They are seen everywhere in West Germany these days: plump, well-barbered, aggressive men, their eyes alert for opportunity or slightly lidded after a heavy meal. They travel from factory to bank to hotel in chauffeur-driven Mercedes 3005's; their women are gowned by Dior, Heim, Balenciaga. Liveried servants attend them at banquets in redecorated medieval castles. They are the new German millionaires, whose energy, efficiency and shrewdness have contrived, organized and engineered the astonishing miracle of West Germany's economic rise from the ashes of war.
Military Objective. Some of Germany's new rich have cultivated their indulgences along with their undoubted abilities. In the vicinity of industrial Frankfurt, the most popular indulgence was Rosemarie Nitribitt, a big-eyed and notably globoid blonde. Rosie's nest was feathered with Persian rugs, green velvet chairs, thick draperies, a multitude of mirrors, and a French double bed. Her closets were jammed with Paris-label dresses and 40 pairs of Italian shoes; and she always kept handy at least 150,000 marks (about $35,000) in cash.
Rosie's amorous career began at 14 in tiny Niedermending, where she instantly became a military objective of the French troops who then occupied the airport. A few years later, Rosie moved on to Frankfurt and became a bar girl. Soon she had enough money to buy a modest Ford Taunus, then graduated to a red-upholstered Mercedes 190 SL. She would cruise up and down the Kaiserstrasse or park in front of the Frankfurter Hof, the city's swankest hotel. As a plump, well-tailored captain of industry approached, Rosie would appear to be having trouble with her engine, and appeal prettily for help. Her tab was high—anywhere up to 1,000 marks in a city where 20 is the average. Explained a Frankfurt businessman: "To understand those sums you had to know Rosemarie."
Medicine for Business. Last October Rosie entertained her last guest. When police broke into her apartment they found her strangled with her own stockings. The police moved gingerly in the case, gently questioned a number of big industrialists, finally arrested an unemployed salesman named Pohlmann, who insisted loudly that he was not the murderer. Most tabloid-reading Germans believe him.
One of those interested in Rosie's rise and fall was Writer Erich Kuby, 48. He was interested not so much in Rosie the prostitute, he explained, as in "Rosie, medicine for our big businessmen, who didn't visit her because she was so good in bed or so beautiful, but because they could unload their troubles, because she fed their ego, because she gave content to their empty lives."