Charlotte "Lotte" Ritter (15 April 1906-) was a German police clerk at the homicide department of the Berlin Police during the 1920s.
Biography[]
Ritter in 1929
Charlotte Ritter was born in Wedding, Berlin, Germany to a working-class family, and she was raised in a crowded apartment where she lived with her grandparents, mother, two sisters, brother-in-law, and infant niece by 1929. Ritter later discovered that she was born as the result of an extramarital affair between her mother Minna Ritter and Erwin Trollmann, making her the half-brother of boxer Johann Trollmann. Ritter worked as a prostitute to pay the bills, and she took on clerical work from the Berlin Police whenever possible. In April 1929, she was hired by homicide detective Wilhelm Böhm to recategorize murder photographs, and she hired her coworker Doris Fichtner to help her with that task. During her first few days on that assignment, she met the policeman Gereon Rath and Rath's assistant Stephan Jänicke, whom she befriended. Ritter frequented the Moka Efti nightclub, where she listened to musical performances by singers and musicians such as Svetlana Sorokina, Alexei Kardakov, and Ilya Trechkov, and searched for clients whom she serviced in the basement.
She came to work with Rath more often after she investigated the murder of the Russian Trotskyist Boris Volkov, and both she and Rath - who knew Volkov and had seen him be kidnapped by the Cheka - were angered at Böhm's hastiness to close the case and decided to investigate the murder themselves. At the same time, Rath's partner Bruno Wolter visited Ritter at her brothel and blackmailed her into spying on Rath for him, threatening to reveal her unlicensed prostitution to the police department; he also slept with her as part of the blackmail. Ritter revealed Rath's medical addiction to Wolter, but she was otherwise very cooperative with Rath, discovering Sorokina's shooting of Kardakov and investigating the explosion of a Soviet train that was carrying poison gas. These incidents helped Rath and Ritter realize that the murder of Volkov, the shooting of Kardakov, and the arrival of the Soviet train were all connected to the Stalinist-Trotskyist power struggle across the world communist movement. At the same time, Ritter reunited with her childhood friend Greta Overbeck, whom she helped to find employment as a domestic servant for political police chief August Benda.
Ritter taking her detective's exam
Ritter came to be a near-equal partner with Rath in his policing activities, causing her to be kidnapped by the Berlin Mafia boss Edgar Kasabian (who forced her to tell him about the hidden gold on the Soviet train) and targeted by the corrupt Wolter, who attempted to kill her in a car crash. After her mother's death, Ritter briefly lived with Jänicke until he was murdered by Wolter. After Wolter's demise, Ritter failed her crime scene certificate test after Leopold Ulrich rigged it against her. She later investigated Betty Winter's murder and struck up a romantic relationship with her old friend Vera Lohmann, but Vera was also murdered. Rath went on to help Ritter become an assistant detective through writing her a letter of recommendation, and she helped implicate Colonel Gottfried Wendt and the Nazis Richard Pechtmann and Horst Kessler in the murder of Benda by a deceived Greta. Nevertheless, Greta was executed for the murder after failing to plead her innocence.
By 1930, Ritter settled into her job as a police officer, but she was fired in 1931 for covering up the role of her sister Toni Ritter in a murder.