After the trial… ‘She started to serve her sentence as a martyr who must pay for the sins of others.’ So concludes Waldemar Weimann’s account of the investigation, entitled, The Most Mysterious Murderer of my career – Nurse Elisabeth Kusian. We can assume that she opted for this ‘neutralization’ technique mainly in order to survive: it meant ‘I am a good person: everything I did was for the man I love.’ Just as she had always tended to do, replacing reality with the virtual, mistaking what her imagination had conjured for reality itself, so that in prison she continued to consider herself not as a murderer but as a warm hearted Samaritan. ‘Walter did it, and I just wanted to help him escape…’
The newspapers, in any case, showed no sympathy at all for her, they did however question whether the whole truth had really come out and the headlines grabbed the reader with titles such as: Kusian’s attorneys ask for a revision. So says the Nacht-Depesche of January 15, 1951, and writes, among other things: Most circles in the city of Berlin have been satisfied with the life sentence being handed down against that woman. The two cold blooded and bloody murders she was found guilty of created great indignation everywhere. There still remain a few questions concerning the trial, those questions were not answered satisfactorily during the proceedings and have consequently left a certain amount of disquiet. (…) it is a fact that the trial did not clarify whether Kusian had accomplices and who they might have been. The search for the ‘Lady in Black’ was abandoned. For whom was the third glass in Kusian’s room intended? The Tagesspiegel of January 26, 1951 had a headline asking: What happens to the children now? – Elisabeth Kusian’s daughters and her son know their mother’s fate. A change of name could not be effected. The thought that ten children in all – including Seidelmann’s and Kurt Muschan’s – have been made to suffer, is one more thing in the end that makes people shudder.
What else was there to report about Kusian? The request for an appeal remained unsuccessful. The Third Criminal Panel of the Federal Court of Justice confirmed the verdict of the Berlin court on December 13, 1951. Seven years later, Elisabeth Kusian was diagnosed with cancer. Did remorse for her actions and her divided soul also make her ill, one can only speculate.
As one good nurse among many she would have been long forgotten but as the ‘Cold Angel’ she lives on in the German public’s collective memory. She was ‘unearthed’ again by Medical Examiners, by Waldemar Weimann in 1964 and by Gunther Geserick, Klaus Vendura and Ingo Wirth in 2001. Now this documentary novel has been written about her. The only way to justify this is to quote Bertold Brecht: It’s a cynical, rootless point of view. I like it.