The Scholl Case Read online

  Anja Reich-Osang, a native of Berlin, has written for Die Zeit, Die Welt and Berliner Zeitung. In 2011, she and her husband published the book Where Were You? A September Day in New York, in which they recall their experiences of 9/11 while living in New York City. She was awarded the German Reporter Prize in 2012 and is currently working as senior editor at Berliner Zeitung. She lives in Berlin with her husband and her two children.

  Imogen Taylor is a literary translator based in Berlin. Her translations include Sascha Arango’s The Truth and Other Lies and Melanie Raabe’s The Trap.

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  Copyright © Anja Reich-Osang 2014

  Translation copyright © Imogen Taylor 2016

  The moral rights of Anja Reich-Osang to be identified as the author and Imogen Taylor as the translator of this work have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Germany as Der Fall Scholl by Ullstein extra Verlag, 2014

  Copyright © Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin

  First published in English by The Text Publishing Company, 2016

  Book design by Jessica Horrocks

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Reich-Osang, Anja, author.

  Title: The Scholl case: the deadly end of a marriage/by Anja Reich-Osang; translated from the German by Imogen Taylor.

  ISBN: 9781925240931 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253552 (ebook)

  Subjects: Scholl, Brigitte. Scholl, Heinrich. True crime stories—Germany—Berlin.

  Murder—Investigation—Germany—Berlin.

  Other Creators/Contributors: Taylor, Imogen, translator.

  Dewey Number: 364.1523092

  For Alexander

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  THE LAST DAY

  HEINRICH SCHOLL LOOKS FOR HIS WIFE

  FIFTY YEARS EARLIER—A YOUTH IN LU

  THE SUMMER OF ’61

  WEDDING

  THE DARE

  NATURISM

  THE UPPER CRUST OF LUDWIGSFELDE

  AT THE CIRCUS

  WOWEREIT’S ADVICE

  SILVER WEDDING

  A POSITION OF AUTHORITY

  NEW FRIENDS

  AT THE PEAK

  THERAPY

  RETIREMENT

  GITTI’S HELPLESSNESS

  SCHOLL’S RETURN

  GITTI’S SECRET

  BENEATH THE MOSS

  THE TRIAL

  LIFELONG

  THE CLASS REUNION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book tells a true story. It was written between October 2012 and March 2014 and is based on observations made during an eight-month trial and on interviews with friends and relations of the victim and the defendant, with the defendant’s business partners, politician friends and lawyers, and with others who were able to provide information about Brigitte and Heinrich Scholl. Most of the people mentioned in this book bear their real names, but in a few cases they have had to be given pseudonyms. These are marked with an asterisk.

  I also had several long talks with Heinrich Scholl himself, in the visitors’ room of the prison in which he was serving his sentence. Over the course of those visits, Scholl wrote down and sent me the memories of his life. My last conversation with him took place in February 2015.

  I would like to thank everyone who supported me in my work on this book.

  —ANJA REICH-OSANG

  On a summer’s evening in Berlin, Heinrich Scholl’s letters blew out of the window. They were on my desk; the last letter, which had come that day, was lying on top. In it, Scholl told of his day-to-day life in prison, which of his friends and relations still visited him, which kept their distance, what he was reading. Three closely written pages—and then a fourth, headed ‘Power of Attorney’. Heinrich Scholl agreed to let me conduct research about him; he asked the local authorities, his lawyers and his friends to assist me in the work on my book. I had persuaded him. At last! I rang a friend and told her there was cause for celebration. When I left the house, the sun was shining and there was no wind. I left the window open a crack.

  The first drops fell just as I was setting off for home. The rain grew heavier, the wind got up. I ran home, up the stairs, into the flat. Too late. The gale had flung open the window and wreaked havoc in my study, like an angry guest. I crawled about the floor, gathering up the pages. They were all there. Almost all. The last letter was missing, the one with the power of attorney. Of course. I looked at the window and imagined the closely written pages, covered in Scholl’s sloping handwriting, sailing past my neighbours’ windows into the summer night’s storm—and with them my story, my book. I am not superstitious, but at that moment I was convinced it was a sign.

  It was a day in August. Like so many days that summer, I had spent it in Ludwigsfelde, a small town to the south of Berlin where, three years before, a hideous crime had taken place. A woman had been brutally murdered in the woods, and her husband—the town’s former mayor and a highly respected social democrat—had been arrested on suspicion of the crime.

  I found myself at the trial as a reporter. Back then, in October 2012, everyone was talking about Heinrich Scholl—in Ludwigsfelde, in Brandenburg, in Berlin. The mayor who had killed his wife. A politician couldn’t lose more face than that. I had only meant to sit in on a few days of the hearing, but I kept coming back. I had to; the story had a hold over me. I wanted to know whether or not he’d done it, of course. But above all, I realised that more was at stake here than murder.

  Heinrich Scholl had assembled trucks in the Ludwigsfelde automobile works and made chairs for East Germany’s state circus. When the Wall fell, he became involved in local politics, helping to found social democracy in Brandenburg, and was soon one of the most successful politicians of the new federal states. Like the country, he reinvented himself. His life seemed symbolic—proof that German unity was working. But what price did he pay for his ascent? What temptations did he withstand—or fail to withstand? And what had happened to his marriage in the almost twenty years in which he transformed Ludwigsfelde into a flourishing place of business?

  On a folding chair in Potsdam Criminal Court, I sat between friends of the Scholls and citizens of Ludwigsfelde who couldn’t believe that their mayor was a murderer and his marriage a farce. There were no eyewitnesses to the murder, hardly any clues and no proof, so the court summoned more and more witnesses. Half the town was called to testify: the Scholls’ son, their neighbours, their cleaning lady, a beautician, the victim’s best friends, the duty policeman, the doctor on call, a cyclist, the Macedonian landlord of Scholl’s favourite Italian restaurant, a fellow party member, business friends, Scholl’s tax advisor, a driving instructor, a former lover of the deceased, a singing florist and a Thai sex worker. They talked of love, power and the times they lived in. They were the dramatis personae of a historical era.

  Only one person did not speak: Heinrich Scholl himself. For eight months he sat in the dock without saying a word, without answering a single question. I gave it a go all the same; on the day of the verdict I wrote him a letter asking whether I might visit him. A week later
an envelope appeared in my letterbox. Return address: H. Scholl, Brandenburg an der Havel. He suggested a date.

  I visited Heinrich Scholl in prison many times after that. He told me about his life—about his marriage. Sometimes he was quiet, sometimes exuberant; often he would cry. Every time he protested his innocence. Sitting opposite him at the little table in the windowless visitors’ cell, I believed him, but as soon as I was in my car, driving back to Berlin, I began to have my doubts. Wasn’t he just an extremely skilful dodger? Hadn’t he had all that time in his cell to think up answers to tricky questions? And if so, did he lie consciously? Or was he suppressing the truth because it was so awful that he would never be able to admit it to himself?

  To begin with, not even his lawyers were allowed to know of my visits. They had proceeded to appeal after the verdict and were afraid their client might make some ill-considered remark. Scholl asked me not to publish anything about the appeal decision. He trusted me. Maybe because he had seen me in the courtroom every day of the hearing. Maybe because, like him, I came from East Germany. Maybe because I was a woman. Heinrich Scholl likes women, but he finds them hard to gauge. That was always his problem, his weakness. He didn’t notice that his wife humiliated him for decades or that his Thai girlfriend, a sex worker, exploited him. Even now, in prison, he described his marriage as a picture of harmony and tried to persuade me that his relationship with the Thai woman had been something very special.

  It is one of the strange certitudes of this story that this weakness, which led to the breakdown of Heinrich Scholl’s marriage and—in all probability—to the murder of his wife, also ended up making my book possible.

  Four hours were the extent of Heinrich Scholl’s monthly visiting hours. That wasn’t much. And so, from his cell, he put together little groups of visitors and organised car pools. I was put on a list with a friend of his who was an asparagus farmer, along with his estate agent and his tax advisor. If my fellow car-pool drivers couldn’t make it, they would ring up and send warm regards to ‘Heiner’. When I wasn’t in prison, I was drinking coffee in Ludwigsfelde with Brigitte Scholl’s customers, eating crumble cake with her first boyfriend, standing at her grave with her best friend, walking through the woods of the Mark of Brandenburg with the policeman who had issued the missing person report, or dropping into Scholl’s favourite restaurant, Da Toni’s. At the end of an interview, Scholl’s childhood friend Dieter Fahle, a former glassblower, gave me vases he had made himself. His cousin gave me fresh tomatoes from her garden. A business friend who was well up in Berlin’s Thai underworld welcomed me outside a nightclub-cum-brothel with the words: ‘First names only in there.’

  I got regular letters from Brandenburg an der Havel; Heinrich Scholl had begun to record his life for me. It did him good, he said. On the back of the envelope he gave only his name, the street and the town, as if the prison were his private address and he the homeowner. On one occasion he sent a card showing a prisoner in a striped suit, staring helplessly at a wall with clenched fists; another time he decorated his letter with dried flowers he had picked in the prison yard and pressed himself. He signed off ‘Yours, Heinrich Scholl’ and sent warm regards to my family.

  A few months before, on my folding chair in the criminal court, I had wanted to get closer to this silent, mysterious man. Now he was almost too close to me. At night I would wake with a start after dreaming about wandering through the pinewoods of Brandenburg or standing like Clarice Starling in Hannibal Lecter’s cell and hearing the door click shut behind me. When I woke, I would construct chains of circumstantial evidence in every possible permutation, and think of Truman Capote, who made friends with a murderer while working on In Cold Blood, his book about the murder of a Kansas farmer and his family. It was my favourite book: at once an example and a warning. And on that stormy summer’s evening in Berlin, I decided it was time to stop, time to get away.

  I ran down the stairs to the courtyard. It was still raining; lightning and thunder were alternating in quick succession as if the world was exploding. The pages were scattered over the entire courtyard; I found them behind the dustbins and in the bushes, gathered them up, dried them and flattened them. Everything was there, even the power of attorney.

  Then I conducted the final interviews, attended Brigitte Scholl’s class reunion and drove one last time to see Heinrich Scholl in prison. This time I spoke to him alone, three days in a row, over several hours. Then I wrote up the tapes and began to piece together what I had found out about him and Brigitte Scholl: the story of a man and a woman bound in love and hate and unable to part from one another.

  Brigitte Scholl disappeared on 29 December 2011, the day after her forty-seventh wedding anniversary. The flowers her husband had given her—red roses—were still on the living-room table; in the corner stood the Christmas tree, straight as a die and lavishly decorated. Everything had to be just so.

  It was to be perfect, right up to the end.

  Brigitte Scholl was sixty-seven years old and a beautician by trade. Her beauty salon was on the ground floor of their house. She was never unpunctual, never unfriendly; you never heard a loud word at the Scholls’. Their marriage was said to be irreproachable. When the first customer rang the bell at eight in the morning, Brigitte Scholl would be standing at the door in her white coat, her hair tied back. From the kitchen there’d be a good morning from her husband, the former mayor.

  Heinrich Scholl was a legend in Ludwigsfelde. He had helped found social democracy there when the Wall fell, been elected mayor in the first democratic elections since the end of the Second World War and blessed the town with unparalleled economic recovery. He brought Daimler-Benz, Thyssen and Germany’s leading engine manufacturer MTU to Ludwigsfelde. He created thousands of jobs and was regarded as the most successful mayor in the former East Germany—proof that East German recovery was effective, and a symbol of German unity.

  He’d been retired for three years, but was no more able to stop working than his wife. Today was in fact a day off for her; the salon was closed between Christmas and New Year. It was one of those days at the end of the year when time seems to stand still. But Brigitte Scholl wasn’t one for standing still; she always had to be doing something, always seeing to something, always helping somebody. In town she was known as the Lady Di of Ludwigsfelde. Her husband was ‘Napoleon’. He was five foot five and liked to wear shoes with high heels.

  Heinrich Scholl was still asleep when his wife got up at half past five to take her dog out, as she did every morning. Ursus was a fourteen-year-old cocker spaniel who growled at everyone since getting bitten on the ear by another dog on a walk in the cemetery last September. Brigitte Scholl fed him dog biscuits round the clock, and while she worked, Ursus was allowed to lie under the customer’s chair. For his sake, Brigitte Scholl had even gone without spending Christmas with her son in Wiesbaden this year. She had wanted to spare the dog the long journey, and putting him in kennels was not an option for her. Everything revolved around Ursus. He’d even taken to sleeping in their bed lately—to her left, where her husband used to sleep.

  It was still dark when Brigitte Scholl stepped outside the door, her face not made up, her hair not done, her woolly hat pulled a long way down over her face. This was the only time of day she dared go out on the street in this state. She was alone.

  The air felt cold and damp, just like the days before. They hadn’t had a white Christmas, and the same grey weather was forecast for New Year’s Day. She walked once up Walther Rathenau Strasse and then back down again. To the left and right of her, rows of wooden houses lined the street, all alike. Dark frontages, pointy gables, little dormer windows, front gardens, flower beds, lawns, fences, garages, hedges. The wooden housing development had been built shortly before the end of the war, in 1944, the very year of Brigitte Scholl’s birth. She was a war child living in a war house. In the attic, they had found notes in Cyrillic script, left there by the Soviet prisoners of war who had built the houses for the Da
imler factory workers. The Daimler works in Ludwigsfelde had been the biggest and most modern aircraft-engine factory in Europe. Three-thousand-horsepower engines were built here for German fighter bombers; the assembly hangars were well concealed in the pinewoods of the Mark of Brandenburg and had direct access to Hitler’s Reichsautobahn. The first engine was built in 1937; five years later, the two-hundred-soul village had become a town of five thousand inhabitants—a faceless place with no centre, no town hall and no church. Ludwigsfelde had been intended as a field camp for Adolf Hitler and his plans of world conquest—and it had never really recovered.

  After the war, trucks were produced here. Today, Germany’s biggest naturist thermal spa was in Ludwigsfelde. The roads, pavements and cycling paths were wide; the motorway now had six lanes. There were car showrooms, petrol stations and roundabouts, schools, playing fields, shopping centres, stations, car parks, tennis courts, a town hall, an arts centre, a museum and a library. Like a Lego model, the town was put together out of lots of little bricks. Another house here, a restaurant here, a savings bank here, an old folks’ home here—and whenever you thought it couldn’t go on, they started on the next industrial estate. Big signs pointed the way to the cemetery, the station, the hospital or to Prussia Park. At the crossings, people waited for the pedestrian lights to go green even when there wasn’t a car in sight. For dog owners, there were plastic-bag dispensers for the disposal of dog dirt. Everything in Ludwigsfelde was well ordered, clean and functional. Just like the household of Brigitte and Heinrich Scholl.

  The couple had moved to the wooden housing development in the seventies. Their semi-detached house was next to a small square with a climbing frame and flower beds, and no longer looked like a war house. Heinrich Scholl had knocked down walls, laid tiles and put in a fireplace and a barbecue. The windows were new, so was the roof, and the garden was a work of art. Visitors had been known to ask whether they should take their shoes off before walking on the lawn. Their hedge was also much admired. So straight. But what was most important to Brigitte Scholl was that the hedge be high. It was nobody’s business what she got up to—whether she was at home by herself, whether she was well or not. She was, to all intents and purposes, still the mayor’s wife—an authority in the small town—and didn’t even confide her problems to her best friends there. Only her son Frank*, who had moved to Wiesbaden twenty years ago, and her friend Inge Karther*, who had left Ludwigsfelde to move to Anklam in 1961, were taken into her confidence. They were also the only ones who knew that she had ordered a grave for herself at Klotz Funeral Directors a few years ago. That too was part of the mayor’s wife’s sense of order: certain things should be taken care of before it’s too late.