The odds of encountering a tornado in Canada are 1 in 412,371. But when the weather warnings take effect, you're running like the wind. But did you know that if you've had chicken pox, the odds of getting shingles are 1 in 3? Why leave it up to chance? Ask your healthcare professional about Shingrix. The Shingrix vaccine helps protect adults against shingles. 100% protection not guaranteed. Adverse reactions may occur. Visit Shingrix.ca.
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Hi, I'm Annie from the US. And I'm Johanna from Austria. And you're listening to your favorite international podcast. The podcast hosted by two women who never met in real life. But we definitely have spent years compulsively researching murders together. Anyway, we don't have to be on the same continent for that. No, that's right. Before we get into it today, we would love to just share a huge glittering rhinestone encrusted thank you to our patrons. Like Liberace style? That's it. How did you always say too much of a good thing is wonderful? Or how was it? Yes. Yeah. Yes. I think that is the quote. Too much of a good thing is...
Wonderful. And you know I'm a magpie at heart. But really, patrons, you're the reason this show is able to exist. You're the reason we keep on buying weird German true crime paperbacks off eBay at 2 a.m. If you want bonus episodes, ad-free listening, and the warm glow of knowing that you are funding two women's, I mean, problematic obsession, I'm doing air quotes, with dead people, head to patreon.com backslash Fresh Health Podcast and you can help support. Well, I have something to tell you. We got an email by a listener.
Because you just said backslash. Yeah. It's not. What is it? Dear listener, I'm sorry I forgot your name. Thank you for informing us. It's just slash. Backslash is the one in the other direction. Oh, the more you know. The more you know. You learn something new every day. All right. So head to patreon.com slash Fresh Health Podcast. All right. Let's get into it.
This week, Johanna has a case for us. And you know I'm always excited about these because most of the time, I've never heard about these cases. And if I've never heard about them, you probably haven't either. And I have to say, Johanna has once again saved my bacon because the episodes I'm working on are taking forever. My headaches will not give me a break. The weather has been really, really bad this summer. And I know it's not just here. It's been bad and scary and dangerous in a lot of places. And I'm sending love to everyone out there with weather-affected illness and also reminding everyone to just please stay safe because...
I feel like half the world's on fire, the other half is flooded, and then anywhere that's not on fire or flooded, there's a drought. It's just bad. All right, Johanna, what are we getting into today? This has been on my list forever. Quick heads up before we start. Today's episode deals with, I'm sorry, sexual violence against the child, murder, strangulation and decomposing body. If any of that is not what you need in your ear holes today, now's your moment to skip ahead for everybody else. Buckle up because we are going to West Germany in the 1950s and this is going to be tragic and infuriatingly unsolved. Once again. Oh, my case is also 1950s next case. So this is great. I love it when our timelines. Yeah, so often, right? Yeah. This is one that I've just never heard about. So I'm excited. She's going to tell me all about it. We're just in a mind meld kind of place right now. I feel like our brains are.
Our brains are synced and so are our periods. Very often, yeah. Okay, as always, please let me set the scene for you and we need to go back to after the war. Germany, 1945. Cities like Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, they have been reduced to absolute rubble. Literally, I told you all about it before. You know, the bombed out shells of buildings, entire neighborhoods just gone, millions of people homeless and food rationed down to barely anything, almost nothing.
This country had just lost the war it started, and it had just been the epicenter of the worst atrocity, or one of the worst atrocities in modern history. And now this country was sitting there, divided up by the Allies, completely broke, and they were wondering what to do now. What was going to happen next? And then, within about a decade, West Germany goes from bombed-out ruin to one of the strongest economies on the planet. And they call it the Wirtschaftswunder, so the economic miracle. And it really did feel like a miracle at the time. How was it possible? I'd say, like so much in life, it mostly comes down to money.
In 1948, West Germany rolls out the brand new currency, the Deutsche Mark, basically overnight replacing the old badly inflated Reichsmark. And also add in there quite a lot of American money through the Marshall Plan. Thank you for that. And a labor force that is super eager to rebuild and put the war behind them. And of course, then we have a government under Konrad Adenauer that leaned hard into the free market capitalism. So very orienting towards the United States of America, I'd say. And that's how you end up with that kind of insane economic growth.
Factories rebuilding and export industry is booming. Unemployment had to be in a massive crisis right after the war. Let's rewind a little bit further than 1945. So, little rabbit hole or a little information. Back during the Great Depression, Germany got absolutely wrecked. It was worse than almost any other industrialized country.
By 1932, we're talking of an unemployment rate of 30%, which meant that nearly one in three workers was unemployed. Over 6 million people officially out of work and the real number was almost certainly higher. And compare this to the US and you all know how bad the Great Depression was there. But the unemployment rate was just, and I'm using air quotes here, 23%. Not that it makes such a big difference because people here and there experienced hunger and homelessness and complete and utter loss of hope. You know, it's the kind of desperate situation that makes people willing to listen to anyone who promises to fix it, which is, as we all know,
exactly what happened, and it's a huge part of how the Weimar Republic collapsed and how then the Nazis walked through the door. And then, obviously, things got even worse because, well, World War II. So by 1945, Germany is not just morally bankrupt, it's also economically bankrupt. The city's in ruins and the millions are dead and displaced, or they're sitting in prison of war camps. If you'd grabbed anyone on the street in 1945 and you ask, what do you think? How long do you think it will take Germany to bounce back from all of this? I'm very certain that the person would answer, well, decades, probably, if we're optimistic.
And then in 1950, unemployment in West Germany is still sitting around 11%. So roughly one in nine people looking for work, not finding it. But then the factories start reopening and new businesses start popping up. And suddenly everyone outside Germany wants German products. And then just five years later, by 1955, unemployment's down to 5.6%, which is still over a million people without jobs, sure. But compared to where it had been a few years earlier, I think that's an incredible turnaround. Yeah, I agree. And just a year later, 1956, unemployment drops below one million people for the first time.
So that's then 4.4%. It's crazy. It is. The economy at this point is growing so fast that employers now have the complete opposite problem. Where on earth do we find enough people to fill all these jobs? And so in 1955, West Germany signs its first labor recruitment agreement. And the first country they did this with was actually Italy. And so by 1956, the first Italian so-called Gastarbeiter start arriving to work in German factories. Gastarbeiter means guest worker. Because the idea was that these people just come for a few years, work here and then go back home. Sure.
But also don't be fooled, because the Wirtschaftswunder wasn't just of economic importance. West Germany actually needed to show the world that they had cleaned up nicely and that they now had their act together again. Some historians call this phase in German history the restoration rather than recovery, because in a lot of ways, West Germany was just snapping back into this conservative, patriarchal society. But also for women, I mean, you have to think about the fact that during the war, they were basically keeping the country running in a lot of ways, like in the factories and on the farms and in the fields. And then in the 50s, they were like, yeah, thank you very much. But now go back to the kitchen. Yeah. It's like, I don't know if you have that in English, but here it's the three K, different kind of K. It's Kinderküche Kirche. So children, kitchen and church.
Children's Kitchen Church. That's it. And it's going to be well over another 10 years for, you know, the respectability and appearance are everything well to start to crumble a bit again during the late 60s. Yeah, I think all of that is a lot easier to imagine than I really like it to be. I mean, I often think it's human nature, all this pendulum back and forth and back and forth, because we are not made for moderation, apparently, and being reasonable. And we have very short memories. Yeah, 100%.
Now, picture an unmarried, financially independent young woman, let alone one supporting herself through sex work, with an apartment and a nice sports car in that place and time. I'm guessing a certain segment of the population was not particularly thrilled about it. I think the majority of the population was not thrilled about it. Yeah. Her name was Rosemarie Nitribit, and her death is one of the most infamous unsolved murders in German history. And that's not just because of how she died, but also because of who she knew, and therefore of who might have been responsible for the murder. And also because of how spectacularly the police managed to blow to one chance they ever had to prove it. But maybe that was probably exactly the goal.
Let's start at the beginning, though, because Rosemarie's story doesn't begin with fur coats and sports car, of course. It begins about as far from glamour as you can get. She was born Rosalie Marie Auguste Nittribitt on 1st of February 1933 in or around Ratingen near Düsseldorf. So that's just two days after Hitler became chancellor in Germany, which was on 30th of January 1933. Rosemarie's mother, Maria, was 18 years old, unmarried, and according to the Nazi files, officially classified as quote-unquote feeble-minded. And I don't think I have to even get into all the horrifying details of what that verdict meant because we talked about it at length in the Zavrel episodes. But remember, the Nazis were also after people they deemed to be a strain on society, which also included unwed mothers. So women who were poor, unmarried, had children by different fathers maybe, or women who relied on public assistance. They were often viewed with a lot of suspicion. Yeah, I mean, I think they still are.
Being a single mother wasn't enough on its own to be labeled something like feeble-minded, but Nazi officials frequently treated poverty and what they considered immoral lifestyles as evidence of hereditary inferiority. Rosemarie never met her father, he'd taken off before she was even born, and he'd later refused to pay any support. You just have to love this, right? Men are the deadbeat fathers, but it's the women viewed as the immoral ones because they need support. The suspicious ones, the ones who are a strain on society. I mean, what else is new, right? Always, always. Here we have the term welfare queen, which was made popular during the Reagan administration. Yeah.
Rosemary's mother would have two more daughters, Irmgard and Liselotte, each with a different father. Anyway, the family lived in genuine poverty. in Ratingen and Düsseldorf. And Maria would then end up serving multiple prison sentences over the years and the three girls grew up neglected and shuffled around and basically falling through every crack. And just as with Friedrich Zavrel, at one point the girls ended up in the foster system. By the time Rosemarie was five, so around 1937, the Youth Welfare Office had had enough of the situation at home and placed her and her sister Irmgard in a children's home, officially citing the risk of neglect.
I'm not really going to talk about Liselotte because I don't really know what the situation is there. I read different things in different sources. But from what I can piece together, it's that Liselotte was born shortly after the two older daughters were taken to the children's home and that they never knew that there was another sister. And apparently Irmgard only found out in the 70s. So Rosemarie most likely never knew that she had another half-sister. I think that's more common than... Yeah, 100%. Yeah.
So, Rosemarie and Irmgard bonds between children's home and reform institutions. And in the spring of 1939, so when Rosemarie was six years old, six or seven, she was placed with a foster family in a small town. And by most accounts, this was actually good for her, at least for a while. For the first time in her very short life, Rosemarie experiences something like a stable childhood in a loving home. I don't love the way you're saying this. I feel like this isn't going to last. I can just hear it in your voice that this is a temporary thing. You know me too well. Unfortunately, it didn't last because otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. That's it. The way it ended, it was really horrific, actually. So when Rosemarie was 11 years old, she was raped by a young man from the neighborhood in a stretch of woods near the village. Now, remember?
tiny rural community in the mid-1940s. And not only that, the war was in full swing and so the assault was never reported to the authorities. The perpetrator was then drafted into the Wehrmacht shortly afterward and he never had to face any consequences at all. Rosa Marie was 11 and she got nothing, no justice, no acknowledgement, and probably she didn't even have the language and the understanding to process what had happened to her. And so from around the age of 12 onward, accounts describe her as increasingly difficult. She was prone to running away and she was exhibiting what the records of the time then would call, quote unquote, behavioral problems. This reminds me so much of Star Faithful. And as we've talked about a lot in these kind of episodes, not all children who grow up with abuse, neglect, instability, or repeated rejection.
respond by becoming quiet and withdrawn. Some do. And that's what many people expect to see in victims. But many of them become angry, impulsive, defiant. And of course, not every abused child develops behavioral problems. And not every child with behavioral problems has a history of abuse. We are really complicated individuals when it comes to human psychology. It's tricky. So complex. Yeah.
So now we have this child, not even a teenager yet, and she just survived sexual assault with zero support, and there is no stability anywhere for the girl, and she continues to move between foster homes and residential institutions, and she was repeatedly running away and then living on her own for periods of time. by her teens. So this is after the war has ended. She was already involved in sex work in a nearby town. And from what I read, she was introduced to this by two older female acquaintances who apparently connected her with American and French occupation soldiers. And according to some accounts of the time, sex was often traded for chocolate, chewing gum, nylons, rations, you know, things like this, and also protection in a way. That's right. And of course, for us nowadays, it's obvious that this is child abuse, obviously, right? We're talking about a 14, 15 year old girl. And we probably would identify the two women who brought her there as groomers. But also,
These people all just survived a horrific war and were basically left with nothing. I think they didn't actually view a 14 or 15-year-old sex worker as something unforgivable. You know what I mean? They probably saw it as means for the girl to survive. As horrible as this sounds, and I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for this, it's just I want to see it in context, right?
I think there were almost no safe options at this time and place. Yeah, I get it. I get it. It's not like a situation with Star Faithful where she was in a loving home and was secretly being groomed by somebody. It's not like somebody was grooming her in order to profit in any way from her. Right. I think that these are all just desperate people showing another desperate person how to survive because that's what it comes down to at the end. Right. Like none of it is ideal. It's all awful. It's awful. It is. But it's different. It's different from from what happened to Star Faithful. It's not the same. Yeah.
She later then spends time in Frankfurt, where she was repeatedly detained by police for prostitution and Landstreicherei, which is vacancy, which was still punishable under German law at the time. And whenever the authorities located her, they returned her to the youth welfare system. And then every time, like clockwork, Rosemary took off ASAP again. At some point during this period, she becomes pregnant and she then has an illegal back alley abortion that very nearly killed her. And of course illegal, because this is also an era when abortions were criminalized and therefore most likely extremely unsafe. I think that comes with the territory of illegal abortions. Yeah. And then by April 1952, welfare officials consider her schwer erziehbar, which means difficult to educate. How was it what they called Friedrich Zavrel? I was just going to say it's giving Amspiegel gründ. Yeah, yeah.
And since no ordinary youth home was prepared to accept her anymore, she was then placed in the Rheinische Landesarbeitsanstalt Brauweiler for a year. The name Arbeitsanstalt tells you what it is. It was a correctional workhouse where women who were considered difficult or socially undesirable, they were expected to perform manual labor. I think she was like gluing paper bags and stuff like that. And then after about a year, she was transferred to another institution in Koblenz and she left that facility as well. And then in 1953, the youth welfare authorities finally ended their supervision of her.
Oh, that's interesting. So she was born in 1933 and she left the welfare system in 1953 and she would have been 20. Was there not like an age thing, like 18 or 21? It just seems kind of arbitrary. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't really have an answer. 20, as you said, 20 wasn't any legal milestone. At the time, the age of maturity in West Germany, I checked, was apparently still 21. So in theory, the authorities could have kept Rosemarie under youth welfare supervision until her birthday, her 21st birthday. But I think, and it's just my opinion, I think by that point, they'd simply run out of options.
Like, Rosemarie had spent years running away from foster homes and institutions, and then every time she was brought back into the system, but she left again, and yeah, no ordinary home was willing to take her anymore. I think they basically threw up their hands. Like, what else were they supposed to do? You can't force anyone to live a stable life. And to be fair, at the time, they had no knowledge or resources to really deal with abuse victims like someone like Rosemarie would have needed.
I mean, someone with this level of trauma today would be difficult to successfully treat, never mind them, and with no one even trying. Exactly. She's a survivor, this girl. Yeah, yeah. So now she was legally free of the system for the first time since she was five years old, and she did exactly what you'd expect a 20-year-old with nothing to lose and nowhere to belong to would do. She moved to the big city to start a new life, and in her case, big city meant Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt.
like many other cities, had been totally obliterated during the war. We're talking something like, I think, 80% of the historic old town destroyed in the Allied bombing raids. It was one of the worst-hit cities in all of Germany. So in the immediate post-war years, this is a city that's basically rubble with a river, the main, running through it. But there's the thing about Frankfurt specifically, it bounces back fast, faster than any other city. And that's because it has something most bomb-type German cities don't have. In that dimension, at least, it's a banking town. It's a trading town. And still is to this day. It's the financial heart of Germany.
By the time Rosemarie rolls into town in 1953, Frankfurt's rebuilding at an insane pace. That means there are cranes everywhere and new office buildings going up and the financial district is starting to take the shape that will eventually earn Frankfurt the nickname Bankfurt, so Bankfurt. And with all that money comes exactly the kind of nightlife you'd expect. There are hotel bars full of businessmen with expense accounts, there are private clubs, a red light district that's absolutely thriving because there's an enormous population of well-paid men in the city with a lot of money to spend. Rosemarie is smart enough to clock that immediately.
Frankfurt is a place to make real money if you play it right. When she first arrives, she rents a small room with a bath and she starts advertising herself in the newspaper as mannequin, so model, for our younger listeners. Back in the day, mannequin or mannequin was not just a dummy you put in a shop window. It was the actual term used for models. My grandmothers continued to call models mannequins all their life. Also, fun fact, side tangent, my maternal grandma also used to call strawberries ananas, which means pineapple in German, which was also very common. But it always led to a lot of disappointment in me when I was a very young child at the time, because back then...
Pineapples were still super exotic and not often served. Why ananas? Why, as a joke? No, because of the first, how was it, the first kind of strawberry that came, that were planted in Europe as like, not the wild strawberries, but the variety that was kind of, how do you say it, bread first? Yeah. It was called ananas something something. And that's why old people then continue to use the term ananas. I had no idea. That's amazing. And then my grandma said, you want some ananas? And I was a little kid, I was like, super excited. Oh my God, pineapple.
And it's just strawberries. But, you know, as a kid, if you always get strawberries. Yeah. You want the exciting pineapple. You want the fruit that starts to eat you back the minute you take a bite. I love it.
Look it up, folks. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway. Rosemarie realizes there is, as I said, a lot of money to be made and she decides, you know what, I'm going to skip the cheap end of the market entirely. And so she starts working her way toward the guys with the actual money. Smart. Very smart. And she knew how to do it because she didn't just buy expensive clothes or put on fancy perfume. She was smart. She taught herself the manners and the conversation styles and the social etiquette that was all expected in West Germany's upper circles.
Biographers describe her taking lessons in etiquette, speech, presentation, so she could move confidently among some of the country's wealthiest men. She also took lessons in English and French, and she was working on her posture and her table manners and also her high German, because she'd apparently decided that if she was going to sit across from industrialists and ministers, she was not going to be called out as the girl from the workhouse. Yeah, I love this. I'm rooting for her. I really am.
All of the hard work, all of the self-improvement gets her out of her cheap rented room and into her own apartment. And also behind the wheel of that infamous Mercedes. And can we talk about it for a second? Because it's almost as famous as she is. Please. If you've ever seen a photo of Rosemarie Nitribit, you've probably seen the car too. It's a black Mercedes-Benz 190SL with bright red leather seats. It's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. In 1957, this was an absolute head-turner. The car launches in 1955.
And it debuts around the same time as its much more famous, much more expensive sibling, the 300SL. You mean the gall wing, the one with the doors that open straight up like wings? Yeah, that one. I think that's basically the poster car for 1950s glamour. And the 190SL is Mercedes' answer to a very specific problem that many people have. They are actually lacking the buying power. The 300SL is gorgeous, but it's also so out of reach for almost everyone, even generally wealthy people. So Mercedes builds the 190SL as this slightly smaller, slightly more attainable.
version and it too it has this very sexy sleek sculpted unmistakably expensive silhouette but with a four-cylinder engine instead of the six uh the 300 has and the price tag I mean, yeah, it's still very much a luxury purchase, but it's at least theoretically within reach of successful business owners and professionals and not just, you know, the high, high, high end of the elite people. It's a convertible. I think it's also available as a coupe or it was also available as a coupe, but this one that we're talking about, it's a convertible. It has this gorgeous curved bodywork and classic chrome grille and white wall tires. It's everything your brain pictures when someone says 1950 sports car.
And it becomes this instant status symbol, not just in Germany, internationally. It's the kind of car Hollywood actors and actresses are photographed climbing into. And it's the car that says, I'm very successful and I have taste and I'm not ashamed to flaunt it. And in case you wonder about said price tag. A brand new Mercedes 190SL was sold for about 16,500 Deutsche Mark in 1955. That was apparently starting price. At the exchange rate of the day, that was just under 4,000 US dollars. And I know, doesn't sound like much, right? Until you adjust for inflation. So in today's money, you're looking at roughly 50,000 dollars.
And I know, again, it would be more than that, wouldn't it? Can you get a Mercedes for $50,000 today? I mean, you can, a used one, but... A used one, but not a brand new one. So many average cars nowadays are like here in Europe. I don't know how it's in the US, but like 30,000 euros and up. Sedans, like ours. Yeah, I think I just heard on the news that cost of a new car right now in the US is like $49,000, which is... It's crazy. Crazy, yeah. Crazy. They just want everyone to get into really insane car payments. Yeah. But even back in the day... It's a lot of money. They're expensive. It would have been three years salary for an average worker in Germany.
Yeah, that sounds about right, because I think somebody making $50,000 a year, say, today would have to spend $150,000 for that car brand new, you know? Yeah. I mean, that was the more affordable Mercedes. At least new. Yeah. And even with the price tag, this car was so highly anticipated that the first year's production was sold out before they even had started regular production, just by showing the first one at the automobile exhibition in Frankfurt. This car was so highly anticipated that clever admin used it as a hook. Annie.
I sent it to you. I found this ad in an issue of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1954. Would you please read it? Because I was laughing so much. I love it. All right. It says, quote.
We can't sell you a Mercedes-Benz 190SL Roadster. They're not available yet. But we do have most everything else. MGs, Jaguars, Rileys, Hillmans, Austins, Morris Miners, Rovers, Singers, Sunbeam Talbots, Rolls Royce. Enter your next concourse with one of these beauties. And then it goes on to discuss different. We'll post it on the Facebook page. It's amazing. And it has a photo of the 190. It's beautiful. It reminds me a little bit of the Sunbeam from that same. It's just so sexy. It's very sexy. British Motor Car Distribution Limited. Van Ness, San Francisco.
California Drive and Barlingame. Yeah, they have all the other great cars. Everything else that you would want, just not this one that everybody wants. The odds of encountering a tornado in Canada are 1 in 412,371. But when the weather warnings take effect, you're running like the wind. But did you know that if you've had chicken pox, the odds of getting shingles are 1 in 3? Why leave it up to chance? Ask your healthcare professional about Shingrix. The Shingrix vaccine helps protect adults against shingles. 100% protection not guaranteed. Adverse reactions may occur. Visit Shingrix.ca.
Exceptional savings meet innovative safety during the Volvo Black Friday event. Take advantage of limited time offers on a range of Volvo models that deliver Scandinavian luxury, seamless technology, and advanced safety features. From November 3rd to 30th, receive two monthly lease payments waived or save up to $7,000 on select models. Conditions apply. Visit your local Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca.
All right, so back to Rosemarie. We now have this 24-year-old woman driving around Frankfurt in that car. And remember, it's the 1950s, which is an era where women driving her own car, any car, is still rare. A woman then driving one of the most glamorous, most expensive cars on the market, entirely paid for with her own money that she earned herself is unheard of. So when people in Frankfurt saw Rosemarie behind the wheel of that 190SL, she was definitely turning heads. And I'm sure many shook their heads in disappointment. This car is basically Rosemarie's whole outer persona. Self-made, unapologetic.
And a little bit too flashy. Funny thing is, if you ask people today what they know about Rosemarie Nitripit, surprising number will mention the black Mercedes before they mention anything else. That's how iconic that car became. And another fun fact, in the movie about Rosemarie, they actually used a red Mercedes instead of a black. Oh, that's interesting. If the car is so iconic, like if people know what the car looked like. Yeah. Do you know why? I can only guess. Honestly, I think my best guess would be red just looks more interesting on screen, more sultry, maybe. I mean, yeah, red and sexy automatically sort of go together, don't they?
At first I thought it might have been a black and white movie, like how Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for blood and psycho because it looked like how red was supposed to look on camera. No, it was a movie from the 2000s, I think, if I remember correctly. Oh, got it. Okay, cool. So Rosemarie works her way up through Frankfurt's red light economy. She's cultivating wealthy clients and she positioned herself as what the Germans call an edel prostituierte, luxury or high class elite.
And she was extremely good at it. By 1956, as I said, she moved into her own apartment, not some crappy room she rented in someone else's place. The apartment's address was Stiftstraße 36. I think apartment 41, if I remember correctly, or 42. It was a newly built building near the Eschenheimer Turm, so right in the heart of the city. It wasn't enormous for today's standards. It was just two rooms with a kitchen and a bathroom. But remember, a single woman in the mid-1950s, this was undeniably luxurious. And she furnished it accordingly.
Visitors described modern yet very elegant furniture and expensive carpets, polished wood, upholstered chairs, you know, heavy curtains, tasteful lamps. Yeah, that makes sense. If you're trying to entertain bankers and industrialists, wealthy people, then the space has to look like it belongs to somebody that's worth spending that kind of money on. Yeah, I think it was a lot about representation, yeah. That's right.
Beautiful clothes in the closets, jewelry, perfume, fur coats. She even owned apparently a high-end music cabinet that combined a radio, a record player and a tape recorder. This was apparently an all-in-one piece of furniture and it was cutting-edge technology at the time and something very few people would be able to afford. I'm guessing a lot of these things might have been gifts as well from clients. Exactly. That's what I'm thinking as well. She got a lot of gifts. We're going to talk about it in a second. Yeah. If you read about Rosemarie, you probably come across descriptions of crystal chandeliers and gold fittings and marble everywhere.
You know, it's an apartment that sounds more like a Hollywood movie set and less like a home in Germany. There's no real evidence supporting these claims of all this, like, marble and crystal and gold. But, you know, too much of that is also a bad thing. Yeah, not so liberace. Yeah, you know, as with so much surrounding Rosemarie, the legend and the lore has just grown over the decades. And the apartment was certainly expensive and tastefully furnished. But I think the more extravagant details seem to have appeared later, you know, when journalists and then even later filmmakers turned her life into something even more glamorous than it already was. Yeah, from everything you've told us so far, it sounds like she really was doing well and making a decent amount of money. And I say good for her. Definitely. Police investigators later estimated that in 1956 alone, apparently Rosemarie earned around 80,000 Deutsche Mark.
I'm really not sure, 100% sure if that was really just in a year. But yeah, that's what many sources claim that the police files say, that this was just 1956 alone. As I say, I'm not 100% certain, but nevertheless, this was a time when building an entire single family house in Germany cost somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 Deutsche Mark. So we're talking about a woman earning something in the neighborhood of two to three houses worth of income in maybe a single year, and it's all cash off the books. Yeah, that's crazy. I also read somewhere that her whole, that everything she owns accumulated to 110,000.
Deutsche Mark in total. That's what they found. Like all the valuables and all the money and everything she owned after her death. By the way, Rosemarie doesn't live alone in the nice new apartment. She lives there with her dog. Oh, she has a dog. She has a dog. It's a white poodle. None of the big poodles. A small one. And I've seen him named Joe in two sources. But again, I'm not really sure if that's his correct name. But to make things easier, I too will call him Joe if that's okay. Yeah, obviously. I sent you a couple of photos of Rosemarie and Joe.
I like the expression of the dog. He always looks kind of a little bit startled. Like, what the fuck am I doing here? He looks so startled. What's going on with her nails in this first picture? Does she have some crazy cool nails? I can't tell if it's just the picture. Doesn't it kind of look like she's got like a fancy manicure? Yeah, the nails look like, I don't know, hard to say. Maybe I find a better resolution on this, but it looks like she is. She's really beautiful. She is, and she has great taste. And Julie, like, she looks great in that photo, in that first photo. I love her hair. She would be played by...
You know the movie, the remake of The Parent Trap, the one with Jamie Lee Curtis, the new wife in that one, the blonde lady, that actress, I can't remember her name. I don't know either, yeah. Dancing with the Stars recently, but that's who she reminds me of. She's beautiful. Yeah, and there she is with the car. Oh my God, I think we have that chair. You do? I swear, that looks just like the chair from my grandpa's house. It must have, you know, it's just a crushed velvet 1950s kind of situation, but it really reminds me of my grandpa's house. Look at Jo, look at that little baby. Is she naked in that one? She might be. She's naked. Good for her.
Oh, the car. Her hat. I love it. I love her. She's very glamorous. She is, yeah. She made her way, let's say, like this. She looks happy. Like, she looks genuinely happy. Or at least content. Content, I think, is a good word, yeah. Because when you think about where she started and where she could have ended up, like Star Faithful, very easily.
Yeah. I mean, I think she made the best out of the cards she was dealt. Yeah, absolutely. We can say that by any materialistic measures, she had truly made it. She became a fixture around town. She was always dressed to the nine in the latest fashion, always behind the wheel of that black Mercedes convertible with Joe riding along. And she has many wealthy admirers. And you were right, Annie, she got a lot of presents, a lot of gifts. One of her admirers, admirers, you know, clients. But I think they were admirers. She had like longtime clients most of the time, let's say like this.
One gave her an Opel Capitaine, for example, as a gift back in 1954. So that was before she had the infamous Mercedes. This was another extraordinary car for a woman in her early 20s to own at the time. And I know I know Opel, Opel Capitaine. That doesn't sound flashy, does it? We don't have Opel here, so there's less of a stigma. I mean, I like Opel. I always think my dad had lots of Opel because one of his friends was an... He owned an Opel... Dealership? Dealership. Well, a chain of dealerships, yeah. Nice. So my dad had a lot of Opels. I think they're fine cars. I have no opinion either way, really. But the Capitan is...
The Kapitän was a big deal. It was kind of Opel's flagship model. It was large. It was a comfortable sedan. And it was basically marketed to doctors, lawyers, business owners, senior executives. You know, if you owned the Opel Kapitän, people assumed you were doing pretty well for yourself. And the price tag on that was 10,000 Deutsche Mark. I think it's a really good looking car. It looks like the kind of car you would expect to see in a movie from the 1950s. Like, it's stately looking. It's very leaning towards the American aesthetic, which is a big car. Yeah, it's very swoopy.
It's nice. Listen, anybody buying you a car is amazing. That's a lot. Yeah, I think she got it because she had a car accident and crashed another car, totaled another car. And so the guy just gave her the Uber company. And I assume he owned it. And he's just like, here, you take it. Which is nice. Nice. That wasn't the only luxury. She was gifted by a man. Another client, for example, took her along on holidays to the Mediterranean.
Rumors spread around Rosemarie, rumors about her client list. Allegedly, it was a who's who of West German economical and political circles. Names that have circulated for decades in connection with her include members of the Krupp Industrial Dynasty, you know, Krupp Steel. For generations, the Krupp family had been among Germany's richest and most influential industrialists. They were supplying everything from railway tracks to battleships and weapons. Also like the coffee maker Krupps? No, Krupps is just one P, while Krupp Steel is with double P. Ah, okay. That makes sense.
Then we have the Quant family, which is one of the biggest shareholders of BMW, BMW, for example. The Sachs brothers of Fichtel and Sachs Manufacturing, an empire. These two, Ernst Wilhelm Sachs and his brother, and you might know that name, Gunter Sachs. Does that ring a bell? Yes. Gunter Sachs, the kind of epitome of 1950s, 1960s gentleman, playboy, married to Brigitte Badeau for a couple of years, as far as I remember. Who else? Yeah, there also have been persistent but never proven claims involving figures from the political establishments, including a federal transport minister of the area and a man who would later go on to become chancellor of West Germany. I'm not going to name any names here.
Let me be very clear why none of this was ever substantiated in court. But the rumors alone were enough to make an entire country deeply, deeply nervous because if even a fraction of this was true, it meant that some of the most powerful men in West Germany had spent the 1950s writing checks or handing over cash, more likely, to an elite call girl. And I know, nowadays, nobody's surprised by that. We all know that the super rich are doing the most fucked up stuff and spending time with a sex worker would be almost wholesome, I'd say. Back in the 50s, huge fucking deal. Yeah, I just hate it when it's hypocritical, you know?
Like, if your platform is conservative family values and you're cheating on your wife with a sex worker, that I think is a huge fucking deal. But some people aren't fussed. It's, you know. But there are hypocrites everywhere. Everywhere.
So yeah, that's Rosemarie at the height of her career. Financially absolutely independent, driving her own sports car, living in her own upscale apartment. And then, in the space of just a few days at the end of October 1957, it all ends. And here is how it went down. Or at least, here's how the story eventually got pieced together. Rosemarie was last seen by witnesses on the afternoon of 29th of October 1957. Nobody heard from her after that. Nobody saw her leave the building. Nobody checked on her because, you know, a woman with her lifestyle. If she was not seen for a few days, that wasn't exactly cause for alarm among her neighbors, I'd say.
Maybe she's off for another weekend in Monte Carlo, you know, who can say? Sure. But there was that constant howling and barking of Joe. And let me tell you right now, the dog is okay. As okay as he can be. But no, nothing happens to the dog, okay? So rest assured. Okay. But for almost three days, the neighbors could hear Joe whining and barking and howling. And that was weird, right? Because why was the dog alone in the apartment for such a long time? Rosemary loved Joe. Clearly she wouldn't just leave him all by himself.
And then there was the bread. Bread deliveries just kept stacking up outside and they were untouched. Oh, come on. Somebody called the authorities, for the love of God. I'm sure in a case like this, though, it's probably one of those things where if she's in a nice building, she might be the only sex worker and everybody else kind of knows what she's up to. And everybody knew who she was. And is minding their business and really not paying attention as hard as they can. But still, come on. It was actually her cleaning lady, a woman named Erna Krüger, who eventually raised the alarm. She just knew something was very, very wrong, right?
But rather than entering the apartment herself, Erna called the police and officers arrived with a locksmith and had the door opened. And by the way, the door was unlocked, just pulled closed. And I'm not sure if it's the same everywhere around the world, but here, many apartment doors automatically latch when you pull them closed from the outside. So you still can't open them without a key, even though they're technically unlocked. You know what I mean? Correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's different from the typical American front door, right? Where unlocked usually means you can just turn the handle or the knob and walk in. That's right. Yeah, that's how it usually is. Our cottage used to have a door latch like you find in the rest of Europe where...
It's almost like a deadbolt that almost automatically engages. But you can then turn the bolt to lock it down. Or I think we got rid of it because we kept locking ourselves out accidentally. Because, again, it's not common in America. So didn't Erna, the cleaner, have a key?
Do we not know? Because she had to call the police to get in? Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good question. And I ask myself the same, actually. And again, I don't have a definite answer. I think it comes down to two possibilities. So she either didn't have a key or she had one, but didn't want to be the one to find whatever it was that was waiting there in the apartment. And I think she had the right idea that it probably wasn't good. Yeah, that makes sense. I think you and I would probably do that. Yeah, I think so. It's different when it's not your family. Yeah. Right. Like when you don't have an emergency, like, oh, my goodness, I have to get ready and find out. And it's like, OK, let's this is bad. Let's call the authorities.
Yeah. And, you know, you and I would know, OK, I don't want to disturb anything in there. Yeah. So, yeah, the authorities arrive, they open the door, they walk in and they find not only Joe pacing around the room, poor Joe, but also Rosemarie Nitribit dead. The scene by every account was horrendous. Her body was lying with one leg up on the sofa and one leg on the floor in a state of significant decomposition. And that's another thing that made me question things because it's only been three days and it's late October. Like, how bad could she have been decomposed? And I was thinking maybe the thermostat was on high.
possible if she was anything like me, like I'm freezing all the time. And she probably wasn't one to launch around in sweatpants and foodies. Then I read sources claiming that the apartment had underfloor heating and it had apparently been running at full blast the entire time and essentially turning her living room into a slow oven and, you know, accelerating decomposition drastically. Yeah. I don't know if that's true, but it was a modern apartment with a modern central heating system, definitely. Yeah. I mean, we hear all the time about cases where the heat is either turned way up by the killer to help speed up decomp or turned way down to try to...
Preserve the bodies. Slow it down as possible. Yeah. It's also possible that she wasn't as heavily decomposed as they thought, or maybe it was just more than they expected, because maybe they didn't realize at first that it had already been that much time. I don't know also what the state of her body was, because I think when there are when there's like blood present and when there's openings in the body, I think that decomp happens faster. I don't know that that's true. And I'm just making that up. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, totally. I think that's true. I think that is true. But we're going to talk more about that next week anyway. OK, for now, just what I did read was that the officers who arrived at the scene described an overwhelming.
sickening smell, even with the windows then open and there was a bloody towel under her head. And then there was a shattered glass ashtray nearby. And they believe this to be the object used to deliver a severe wound to the back of her skull. You know, I imagine it to be this heavy, big glass ashtrays. For example, if you entertain a lot of men who smoke cigars, for example. Yep. I literally just hunted one down. I really wanted another one of these. My grandpa had these like emerald green stacked, really big, heavy glass ashtrays from the 60s, probably 70s. I don't know. And I found one at a thrift store and I was so excited because it reminds me of grandpa.
And then around her neck, unmistakably, there were marks of strangulation. And so the official cause of death was determined to be manual strangulation, followed. what appeared to have been a struggle because of the furniture was kind of disturbed, flipped over. Yeah, as I said, we're going to talk more about this next week because I think this is the right moment to stop for this week. And next week we talk about the rest, the crime scene, the investigation, the mistakes made, the theories, all of that. I'm so sad that this is her end because I was really rooting for her. And listen, I know some people might be thinking like Annie, like rooting for a girl working as a sex... But I think given where she had come from and what her...
options were and what the average outcome of a situation like the one she was in is i just feel she was really doing great you know oh i'm really sad about that she didn't make it that sucks all right do you have something good after this really said Yeah. Well, we've had so many amazing visits from loved ones lately. My brother who's traveling had a quick couple of days at our house between South America and the next destination. And we were able to go and see the Odyssey. And I know I said that I wasn't going to see it because the dog dies.
But I did go to see it. And the dog dies. And I did cry audibly. I let out an audible sob, but I wasn't the only one. A lot of people in the theater were crying. So bring your tissues. That's the only spoiler I'm going to give you. And honestly, that story's been out for a really long time. So I maintain if you didn't know it's on you. I think it's been 3,000 years or something like that. And my husband, who was initially a little bit annoyed that I told him because he couldn't remember that that had happened and he hates spoilers, after the fact said he was actually kind of glad he knew what was coming because it is bad in the movie. Like, y'all, they are mean to this. It's bad.
He said that he was really glad to know that it was coming and that it in no way ruins anything plot wise. So I wouldn't do you guys dirty like that. I just think I just think knowing that it's coming does help. My brother, who was over the moon excited to watch it, said it wasn't as good as he was hoping it would be, but that maybe he just got a little too excited. All of us are looking forward to seeing it again because we all think that Christopher Nolan is the kind of director that like every time you watch something, you pick up something that you missed before. See it in IMAX if you can. It was beautiful. As Nolan intended. What's that? As Nolan intended. I was going to say, yeah, see it in IMAX. Hashtag as Nolan intended. That's a new thing because everybody's like, go and watch it on IMAX as Nolan intended. I love it. I love it.
It was really good. I'm glad. Also, it is long, you guys. It's long. It's like three hours long. When I tell you that I moved in a fast manner that I didn't think was possible for my body anymore in order to not wet my pants at the end of that movie. Well, ask her this is how long it was. It was long. The problem was the theater that I'm actually, we see it in. You don't want to be that person that has to get up and shuffle past a million people. Sorry, sorry, sorry. How about you?
The next heat wave is just starting right now. And Annie knows it. I'm this kind of European snob who turns down her nose on air conditioning. Like, we don't need air conditioning here. We have thick brick walls. But the problem is Jem. My beautiful Jem suffers so much with the heat and wants the temperature in the house. And it takes several days of really a lot of heat for the brick walls to heat up. But once the heat is inside, you know how our houses are built. Keep all the heat inside because winter, yada, yada. So he's suffering. Like, he can't sleep. He just paces around. And we just had a fan.
But that didn't really cut it. And with his Lefora, like he needs to sleep. He needs to sleep. You need your sleep. So I did it. I went. We got an air condition for our dog. And it's so much better. He can sleep. The temperature is a nice 24 degrees because we don't need it too cold in here. No. He enjoys it a lot. I'm also fine with it. And now I'm really relaxed looking at the temperatures for the next week because I'm like, yeah, we're set. You guys are going to be okay. That's it. It does make a difference when...
At least if it's too hot outside to be doing things and being productive, there are things you can do inside your house and not die of heat stroke. It's a lot. I'm like a person. I love the heat. I don't mind it at all. I used to be like that before the heat intolerance. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And as you said, Jem needs to sleep. Absolutely. I woke up at three o'clock in the morning and he was just like, you know, walking around and getting up. And then I had to open the door to the garden, which I'm not a fan of sleeping at night with unlocked open doors. No, I don't like that either. So, yeah, I'm very happy about that. I think it's amazing. Things we do for our dogs. Oh, yeah. You guys know we bought a car for Tucker.
That's why, you know, it's basically bought a house for the dogs. Yeah. This is it. We, you know, our dogs are our children. And I know there are people who poo poo that. But listen, it is what it is. They are our family. And there's nothing we wouldn't do to try to make their lives better if we can. Yeah. So. All right. They are here for just such a short while. I saw this thing ages ago where it said something like, you know, their lives are so brief that we must seem like these all knowing, never aging, you know, and it just broke me. It just it made me cry and cry and cry and cry because.
I just wish they lived longer. It reminds me, we had Helion reach out to us for support. She started a petition to raise awareness for walking dogs, not when it's super, super hot outside, like because the ground gets too hot for their paws. And I'm going to share the link to the petition in our show notes. Awesome. Also, another note, we got a comment on Spotify because I made this comment on another episode about people riding their bikes with the dogs running next to it when it's like...
40 degrees outside in the city on the pavement. I'm sorry, I was not super clear. I'm not in general against people riding bikes and dogs running next to it when it's somewhere where that's okay. I was talking explicitly about summer in the city on a bike with a dog leashed to the bike, which is actually against the law here in Austria. So that's, just want to make that clear. If you're somewhere in the fields here and it's 20 degrees and your dog is just hyperactive and needs a lot of exercise, please go for it. But you know your dog, but on the whole, very specific. Yeah, that's right.
All right. All right. That's it. If you enjoyed this episode or any or all of our other episodes, please do us the huge favor of rating and or reviewing us on your favorite podcast app. It genuinely makes a huge difference and it helps new listeners to find us.
And also a quick note on that. On Spotify, you can only leave a star rating, not a written review, but you can comment under the episode. And we really do love those because we can even reply. And I think you just told me we have a bunch of comments, so I'm going to go look after you record. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love to read them. Yeah, me too. You can also comment on YouTube or, you know, just tell a friend about us, preferably one maybe with a soft spot for vintage sports cars or unsolved German murders or a very healthy suspicion of wealthy industrialites and their dynasties, maybe. If you would like to help keep the podcast going and get access to all kinds of bonus content, you can join us over on Patreon.
That's where you'll find our monthly live get-togethers, early ad-free episode releases, and Cinema Macabre, where we discuss and occasionally reenact various related... Did your scrubs arrive? They did. My scrubs are here. My scrubs are here. I've got a box packed for you with your red flags in it. And then another one I'm putting together with our awards in it.
That's what I actually need Patreon money for, you guys. If you would please join Patreon so I can afford to mail Ioana all of the stuff that I have for her, that would be super. But no, really, joking aside, we can't thank our supporters enough. You really do keep the show alive. Absolutely. Yeah. You can find all the links on our website and we'd love to see you in our Facebook group where the fun keeps going all week. All week. The lovely weirdos there and on Patreon literally help us put the fun in funeral. Speaking of which, I wore that shirt you got me.
The pump and funeral one to the Odyssey. I got a lot of weird looks, but it felt accurate for what we were about to watch. They have such great merchandise. They now brought out a picnic blanket with like, you know, the outline of a body. I love that so much. I don't know if you saw the Nantucket Whaling Museum just came out, which is a great whaling museum. If you're visiting the Capen Islands and you're on Nantucket, it is absolutely worth a visit. But they got a one star review that said this is something like this is the worst aquarium I've ever been to.
And they made it into t-shirts. I love that. And they've already sold out. I love it so much. All right. You can always drop us an email at thresholdpodcast at gmail.com. Or if you're old school, our PO box address is on the side too. Which reminds me, Melissa, thank you. Your package arrived. Oh, thank you so much. I'm going to have to send it to Ed. We're sending stuff back and forth. It's a whole thing. It's our whole life now. That's all we do is mail things back and forth to each other. I keep thinking that I'm going to hand Gary this stuff over and see her soon. And then it's, listen, it's fine.
Also, don't forget, please, to send us your story for the Halloween listener episode. We want to hear your creepy, mysterious, entertaining, mind-boggling encounters with the macabre, paranormal, or extraterrestrial. The stories that Annie loves the most. That's it. You know you've got weird stories. You know you want to tell them to us. We want to hear it. Get on it, please. Is that it? Is that everything?
That's it. Please tell your pets we said hi, hug them, cuddle them, keep them cold, keep them warm, feed them, water them, whatever you need to do. Take them to the vet, you know it. Be kind to them. That's right. Be kind to your fellow human being and also at least sometimes be kind to yourself. You deserve it too. You really do. And please remember that if you're going through hell, get into that Mercedes and keep driving. Just keep driving. Get the hell out of there. Tschüss. Bye.
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