The doctor terrified Dore at first. His body’s lithe movements suggested a predator’s gait; his gaze was one of harsh and final judgment; and his general disposition seemed strangely absent of any amiability or compassion. She hoped he would never lay his hands on her.
Dore was just 26 and receiving treatment for multiple sclerosis. She had been diagnosed three years before and had already gone through several gruelling procedures, including a hysterectomy, in an attempt to cure her. Nothing had worked, and she was now bedbound in the Hydrotherapeutic Institute in Berlin.
However, there were upsides to her time in hospital – escaping the drudgery of life with her husband. Even this savage-looking doctor, despite his demeanour, piqued her interest as he roamed throughout the ward.
It was inevitable, she supposed, that – as he prowled from room to room and bed to bed – he would one day stop at hers. He introduced himself as Friedrich Ritter and gave her a thorough examination.
The Baroness and Robert, dressed only in rags, point guns as they pose for the camera
‘You are not ill,’ he told her.
‘But the professors said I am,’ she protested. ‘They said I could never get my health back again.’
‘You are not ill,’ he repeated. ‘But you desire to be ill.’ Then he walked away.
‘He can look through me,’ she thought, and blushed, feeling strangely exposed.
She arranged to see the doctor during his private consultation hour and confessed to all that ‘pressed’ her soul. Except that she didn’t mention her marriage. When she had finished, Friedrich delivered his assessment: ‘You are not happy in your marriage . . . let us try to change the base of your illness.’
Friedrich understood the mental stress behind her physical pain and their daily conversations became her medicine, allowing her to unburden her mind of its darkest thoughts. Soon she was strong enough to spend her days walking through the park with him. He had saved her life and restored her hope: she felt that he could see and understand her soul.
Friedrich for his part found himself attracted to her passion and flagrant unconventionality. It wasn’t long before they had fallen in love.
Their only problem was that they were both married to other people.
And then Dore came up with a brazen scheme. She would persuade Friedrich’s wife to move in with her husband.
Incredibly, both parties agreed. Friedrich and Dore were free to love each other.
It was an unorthodox beginning. Even so, few could have foreseen the madness that would come to define their time together. Nor that in five years one would be lying dead in the tropics with the other suspected of their murder.
As they walked arm in arm through the streets of Weimar-era Berlin, Dore began to discover more about her eccentric lover.
Notably, he had a firm intention to live to 150. He was a fanatical vegetarian who preached on the benefits of raw food. He also hated civilisation. Ritter had concluded that the world was beyond redemption; he could do nothing for it, and it could do nothing for him.
There was only one option as he saw it; to leave it all behind. His idea was that the two of them could live out their days on an uninhabited island, growing their own food and enjoying intellectual discussion and with no need for company or even clothes.
Their astonishing, surreal story is soon to be a movie starring Jude Law and Sydney Sweeney. Friedrich’s plan was prompted not just by a hatred of humanity. He had also concluded that escape was an urgent necessity.
Albert Einstein, an acquaintance of his, had discussed with him the very real prospect of a bomb that would destroy all of civilisation.
Aware that there would be no dentist in their Utopia, Friedrich took one important pre-emptive measure: he had all his teeth extracted and replaced by a set of steel dentures.
In 1929, just before the Wall Street Crash, Dore and Friedrich turned their backs on Germany. They had decided to forge their utopia on a tropical island in the Galapagos.
The rocky, lava-encrusted islands, just off the western coast of South America were not known to be an earthly paradise. However, the typical vision of a soft, abundant land with glittering sand and waving palms would not suit Friedrich and Dore’s dream of rigorous self-creation.
Dore, believing wholeheartedly in Friedrich’s genius, thought that he sought the unforgiving wilderness not to punish the flesh but to illuminate the mind.
The problems began as soon as they arrived in Ecuador. Their luggage – including two zinc bathtubs, one hundred yards of calico and carpentry tools – proved too heavy for any aeroplane so they had to wait 10 weeks until a boat could take them to their island.
Still madly in love, they little suspected that within five years jealousy, greed and murder would turn their paradise into a hellscape.
They had chosen Floreana, a former penal colony once home to a drunken 19th century pirate called Patrick Watkins, who was notorious for capturing unwary soldiers and killing them if they refused to work for him.
The Baroness in her bedroom in the Galapagos
The ship’s captain who landed them on the beach urged them to hire his cabin boy, a 14-year-old called Hugo, who brought an ancient rifle with him. Soon after the three of them set up camp on the island it became clear the 14-year-old was adapting to the harsh environment of the island more naturally than Ritter could.
The exchanges between Friedrich and Hugo became fraught. This unsettled Dore in ways she was afraid to name, and with each painful step she was forced to confront the fact that Friedrich was jealous of Hugo.
Back in his native Germany, Friedrich was no stranger to fits of rage and jealousy. He had been gassed in the First World War and had been found lying in a ditch, flanked by dead bodies rotting in the heat, the poisonous clouds coiling around him.
The experience had changed him irrevocably. The eccentric genius Dore had fallen in love with was really a violent lunatic.
Once, in Berlin, disgusted by the sight of his nephews’ dachshunds rolling around in their own filth, he took his pistol from his pocket and shot both dogs dead.
His jealousy of Hugo spelled the beginning of disaster.
In Floreana, the tropical sun seethed with heat. Friedrich declared that they should discard all of their clothing save for their boots. They were, he joked, ‘a toiling Adam and Eve — in boots’.
Day after day they worked naked in the searing sun. At night, they slept in hammocks. The endless walks across the rough terrain pained Dore’s leg and she often called for Friedrich to help her. He ignored her and walked on.
She vowed to herself that she would never again show weakness to Friedrich, nor expect from him any kindness or sympathy.
After a few weeks, life settled into a pattern: a brief contentment, an inevitable dispute, a silent seething, a blistering confrontation in which Ritter would vent his rage, sometimes violently, and then a fragile peace.
Yet Dore kept telling herself that, ‘in spite of all our differences, both of us knew we had been intended for each other. We could never be parted and live’.
Hugo soon left the island, after being gored by a wild bull, and the couple struggled to subsist. They were saved when a passing yacht, captained by playboy American millionaire Eugene McDonald, stopped at the island. He was amazed to find signs of life.
Ritter’s lunatic fantasies of living as ‘a modern Adam and Eve’ entranced McDonald. He took a photograph of the couple – him in torn shorts, her in a ragged dress – and after leaving Floreana, wired it to a journalist at Associated Press.
The picture was printed worldwide, with McDonald’s quote: ‘Their arms were around each other and the expression on their faces would tell anyone who couldn’t recognise love in the civilised world that there, indeed, was a pair truly in that state of mind.’
Weeks later, when a passing boat from Ecuador dropped off more supplies, a newspaper was included in the bundle.
With horror, Dore read a story about herself, gossipy fodder about her scandalous relationship with a married man and the husband she left behind.
The paper also described how hundreds of would-be castaways, including entire societies of German emigres, were now planning to embark on new lives in the Galapagos.
Ritter found her sobbing and demanded to know what the matter was. She pressed the paper into his hands, telling him: ‘This is the end of everything.’
Journalists were amongst the first to arrive and sent back reports of how Ritter cleaned his metal teeth with wire wool.
Soon a couple arrived who had no intention of leaving. Like Dore and Ritter, Margret Wittmer and her older husband Heinz were both married to other people when they landed on Floreana with Heinz’s sickly son Harry. They brought an abundance of provisions, from coffee and beans to brandy, potatoes and a typewriter.
Dore disliked Margret, 27, on sight. Her first words when they met were: ‘Aren’t you a bit too well-dressed for the Galapagos?’
Margret forced a smile, looked Dore up and down, and replied: ‘I like to put on something decent when I go visiting, even here.’ But their feud was insignificant compared to what happened next.
Baroness ‘Toni’ Wagner von Wehrborn Bosquet was an Austrian aristocrat, descended from the Hapsburgs as well as the House of Glucksburg.
As a schoolgirl in Vienna, she posed naked for life classes. As a young woman, she had a reputation as ‘a male-murderer who ate her way through the hearts and wallets of her admirers’.
She liked to claim that one British officer had put a pistol in his mouth and blown his brains out after she rejected him. Another, a Russian noble, attacked her with a dagger for refusing his advances.
Despite her overpowering sex appeal, one friend wrote: ‘It cannot be said that she is pretty. Her body is angulate and thin. She uses strong eyeglasses in front of swollen eyelids, and even if her mouth is large it cannot close around the long, yellow, horse teeth.’
And yet, by brute charisma, she enthralled nearly everyone she met. Her manic gaiety at parties could swiftly turn to anger and often violence. She liked to humiliate people, then overwhelm them with attention and affection, believing that when the vortex of emotion settled they would be loyal to her forever.
Fundamentally, the Baroness was dangerous. One journalist who met her described her as possessing a ‘profound contempt for humanity’.
Though she was married to a French war hero who survived being shot in the stomach during aerial combat, she kept two devoted lovers, Robert Phillipson and Rudolph Lorenz – one 13 years her junior, the other eight.
Rudolph was her assistant and chief backer of her Parisian lingerie shop, Antoinette.
Robert was dark-haired and impressively muscled: a Jew from Berlin, he looked, said one observer, ‘as though he might have been a gigolo in a very cheap place’.
After reading about Dore and Friedrich in the German newspapers, the Baroness had decided the islands would be the next international holiday destination, and announced she was going to open a luxury hotel on Floreana.
In July 1932, she and her coterie set sail on the steamship Bodegraven with her three dogs, a hive of bees, four packing crates, 21 cases and trunks, and as many cigarettes as she could purchase.
Arriving in Floreana, she held out a hand to be kissed. Dore shook it instead, igniting another feud. ‘If this was a mere Baroness,’ Dore noted, ‘she certainly behaved as though she were at least a queen.’
Ritter and Dore quickly noticed how she kept Rudolph in particular on a tight leash: ‘Rudi! Take off my glasses for me,’ and, ‘Oh, Rudi, darling, there’s a stone in my sandal – get it out for me.’
Within days, she had staged a sort of coup. After offering to look after the supply stores, she informed Heinz that if he wanted access to his own provisions, he would have to pay her for the privilege – and demanded more than twice what he had paid for them.
When Heinz protested, she pointed out that she had brought a labourer with her from Ecuador to help build her hotel, as well as Robert and Rudolph.
‘Were you thinking of throwing me out?’ she sneered. ‘I have three men, and I can count as a fourth.’ As she said it, she laid her hand on her pearl encrusted revolver.
Certainly, she was to be feared. The Baroness was a formidable sight to behold, stalking the jagged rocks of the island with a whip in one hand and a revolver in the other, like Indiana Jones in scarlet lipstick, shooting at anyone or anything that displeased her.
Dore was shocked to learn that, though Rudolph and Robert hated each other, the Baroness insisted they all three slept together. Men were like dogs, she declared, and to illustrate the point she shot two of the wild dogs that hung around the compound – wounding but not killing them. Then she nursed them back to health. One was maimed but pathetically loyal to her. The hotel was quickly built from corrugated iron and dubbed the Hacienda Paradiso. Inside, it was decked out with finery brought from Europe: silk upholstered divans that doubled as beds, and carpets on the walls.
Every day brought some new outrage. When Margret had a baby, a consignment of tinned milk was ordered from Ecuador. The Baroness commandeered all of it, bar a single tin. When a party of hunters landed on the beach, she confronted them and drove them away, shooting one.
The islanders complained about her behaviour to the governor of the Galapagos. He arrived to investigate, fell instantly under the Baroness’s spell, and ended by inviting her to join him for a holiday.
When she returned, she brought back another lover, a Dane called Arends . . . whom she also shot and injured, probably by accident.
To spite the other islanders, she wrote newspaper articles mocking and slandering them. And then – she vanished.
Margret claimed the Baroness had turned up at her cabin, wearing her customary riding outfit of breeches and high boots, and announced she was planning to decamp to Tahiti, abandoning her hotel.
Rudolph, the Baroness’s most downtrodden slave, confided in Margret that she had tired of him and was, he believed, intending to murder him. Nothing was seen of the trio of lovers for two days – and then Rudolph returned, claiming the Baroness and Robert had gone to Tahiti.
Nothing was heard of her again. Their bodies were never found. Whether Rudolph killed them, no one ever knew.
Rudolph left the island, begging a ride on a fishing boat. Months later, his body was found washed up in a canoe. He had died of thirst.
And then there were five.
During this period, Friedrich had been growing increasingly sullen and angry and more consistently violent; the same man who once refused to eat potatoes because they ‘had to be dragged from the earth by force’ now did not hesitate to beat Dore. After Rudolph left the island, Dore grew obsessed with the idea of her own escape. Ritter’s violence had become intolerable.
One evening, she prepared a meal of pork – Ritter’s vegetarianism had disappeared alongside any remnants of morality he may have possessed – and after eating it he was soon violently ill.
Whether or not she knew the meat was poisoned will never be known.
Dore fetched Margret and as they sat by his deathbed he reached for his pencil and wrote: ‘This is choking me. Give me my gun.’ Dore picked up the gun from his bedside table and placed it out of his reach.
She then leaned in and chided him: ‘Die in a manner worthy of your name.’ Margret understood: in German, the name Ritter means ‘knight’.
Dore went into the garden and lay down. She thought of the five years they had spent designing and tending to their ‘Eden in the wilderness,’ a paradise that would never bloom again. As she later concluded, in the title of her book about her time there, Satan came to Eden. After living on Floreana for five years, she returned to Europe. Heinz and Margret remained, and today their children still run a hotel there.
Floreana’s notoriety as a haven for mad Germans and Austrians was slow to fade. In 1945, after the end of the war, the US Army despatched a unit of soldiers to search the island.
They suspected Adolf Hitler was living there in secret.
- Adapted from Eden Undone by Abbott Kahler (HarperCollins, £25), out on September 26. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 21/09/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
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