The Strange Case of Marianne Kreuzer

Real-life gangster Petras Dominas as depicted by Edwin Marian in the East German film Die Dominas-Bande (1968).

2,950 words

“Germans commit crimes, too.”
“That’s my point. We have enough idiots of our own, we don’t need to import more.”
“I disagree.”
— An actual conversation between the author and one of her liberal friends

In all my years of biographical research, this might be the strangest case I’ve ever come across — next to the case of Mac Wenner, the guy who fell or jumped out of the bathroom window of a plane without anyone noticing it.

I didn’t even go looking for Marianne Kreuzer. She just crossed my path as the attorney of Longin Bladowski, an acquaintance of Savitri Devi who had first been condemned to death at the Neuengamme trial and then had his sentence reduced to 12 years in Werl prison. He was ultimately released in 1953, on the same day as Savitri’s friend Hertha Ehlert.

So Marianne Kreuzer, the lawyer from Essen, Germany, really was of no importance to me — until I Googled her, just to see if there was a picture of her available for my blog post. The results were . . . interesting, to say the least.

“Blood and Diamonds,” screamed the Spiegel headline of October 6, 1964. “Gangster’s Lawyer” commented Die Zeit of January 26, 1968, and opened its article with: “Ever since the Essen-based lawyer Marianne Kreuzer equipped her beloved client Petras Dominas with guns . . .” What the heck?

Wikipedia gave me the gist of it (my translation):

The Dominas gang was a criminal organization founded by Petras Dominas in the 1960s. The gang committed burglaries and robberies. Their targets were located particularly in the Ruhr area. Two people, the siblings Albrecht and Lina Höhmann, aged 70 and 60, respectively, were shot dead by the gang on August 25, 1964 in their “Onkel Albrecht” truck stop in Lünen. The getaway vehicle usually used was an Opel Rekord. . . .

The head and the one who gave his name to the gang, Petras Dominas, was arrested when he attempted to drive away in a parked car the day after the robbery in Amsterdam.

Dominas, a Lithuanian by birth and a typographer by profession, had already been sentenced to four years in prison in 1959. Dominas made notes in a cipher consisting of around 1,000 symbols. It could only be cracked with great effort by the Central Office for Ciphering (ZfCh) in Bonn. Other perpetrators included the brothers Gerhard and Helmut Balk, Paul Cichetzki, and the Essen lawyer and notary Marianne Kreuzer. The criminal trial was concluded in 1967 and Dominas was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of cancer a few years later.

The full story reads like the script of a crime thriller — and indeed, it was adapted twice for television.

The Dominas gang robbed a jeweler in Bochum on November 19, 1963; a bystander was shot in the belly. On January 3, 1964 the gang robbed a jeweler in Witten and in the process shot a bystander in the thigh. On February 28, 1964 Dominas and his accomplices — the laborer Helmut Balk and the unskilled worker Paul Cichetzki, both from Bottrop — robbed a jeweler in Dortmund. On April 1, 1964 it was the turn of a jeweler in Essen; on April 20, a jeweler in Gelsenkirchen; and on May 2, a jeweler in Siegen.

It was pretty obvious to the police at that point that they were dealing with the same perpetrators, as the gang always used stolen Opel Rekord cars for the getaway. The shop windows, made of bulletproof glass, were always smashed with a lump hammer. The criminals also always committed their robberies in the Ruhr area in the evening hours between 8:50 and 10:55 PM — just before the jewelers (usually after the last cinema showing) lowered the security gates in front of their shop windows. In each case, this was the time when the local patrol cars were driving to the police station so that their teams could change (usually around 10 PM).

You can buy Savitri Devi’s Defiance here.

On June 7, 1964 Dominas and his men expanded their radius when they robbed a jeweler in Amsterdam. This time, however, there were witnesses, a mother and her daughter, who could actually describe one of the perpetrators.

The German police and the gang got into a gunfight on July 31, 1964, when the gang was robbing another jewelry store in Gelsenkirchen. On the night of August 24-25, the police found shell casings from a Belgian “FN” pistol at the “Onkel Albrecht” truck stop near Lünen. Albrecht Höhmann and his sister Lina had been murdered and robbed, probably because the popular landlord Albrecht liked to show off a thick bundle of bills to his customers. The forensic investigation came to the surprising conclusion that Albrecht and his sister had been murdered with the same gun that had been used by the jewel robbers.

Ten days after the double murder, a seven-member special commission was formed under Chief Inspector Heribert Löblein. In the meantime, the Dutch criminal investigation department had come up with some leads as well. A Westphalian lump hammer had been found in front of the jewelry store. When the German police learned of this, they immediately recognized the modus operandi. More importantly, however, the Amsterdam witnesses had reported that one of the robbers resembled the prominent Dutch quizmaster Theo Eerdmans. Eerdmans turned out to be innocent, but Heribert Löblein compared his photo with others in the criminal albums and came across the convicted burglar Petras Dominas, 35, a Lithuanian by birth who was by then stateless.

Apart from this physiognomic trace, other clues also pointed to Dominas. According to the Criminal Investigation Department’s files, he was one of those violent criminals who, contrary to the criminal wisdom that more than four years in prison was bad, fired without hesitation and thus no longer took the risks into account. The word in underworld circles was that Dominas was planning to “work hard for a year and then emigrate to Canada.”

Based on these incriminating facts, an arrest warrant was issued for Dominas on September 23. Finding him proved difficult, however, as he had not registered his residence. Three days later, on September 26, 1964, Löblein met with his Dutch colleague Pieter Landman in Amsterdam. They were still discussing their case when an alarm went off.

Landman and Löblein were only a hundred meters from the scene of the crime. The shop window of Herman Schipper’s jewelry store at Helligeweg 3 had been smashed, gold and diamonds with an insured value of 380,000 marks had disappeared, and an Opel Rekord was just driving off. A patrol car took up the pursuit of the suspicious vehicle, but got stuck in traffic. When a citywide pursuit of the black Opel was ordered a short time later, the robbers had already abandoned their car. By this point, the Dominas gang had stolen gold and jewelry amounting to 1.5 million marks.

The story only got wilder from there.

Löblein showed photos of Dominas to the robbery’s witnesses and ascertained that he had indeed pulled off the coup. Landman promptly ordered a search for the Opel Rekord that had been driven by Dominas and his girlfriend Betty, one of Balk’s sisters, in the months before, according to the investigations in Germany. A police officer discovered the car that afternoon opposite the Hotel Polen in Amsterdam. Detectives staked it out, and just to make sure they deflated the car’s front tires.

At 12:30 AM the next day, a man and a woman approached the car. They were Petras Dominas and a young woman by the name of Gerlinde Kreuzer. Both were arrested.

Here we finally get to Marianne Kreuzer’s involvement. When she learned that her daughter was being held, she naturally went to Amsterdam — and was also detained. Apparently the Dutch police used a trick that was not quite legal, at least under German law: They told Marianne Kreuzer that Gerlinde had already confessed, and that she had incriminated her mother. The lawyer reluctantly told her story; first, that she had known about the robbery in advance; and later that she had been blackmailed by Dominas and had obtained two guns for him.

The second Amsterdam robbery had gone as follows. Since August 20, the gang members had taken up residence at the Amsterdamse Bos campsite. On August 29 they stole a black Opel Rekord from Pastor Stavemann in Hilversum. Petras Dominas made several trips to the North Sea resort of Noordwijk aan Zee in order to visit Gerlinde Kreuzer, who, as one source puts it, had rented a house with her fiancée, a German student. Another source claims that Gerlinde had actually been engaged to Dominas. Be that as it may, Gerlinde invited her mother over the phone to come watch the upcoming robbery.

According to the original plans, the robbery was to take place on September 19. The lawyer arrived in Noordwijk by cab from Essen, talked to her daughter for ten minutes, and then took a cab back to Essen. The jewel robbery was postponed.

Dominas left the campsite on Septembr 25. He moved into a double room with Gerlinde Kreuzer at the Hotel Polen in Amsterdam. At dawn on September 26, the day of the crime, Marianne Kreuzer and her older daughter Irma, 25, who was a law student, set off from Essen to Amsterdam in a Ford Consul Capri. The car was parked on Rokin, a busy thoroughfare, directly in front of the bandits’ stolen Opel Rekord.

At around 8 that day, Dominas, Balk, and Cichetzki met on the Munt, a square near Herman Schipper’s jewelry store. At about a quarter past nine, Marianne Kreuzer and her daughters were seated in a tea room 25 meters from Schipper’s jewelry store — “box seats,” as Gerlinde Kreuzer later told the police. The stage was Herman Schipper’s store, the curtain the cast-iron security gate in front of the displays.

The curtain went up. Head saleswoman Paula Versteeg took the most precious diamonds and jewelry out of the safe and placed them in the shop window. Employee Grietje Smit started cleaning the display windows when suddenly she was grabbed from behind and pulled into the street by Paul Cichetzki. He shot three times in the air — the signal for the main star of the show, Petras Dominas, who then appeared wearing dark glasses, gloves, and a hat pulled low into his blackened face. He dramatically fired a shot into the shop’s stucco ceiling. Jeweler Herman Schipper grabbed a stool to throw at Dominas, who then shot at him but missed. A third shot shattered a showcase window and wounded Versteeg. In the meantime, an employee called the police in the shop’s back office. Helmut Balk smashed the bulletproof glass with the hammer and cleared out the displays.

After their escape, all involved reacted with remarkable cool. Cichetzki bought two packets of sliced raisin bread at a bakery and then went back to the campsite. Dominas and Balk went to a hairdressing salon, and Balk had his hair cut. Meanwhile, the Kreuzer family went to a shoe shop next door to the Schipper jewelry store, bought shoes, and asked the sales clerk about the robbery.

Dominas and Balk got into a light gray Taunus 12 M and drove back to the campsite. They changed their clothes and buried some of the loot and their pistols in a wooded area before the group split up: Balk set off for Bottrop by car, Cichetzki took a train to Oberhausen, and Dominas went to the Hotel Polen, which was also Gerlinde Kreuzer’s destination. Irma and Marianne drove back to Essen in the afternoon.

The true nature of the relationship between Petras Dominas, Marianne Kreuzer, and her two daughters has never been revealed. When asked about it in court, Petras Dominas simply said, “Ask Mrs. Kreuzer yourself.” The lawyer’s only comment was, “I’m keeping silent about it and always will.”

Contrary to some of the spicier speculations in the tabloids, a psychiatrist explained Kreuzer’s behavior by the fact that she had always wanted to have a son and had cast Dominas in that role.

What is known is that Marianne Kreuzer’s husband, himself a lawyer, had been sentenced for war crimes and had met Petras Dominas in Werl prison. He was pardoned in 1954, but of course was not allowed to work in his profession again; he died in 1958.

Marianne Kreuzer (née Birkenbach) had, according to her own testimony, been barred from practicing during the Third Reich because she was a woman. After the war she was barred from becoming a judge because she was married to a convicted war criminal. The information given in the East German film adaptation (see below) is that she actually worked as a lawyer for a private company from 1939 up to her marriage in March 1940.

Marianne Kreuzer had been the attorney of Albert Letz, who was sentenced along with Longin Bladowski at the Neuengamme trial, which is ostensibly why Bladowski later requested her to represent him when he was trying to get out of jail early. (He had represented himself at his trial, after witnessing “in the first Neuengamme trial that the public defenders there only played the role of yes-men and did not help their clients in any way”.)

You can buy Savitri Devi’s book, Gold in the Furnace, here.

Marianne Kreuzer was thus probably quite well-known to the inmates at Werl. That is how she came to represent Petras Dominas in 1959. When her defense of him was unsuccessful, she smuggled a metal saw into his cell. The escape from the third floor of the prison was short-lived; Dominas was caught 24 hours later and remained in prison for jewel theft until 1963.

True to form, when the case of the Dominas gang finally went to court two years later, Petras Dominas dragged it out by trying to recuse the presiding judge, the jury, and the public prosecutor –everyone over the age of 45. He had put together a dossier, he claimed, documenting the National Socialist past of 180 people in the court, but said that the public prosecutor had stolen the list. In the end the annoyed court passed a life sentence, and Dominas died from cancer some years later. Meanwhile, Marianne Kreuzer’s daughters sold their mother’s story to a tabloid for 40,000 marks.

Strangely, I was unable to find out on the Internet what Marianne Kreuzer’s sentence was. There are also hardly any photos available online. I have managed to find two extremely bad scans from Der Spiegel, and Alamy offers a picture of Gerlinde Kreuzer being escorted across the border on October 28, 1964, as well as a series on Pieter Landman, including the search of “Anna Kreuzer Birkenbach’s” car.

The story has been adapted for television twice. The East German production Die Dominas-Bande (1968) is a two-part episode from the series Kriminalfälle ohne Beispiel. It has been described as “Robin Hood romantic with a bit of class struggle,” which is true to a certain extent, but it’s more a story from Wild West Germany that portrays the capitalist system’s moral decay. You know, everybody is so obsessed with money that humanity has no place in it, and of course there’s Nazis in every position of power. Unsurprisingly, Dominas’ alleged 180-name list plays a major role in the film. Still, I owe Die Dominas-Bande a debt of gratitude, because it quotes a lot from the court files and newspapers of the time — meaning I not only learned from it who Marianne Kreuzer’s husband was, but also that she was sentenced to six years’ hard labor (Zuchthaus), of which she only served one for health reasons. A corresponding article from the Neue Ruhr-Zeitung on January 26, 1968 is actually shown. The information gleaned from the film is not absolutely correct, but it helped quite a lot.

The West German production Komplizen (1969) from the series Das Kriminalmuseum is available on YouTube. All the names have been changed and some of the elements have been streamlined. Unlike the East German production, the film omits most of the background story; only a few bits and pieces are mentioned in the dialogue. Needless to say, there is no Nazi list, the court isn’t some old boys’ club, and the Dutch don’t immediately scream “fascistic occupation” because three guys from Germany have robbed a jewelry store. Komplizen is not exactly dramatic or exciting; it’s not even sexy, despite the Dominas character (here called Pit Servatos) supposedly being such a lady’s man. But Edith Schneider as the Kreuzer character, Dr. Irmgard Thalmann, is excellent. (She would, many years later, feature in my favorite Lebensborn film, Of Pure Blood). And of course it’s set in the Ruhr area and Amsterdam in the 1960s. Need I say more? No diversity anywhere in sight. The streets were clean. People actually knew how to dress. The West German and, apparently, the Dutch police drove around in Volkswagen Bugs. (If you’ve never seen an Amsterdam car chase involving Bugs, you haven’t lived.)

As an aside: When my mother recently cleared out her collection of ancient wrapping paper, she came across an old cutout from the HÖRZU tabloid magazine. There is no date given, but it must have been from 1984, because it’s about the popular crime show presenter Eduard Zimmermann’s visit to London:

The British television company BBC had just acquired the rights to his series Aktenzeichen XY . . . ungelöst. Crime Watch [is] its title on the island. The proud “Ede” told HÖRZU: “I’m particularly pleased with the BBC’s decision. It’s the first time that the British have adapted a German program.”

The first episode of Crimewatch U.K. aired in June 1984.

The reason why I’m bringing this up in the context of the Dominas gang is because Crimewatch host Nick Ross said something right at the end of the first episode that became a sort of mantra as the series progressed: “Don’t have nightmares. Serious crime is mercifully rather rare.” Or, in another episode: “Britain is still one of the safest countries in the world.” That was in 1984. I’ll leave you with that.