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Almost everything could be learned about their love, at least about the love that was for sale.

Because the 24-year-old was a, yes - hooker, noble whore, luxury prostitute?

"Mannequin", Rosemarie Nitribitt entered in the phone book.

The petite blonde had never gained a foothold as a model: her Eifel dialect was too broad, her demeanor too crude and cheeky.

So she went to work under the name Rebecca, within a few years first became the most famous pleasure lady in Frankfurt nightlife - and then one of the great German criminal cases.

This case seems predestined for all the novels, films and documentaries that were written decades after Nitribitt's death.

The moral scandal, the sex, the conspiracy theories: a screenwriter could hardly have better arranged the gruesome and mysterious details of the crime, which remains unsolved to this day.

The pink terry towel that the murderer placed under her head laceration after strangling her with both hands.

The sloppy police investigation that seemed to cover up rather than reveal - because men from the highest circles were involved, it was rumored.

Or that fateful moment in the autumn of 1957 when Rosemarie Nitribitt was sitting in front of a glass of champagne in a Bad Homburg bar and said: "Somebody else will break my skull in at some point."

The body was in the overheated living room

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A few weeks later, on November 1st, she was found at home, at number 41 in the Frankfurt apartment building, Stiftstrasse 36. The body was lying in the overheated living room, half decayed.

Rosemarie Nitribitt was a woman who caused a stir.

She didn't go out on the street, but drove through the city, parked in front of luxury hotels and looked for her suitors herself: first in an Opel Kapitän, then in a glamorous Mercedes 190 SL, black, red leather seats, whitewall tires.

An attractive woman, always tastefully dressed, mink coat, diamond ring, plus a white poodle named Joe.

She looked for wealthy customers, but sometimes offered her services for a 50-mark note and made a fortune.

The investigators suspected robbery and murder, and after months of bungling, they arrested the sales representative Heinz Pohlmann, a friend of Nitribitt who was chronically indebted.

The circumstantial trial, however, ended with an acquittal.

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On the other hand, nothing at all came from the higher circles in which she frequented and the police interviewed.

The young woman had half of the economic miracle celebrities in the address book;

Her contacts included, for example, the millionaire brothers Gunter and Ernst Wilhelm Sachs or Harald Quandt, offspring of the industrial clan.

Love letters from the Krupp heir

The Krupp heir, Harald von Bohlen and Habach, even wrote her love letters;

only a wedding was out of the question for him.

In the prudish, honest Adenauer republic, the very existence of this woman was scandalous;

such a liaison would have been simply unthinkable.

Was it really love between them?

Possible.

Rosemarie Nitribitt was enigmatic, from girlish to seductive to vulgar and hardy in all facets.

According to Christian Steiger, author of the book "Rosemarie Nitribitt - The Autopsy of a German Scandal", she actually longed for closeness, family and a house in the country, in short: a bourgeois existence.

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That doesn't necessarily sound like "Rebecca", but it may sound like Maria Rosalie Auguste, who was born out of wedlock, as Nitribitt was actually called.

That young woman who grew up in a foster family and then in brutal reform homes, was raped at the age of eleven, kept running away and served as a soldier as a teenager.

That young woman who often fell in love unhappily, had affairs with men or women and finally gathered money and admirers around her.

Only real love was denied to her.

The love that could be bought made her famous for it - and it was her undoing.

This article was first published in 2013.