Killing of Rosemarie Nitribitt

Rosemarie Nitribitt (born Maria Rosalia Auguste Nitribitt, 1 February 1933) was a well-known luxury call girl in Frankfurt am Main during West Germany's postwar economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder. Born in Düsseldorf, she grew up in low-income circumstances, spent time in a juvenile home and with foster parents, and was reportedly raped at age 11. She began sex work as a teenager, was later placed in juvenile correctional homes from which she repeatedly escaped, and eventually settled in Frankfurt, where she was arrested for prostitution at the city's railway station in 1951.

By the mid-1950s Nitribitt had become financially successful, earning an estimated 80,000 DM in 1956 — a substantial sum at a time when building a single-family house cost roughly 25,000–30,000 DM. She drove a black Mercedes-Benz 190SL with red leather upholstery, which she used to solicit clients, and lived in a luxury apartment at Stiftstraße 36 in Frankfurt.

On 1 November 1957, Nitribitt was found dead in that apartment. Investigators believed her death had occurred three days earlier, on 29 October 1957. Her body showed signs of strangulation and a head wound. Police investigations were described as sloppy, with evidence destroyed in the early days of the inquiry. Several prominent men were identified as her personal acquaintances during the investigation.

Heinz Pohlmann, a businessman and friend of Nitribitt's who had visited her on 29 October 1957, became the prime suspect. In the days after the killing he settled substantial debts and purchased an expensive car but could not account for the source of the money, and gave contradictory statements to investigators; it later emerged he had embezzled funds from his employer. Pohlmann was charged with Nitribitt's murder but was acquitted in July 1960 on grounds of reasonable doubt. His defense argued that police had failed to measure the precise temperature of the apartment when examining the scene, which his lawyer said would have been essential to establishing the exact time of death. Prosecutors did not appeal the acquittal.

Nitribitt was interred at the Nordfriedhof cemetery in Düsseldorf, though her head was retained by police as evidence and later displayed in Frankfurt's Kriminalmuseum before being buried in 2008. The case caused a significant public scandal in West Germany, inspiring a novel, film adaptations, and later speculation linking it to other unsolved killings of prostitutes, including a 1959 case in the Netherlands and the unsolved 1966 murder of Frankfurt prostitute Helga Matura. The killing of Nitribitt itself was never solved.