if they were Brigitte Bardot and Curd Juergens together on TV. In Munich, the centre of interest, nothing has been spoken of but the Trial for months in the circles of theatre-artists-journalists, not to mention police- men and lawyers. Yet when I open the London papers or Time there is not a single word to be seen about what has excited more talk and self- examination in Germany than Rosemarie Nitri- bitt and Peter Ktirten together. So no wonder we are always being surprised about the things people do, apparently suddenly, in other countries. We are just never kept up-to-date on What they are really doing all the time. And the Vera Bruehne murder trial is not a vastly com- plex political affair hard to explain to strangers, but a universal human story, instantly appealing to the most basic and least national of feelings.

Dr. Otto Praun (sixty-five) was a Munich doctor with a panel practice, once large, but lAely by his own wish considerably reduced. He was rich out of all proportion to this stand- ing, by means of wise investment and specula- tions in house property. Though he had lived for years peacefully, after divorce, with his housekeeper, who rejoiced in the odd name of Kloo, he also had other tastes. He was a vain, snobby man who balanced between love of money and fear of losing it; and a greed for high living which he conceived of as the public company of tall, blonde and beautiful Women and the enjoyment of some odd erotic practices With them in private. It was important to him to be seen with his series of mistresses in the bars and cabarets of Schwabing (Munich's Left Bank equivalent). Being a respectable doctor at the same time, he had to pay for his pleasures, for they had to be discreet, no scandals. He got rid of his mistresses, when he or they tired, With presents varying with the greed of the lady and her consciousness of his public vulner- ability. One of his best ploys was the promise of leaving the current tall blonde his villa on the Costa Brava. He had bought quite a large plot of land there and built the villa, a really smashing affair, on one part of it, clearly intending to cover the cost by selling part of the unbuilt land, as it rose in value.

Some time after he bought this land he met the woman now accused with an old kiver of hers of murdering him, by the simple means of Picking her up with a woman friend in the Railway Terminus Restaurant 'in Munich. Both Vera Bruehne and the friend were his mis- tresses, separately and together—they had also a lesbian relationship; on at least one occasion the two women hid in a large (genuine) Renais- sance cupboard in Vera's sitting-room to watch their respective daughter (fifteen) and son (four- teen) making love on the sofa. It is that sort of story. The chief crime reporter of Die Welt Sighed at one point, 'It makes me feel a proper backwoodsman.' Vera Bruehne became Praun's chauffeuse and helped him as well with the building and fur- nishing of the Spanish villa. They made a number of extedded trips there together. He promised to leave her the villa in his will and the will was actually drawn up--not the first time he had done this. Then he began to tire of her, she 'managed' him too much, she tried to marry him, she became a nuisance as well as a valuable help. He began to talk of selling part of the Spanish land. One of the jobs Vera was detailed to do was to look for a buyer. The prosecution said that she produced a pos- sible buyer, one Schmitz, who almost certainly never existed. If, as they allege, Vera invented him, it may have been to start negotiations which could drag on for months until Dr. Praun tired of them, leaving the land intact and willed to Vera. The prosecution case is that Vera called on an old boy-friend, Johann Ferbach, from Cologne (both the accused are Rhinelanders), to impersonate Schmitz and introduced him by letter to Dr. Praun.

On the Thursday before Easter, 1960, Praun waited all day in his consulting-room for a call from Vera that she had brougbt Schmitz (that is, Ferbach) to discuss the sale. Finally a call came, his receptionist took it, gave him the speaker and left the room. He told her afterwards that the caller was Vera and he seemed annoyed because Vera and 'Schmitz' had gone straight on out of Munich to Praun's home instead of itopping in the city so that Praun could have a private word with Vera first. This receptionist is the only woman in the case who has retained her reputation and had no relationship with Dr. Praun except her job. Nevertheless her evidence would be, by English rules of evidence, simple hearsay. She was not even in the room to hear Praun's side of the telephone call. This call is the only, but the only, evidence that Vera and Ferbach were in Munich, or in the suburb where Praun lived, that day.

On the Tuesday after Easter Praun did not appear in the practice. His receptionist found a locum and got through the day's work, calling Praun's home several times and getting no reply. In the evening she called a friend who knew the doctor and the house and had done odd jobs about it from time to time. They drove out and the friend entered the house by the terrace door, which was on the latch, at once smelling disaster. Praun was lying very, very dead in the hall from what Chandler would have called lead poisoning, and the body of Frau Kloo, equally dead, was in the cellar. They had been there several days with the heating on. The doctor's half-blind old cocker-spaniel, starving, was also down in the cellar.

When the police arrived they behaved with unbelievable incompetence—it must have been more like the Keystone Kops than the watchdogs of the law. They helped themselves to drinks from a bottle of brandy standing on the living- room table with four glasses ready for guests, without first taking fingerprints. They shot the poor old dog, with permission of Praun's son who naturally was present, with one of the two pistols Praun kept in the house—he was always terrified of being robbed of his money—without making sure whether it had already been fired; it was not known until later whether it was the gun lying beside Praun's body or the other one in his bedside table. They took no useful photographs. The police surgeon's examination was so cursory that he noticed only one bullet wound in Praun's head--there were two. They did not notice that Praun had his overcoat still on and had clearly, from its position, had his hat on until it fell off in his fall. Neither did they notice that the doctor had brought a bag full of delicacies for the quiet weekend out from the Munich shops in his overnight case.

When the inspector in charge questioned Vera, among others, he became so friendly that they used the second person singular to each other and he read poetry to her . . . on one occasion in her fiat he went down to the corner shop to buy a bottle of brandy for them both and left his brief-case full of important evidence open on her table. Among others things a letter of introduction about 'Schmitz' was in it, which he had failed to notice in the doctor's house himself, but which had been pointed out to him by the doctor's son. Though this letter was evi- dence against Vera and Ferbach, for it was (it was alleged) typed on a machine in Vera's flat belonging to a lodger, she did not possess her- self of it when she had the chance, though conscious of its importance. The deaths were written off as murder-and-suicide by Dr. Praun.

When the will was read and the clause about the Spanish villa came out, Praun junior became suspicious, he said. The police were unin- terested and it took young Praun, who is also a doctor, and his lawyer eight months to get an order for the exhumation of the bodies, when the second bullet wound was found in the old doctor's skull. Fresh police inquiries were begun, the former inspector having been dis- ciplined and his assistant transferred—and 'pro- moted. There were about a dozen possible suspects, including the beneficiaries under the will, and the receptionist's friend, Praun's for- mer odd-job man. Almost at .once Vera Bruehne focused suspicion on herself by framing a won- derfully complicated alibi, instead of saying, which was true, that she had been on her way on the day in question to the death-bed of her mother in Bonn, but could recall no exact times and details. She told so many disproved stories then and since that she can truly be said to be her own worst enemy. Too used to 'managing' people for many years—she is now a brilliantly attractive fifty-two—she thought she could manage the police and later the court, as she had, indeed, managed, the first police inspector.

Theoretically Vera would have been able to accompany the actual alleged murderer, Ferbach, to Praun's house, wait for him to do the deed, and then set off for Bo. She could not prove that she did not, but if she had behaved with sense, neither could anybody else prove she did. In fact, apart from the slender telephone call and the letter, which turned out to be dated the previous September and is therefore almost meaningless, there is absolutely no direct evi- dence at all of her complicity, except by impli- cation from her stupid (terrified) lying. Ferbach has throughout denied everything, and though his own quite casual alibi does not stand up, neither is it disproved. Presented thus with a perfect suspect, or rather two, the police hardly concerned themselves with other possibilities and Vera, and then Ferbach, was arrested, on sus- picion, for examination.

Vera's daughter Sylvia, now twenty, here enters the story. Unstable and febrile, grown up in the dolce vita atmosphere of her mother's life, she began to discuss the story with a school friend who was now a reporter and another journalist who had introduced himself to Vera and the girl in order to get a story. These two reporters separately worked on the girl until she finally went to the police and made a long circumstantial story of a confession she said her mother had made to her. She did the same thing the same day to the examining magistrate, which put the 'confession' on an official footing as evidence. Though this evidence of Sylvia's is very detailed and intimate, there is nothing in it that could not have been gathered together by good reporters with the assistance of the girl's knowledge of her mother and the other people and places involved. At the trial Sylvia with- drew the story, stood up to five hours' gruelling from the prosecution and the court, was briefly arrested afterwards for perjury, and then released again.

To cover Ferbach's guilt the prosecution pro- duced fellow-prisoners from the remand (investi- gation) prison, one of whom alleged that Ferbach had confessed the murders to him. This man, a professional con-man, is a known police spy and totally discredited. A number of other prisoners offered evidence as to this man, and to Ferbach's 'confession,' and were led into court in handcuffs, as one commentator said, like a scene from The Beggar's Opera. At this point even the serious, humane and gentle learned judge showed signs of impatience. Of course, the criminals had a wonderful day out from their dreary prison round, but they added less than nothing to any serious knowledge of what had happened to Dr. Praun or Frau Kloo.

One of the most striking things to an English observer about the trial itself, which has just ended in a double sentence of life imprisonment and an appeal by the defence, is the length of time and the patience of the court expended on accounts of the past lives of the two accused, especially of Vera, and marginal evidence of character. Much of all this can really only be called gossip, nearly all second- or even third- hand; and hardly any would be evidence under English law. A long queue of ex-friends of Vera's, all scurrilous; witnesses to Vera's liaison with Ferbach, which at first she denied alto- gether, going back to the end of the war; accounts of her dealings in quite other direc- tions, which may, if proved, throw light on her personal character, but had nothing to do with whether she induced Ferbach to pump two com- plete strangers full of bullets for her sake. Of this proposition by the prosecution there is no evidence of any kind, not even second-hand gossip, except the tale of daughter Sylvia, which is discredited in any event, whether her first or her second story is true, or, what is more likely, neither of them. As a personal opinion, I would say that no policeman in Britain would bring a man to court on a charge of stealing chickens on such evidence—let alone double murder.

Why was the case ever brought to court? Be- cause Dr. Praun's son pushed the police until they started inquiries, and then himself brought a private charge of murder against persons un- known, which became a secondary charge to that of the public prosecutor when it was finally de- cided to charge Vera and Ferbach. Once there was a private charge of murder lodged, the public prosecutor was practically bound to bring a charge against these suspects or others.

Once in court, both prosecution and defence showed a strange incompetence. Neither side seems to have tried to find first-hand evidence of the presence of the pair in Munich on the day of the murder or of their presence else- where. There is no evidence, or none in court, of anyone who heard two or three shots, no- body saw this striking woman sitting waiting in a Volkswagen in a quiet little villa-street full of people minding each other's business. Nobody except a gardener, who took no notice, marked the lack of activity at Praun's house, though his car was standing before the door, and no- body heard the dog, who must surely have howled his head off. It is part of the prose- cution case, from Sylvia's story, that Ferbach meant to bring away the letter of introduction with him after killing Praun and Frau Kloo; but he forgot it and the pair turned back to fetch it; the story goes on that they found on their return the door locked and the light on inside the house, so they went away again. Yet on the Tuesday evening after Easter the terrace door was on the latch and the house was entered without difficulty, and there were no lights burning. None of these open questions has been answered and it is not even certain when the killings actually took place.

There is no law in Germany which prevents the press discussing a case which is sub judice. The serious papers have tried with considerable responsibility to stick to reporting the process in court, but they have been forced by the popu- lar press and the illustrated weeklies to ven- ture into comment in order to correct at least some of the wilder rumours. The case is bound to bring up once again the question of a law similar to the English practice on contempt of court; this is not believed in Germany to .be necessarily a good thing, since it leads to a great deal of covering up, especially in civil cases, and is an encroachment on the complete free- dom of the press promised in the Constitution.

Two other allied controversies the case has reawakened are a reform of Provincial police methods, especially in Bavaria; and the long- discussed reform of criminal procedures on remand and in court. The very widespread net of evidence allowed in German criminal cases, as well as the large powers allowed to the judge, who takes much more part than an English judge, are results of the modern German neurosis, which has gone to the exact opposite extreme from Nazi days and is so worried abouf condemning anybody who could conceivably be innocent that it is very difficult for the law to see that real criminals do get their deserts. One of the few people who have come out of this case with an enhanced reputation is the judge, Judge Seibert, who showed patience and humanity and maintained, in a very difficult and sometimes hilarious situation, a calm friendly dignity.

Just the same, it cannot be good for guilty or innocent that so much responsibility is laid on the judge, who is himself only a man. German criminal law, like so much else in this country, suffers from the lack of a coherent and con- tinuous inherited body of procedure and pre- cedent which has never been, in itself, dis- honoured or discredited. We still do not know whether Vera Bruehne and Johann Ferbach com- mitted these murders; what is very clear is that nothing about the matter has been proved. Bad as this is, it is fortunate that there is no capital punishment in Germany. . . .