The Defeated Aristocrat

The Defeated Aristocrat

KONIGSBERG 1919

Katherine John

After spending the last months of the Great War as POWs, Wolf Mau and his fellow soldiers are relieved to be back in Germany. Their homeland is defeated, starving, and broken – they didn’t expect a welcome home party. But neither did they anticipate murder …

A killer is stalking the medieval streets of Konigsberg. A killer who specialises in kidnapping demobbed soldiers … before torturing them using medieval methods and leaving their mutilated corpses in the city’s red light district.

With senior police officials more concerned with politics than crime-solving, it falls to Wolf to hunt down whoever is committing these sadistic crimes – before he and his remaining friends find themselves on the growing list of victims …

Nothing straight can be made from timber as crooked as that which makes man.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Native of Konigsberg, East Prussia

Contents

PROLOGUE

The following is based on the journals of my great grandfather Freiherr Wolfgang Friedrich Leopold von Mau, one time Kriminal Investigator in Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, Germany. Aside from personal thoughts and events in his private life, he recorded an account of every case he worked on, and preserved the relevant newspaper cuttings from the
Konigsberg Zeit
(
Konigsberg Times
) and the
Konigsberg Sonne
(
Konigsberg Sun
).

I’ll not reveal the names of those who assisted me in retrieving his papers. Even in the twenty-first century, there are factions from extreme right to far left in the political spectrum intent on harming those they suspect of working for the freedom of the individual against the ideology of ‘state and common good’.

The fate of Konigsberg has been documented elsewhere for those prepared to seek it. Suffice to say approximately twelve and half million survivors from the pre-war German population of fifteen million East Prussians were expelled by the Allies in 1945-1948, a high proportion to their death as slave labourers in Siberia. The fortunate escaped to the West. The city was renamed Kaliningrad in honour of the Bolshevik revolutionary Mikhail Kalinin, and given into Russian control, and the names Konigsberg and East Prussia were erased from the map.

This is not an entreaty that homes, lands, and buildings be returned to their rightful owners who were not compensated for their loss. The East Prussians are far from unique. Throughout history, people of many races and creeds have been murdered, vilified, oppressed, subjugated, robbed, enslaved, and driven from their homes and lands. At what point in time should society begin making amends to surviving exiles? A decade later? A generation? A century?

If I learned anything from my East Prussian forefathers, it is that ‘the strong survive’. Never look back. The past has gone. Live in and for the present, albeit without roots. The future cannot be seen or foretold – which is probably just as well.

This is a plea that Konigsberg be remembered for the people who built the city, lived there, and made it the great port it once was. It is a simple, honest account of a kriminal investigator’s experiences in a place and country that now exist only in memories and a few – scant few – dusty archives.

The new Russian city of Kaliningrad remained closed to visitors until 1991. Even then the authorities made it difficult for foreigners, particularly Prussian-born former inhabitants and their descendants, to obtain visas. After the borders opened, I smiled at a few officials. They weren’t as impressed with my goodwill as they were by my money. I acquired a visa. I’d memorized my great-grandfather’s address in Konigsberg and researched the location of his properties in the new Kaliningrad. His former home had been reduced to rubble, destroyed like so many of the medieval buildings when the city was bombed, first by the RAF in 1944, later by Russian artillery, but the cellars remained, shrouded in weeds behind wire netting.

I had directions and found what I was looking for. Afterwards I spent a week touring the sad remains of the city. I walked on grassy knolls that blanketed the foundations of medieval houses and inns. When I stood on the banks of the Pregel I could have sworn I heard ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’ being sung in a bar behind me, just as it had been for centuries by students of the Albertina, the nickname given to Konigsberg University.

Ghosts! Or my imagination?

I hired a car, ventured into the countryside, and found the crumbling walls of Waldschloss and the desecrated church and graveyard of Lichtenhagen where my ancestors had lain – and possibly still lay, although Russian troops had a penchant for ransacking graves in the hope of finding valuables. A few neglected, broken pre-war houses had been left standing and were occupied. However, modern Yablonevka bore no resemblance to my family’s photographs of the thriving rural Prussian community where six hundred people had lived and worked before the conflict the Russians had christened ‘The Great Patriotic War’.

I hacked a path through weed-strewn wildernesses populated by vagrant cows and pigs and found no trace of tended fields and farms. Nature had done its work. Centuries of cultivation counted for nothing. Standing on the site of my family’s home for eight hundred years, I felt as though a gossamer curtain hung between me and the past. If I could tear it aside … if I …

But Wolf Mau’s Konigsberg proved unreachable. I remained locked in modern Kaliningrad. I hoped Wolf’s ghost and those of his contemporaries couldn’t see what the city had become.

My visa expired. I flew over the plain that surrounded the great medieval seaport and took a last look at the dark woods and glittering rivers of old East Prussia, reminding myself it was now the Kaliningrad Oblast.

I returned to the hills that stood sentinel around my house. There I found Wolf’s legacy waiting for me. I began to translate and edit my great-grandfather’s papers and, while I worked, Konigsberg lived and breathed again. Proud, ancient, beautiful, and welcoming. The land and city of my forebears.

This is the result; the first chronicle of Wolfgang Friedrich Leopold von Mau – or as he preferred to be known, Wolf Mau – his life and career as a police investigator – and if he occasionally chose to ‘reinterpret’ the law to the ends of justice as opposed to the dictates of bureaucrats, who am I to blame him?

Katherine John, 2014

CHAPTER ONE

Wasser Strasse, Konigsberg, Friday January 3rd 1919

The silhouettes of the medieval warehouses and antiquated crane stood velvet black against the grey, snow-laden night sky. Below them, the ice-encrusted banks of the River Pregel glistened, crystalline in the glacial wind that blew in from the Baltic.

Two uniformed police officers halted outside one of the narrow five-storey houses in Wasser Strasse. It bore a crude metalwork sign,
Hotel
next to a tarnished copper bell pull. A cloaked and hooded figure moved in the shadows.

‘Von Braunsch?’ Her voice was low, seductive. Her accent, French.  A curtain in the building behind them moved, momentarily illuminating the woman’s face. It was beautiful, fair-skinned with jewel-bright blue eyes.

The older officer stepped forward … ‘Do I know you?’

‘You’ve forgotten me?’ There was reproach in her voice and something else.

Von Braunsch wondered if he’d imagined the anger. ‘No … I …’ He frowned. The young woman
did
look familiar.

‘Room 10.’ The woman didn’t wait for von Braunsch to reply. She walked into the hotel.

Von Braunsch turned to his companion. ‘I have to leave you, Blau. Return in an hour and we’ll continue.’

‘If you’re not here, sir?’ Kriminalassistent Blau, a raw recruit on his first patrol, questioned diffidently.

Kriminaloberassistent von Braunsch hesitated. ‘You wait five minutes, no longer. Return to the station at seven and stamp us both off duty. I’ll see you in Headquarters, six thirty sharp this evening.’

‘Isn’t it against regulations to stamp for someone else, sir?’

‘You don’t have to “sir” me, Blau, kriminaloberassistent is sufficient. I’m your superior colleague, not your superior. Every officer stamps colleagues in and out. We wouldn’t have time to sleep if we didn’t.’

‘What do I say if I meet a superior officer and they me ask where you are, Kriminaloberassistent?’

‘The truth. That I’m with an informer. Didn’t they tell you when you were training that the most important duty of every officer is to assemble a network of spies? We need information about criminals to catch them.’

‘Yes, sir. That woman is one of your informers, Kriminaloberassistent von Braunsch?’

‘I have a feeling she’s about to become the best.’ Von Braunsch tapped his nose before disappearing inside the hotel.

A door to a beer shop lower down the street swung open and a chorus of ‘Ein freies Leben führen wir
’
momentarily filled the air.

Students! Blau hated them. Sons of the rich, who had all the money in the world to live high on venison in their castles and join expensive university corps where all they did was eat, drink, sing, and duel. Everyone knew the ruling elite had betrayed Germany. Ignoring the price the Fatherland’s soldiers had paid with their blood and lives, they’d negotiated political surrender to the allies behind the back of the military authorities when victory was within sight just so they could keep their money in their pockets instead of spending it where it was needed, on defence.

He passed a group of nuns from the convent attached to the Church of the Holy Family. They were wheeling a portable cart fitted with an oil stove, and were offering hot drinks to sailors and streetwalkers more interested in schnapps and sin than refreshment and redemption.

A man lay huddled in a military greatcoat in a doorway. Blau pretended he hadn’t seen him. Von Braunsch told everyone who’d listen that he’d served four years in hell as a captain on the Western Front, but that didn’t stop him from harrying homeless discharged soldiers out of whatever meagre shelter they found.

Blau shook his head at a sister who offered him a steaming tin mug. He stood beneath a street lamp and studied the map von Braunsch had handed him when they’d left headquarters.

‘
Our route
i
n case we’re separated
.’