A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (2 page)

ELFRIEDE FRANKE
Attacked December 1940 on the S-Bahn

IRMGARD FREESE
Attacked December 1940 outside the Karlshorst station

HERTHA JABLINSKI
Attacked December 1939 in the garden area

GERDA KARGOLL
Attacked September 1940 on the S-Bahn

FRIEDA KOZIOL
Attacked July 1941 in the garden area

GERTRUD NIESWANDT
Attacked July 1940 in the garden area

JULIE SCHUHMACHER
Attacked August 1940 in the garden area

GERTRUD SIEWERT
Attacked December 1940 on the S-Bahn

JOHANNA VOIGT
Attacked February 1941 on the S-Bahn

KILLER

PAUL OGORZOW
S-Bahn employee

LAW ENFORCEMENT AND GOVERNMENTAL PERSONNEL

JOSEPH GOEBBELS
Minister of propaganda, gauleiter of Berlin,
Reichsleiter

GEORG HEUSER
Kripo detective

REINHARD HEYDRICH
Director of the RHSA

HEINRICH HIMMLER
Chief of the RHSA and the SS

WILHELM LÜDTKE
Kripo police commissioner

ARTHUR NEBE
Head of the Kripo (RHSA
Amt
5)

DR. WALDEMAR WEIMANN
Forensic pathologist and psychiatrist

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES

I’ve tried to minimize the use of endnotes in this book to make it a more enjoyable read. If information is not cited, it is either commonly known, such as dates of key events during World War II, or it comes from the
Kriminalpolizei
file on the criminal investigation into the S-Bahn murders. The original documents from this investigation are at the Landesarchiv Berlin, A.Pr. Br. Rep. 030-03 Tit. 198B Nr. 1782–1789.

PROLOGUE

The woman looked to be alone. That was Paul Ogorzow’s first mistake. He was so eager to attack her that he went with this initial impression instead of taking the time to make sure there was no one around that could save her.

She was walking along a pathway through the gardens of suburban eastern Berlin in an area known as Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. Although she was near the station from where she could catch a train that would whisk her into the heart of Berlin, this residential area felt like the countryside. She’d walked this path between residents’ allotments many times, through the lush gardens with their cherry trees, chestnut trees, apple trees, carrots, onions, potatoes, hedges, and assorted bushes and grasses.

Twenty-seven-year-old Paul Ogorzow hunted for victims in this area. He stalked and attacked women who were walking by themselves at night. And night had acquired new meaning in wartime Berlin—a government-imposed blackout meant the only meaningful illumination here at this hour came from the night sky.

He looked rather average—on the short side of medium height, white, with short black hair parted on the left. He mostly was clean-shaven, although he sometimes had a wisp of a mustache. His eyes were a bit beady, his lips thin, his hair thinning, and his ears stuck out, but his only truly noticeable feature was his nose. The left nostril looked normal, but the right nostril was oversized, the result of a broken nose he’d suffered in his youth that had not been properly set.

He sometimes wore his uniform during his attacks, in which cases that was generally all his victims noticed. His railway uniform, though, looked somewhat like many other uniforms worn during the Third Reich. In the dark, and with the suddenness of his attacks, it could be hard to observe the details that would reveal exactly what kind of uniform he was wearing.

This was not Ogorzow’s first time looking for a woman to assault. By now, he’d emerged from the darkness to attack around thirty different women here. So far, the confusion of the war had helped him avoid much police attention, but he’d also been careful to attack his victims only when he felt confident that he could safely overpower them.

Taking advantage of the darkness on this evening, he rushed his victim. She only saw him coming at the last moment, when she reacted by screaming as loud as she could. Ogorzow wrapped his large hands around her neck and started squeezing, hoping to silence her and render her unconscious. She fought him though, tooth and nail, enough to be able to continue to breathe, and even to scream.

What she knew—and he did not—was that help was only a short distance away. Her husband and brother-in-law were nearby, and she hoped they would hear her screams and come to her aid.

They were horrified to hear her yelling for help and rushed to the scene. Ogorzow was a man of some strength, as he’d worked in manual and farm labor for most of his life, but he was not a big man. Also, he had expended a lot of energy trying to subdue his victim by the time the two men came upon him.

The husband and brother-in-law violently grabbed Ogorzow and yanked him off his victim. They began to pummel him. Once they were done beating him, they yelled at him that if he were still alive, then they would turn him over to the police.

Ogorzow had just experienced a sudden reversal of fortune—one moment, he felt as powerful as God, able to control whether his victim lived or died, his hands squeezing around her throat, and the next, he was being beaten by two men. He worried that they might kill him or, if he survived, alert the authorities so they could arrest him.

In the darkness, Ogorzow was able to break away from his attackers and hide among the numerous bushes and trees in this area. He knew this place well, having spent time here at night, looking for victims to attack. These two men searched for him, but they eventually gave up and took their loved one away for medical attention. By the time the three of them reported this incident to the police, Ogorzow was safe at his nearby home.

Afterward, Ogorzow thought back on his mistakes. Besides having attacked a woman who was not alone, he had left behind three witnesses. He’d counted on the speed of his attack, combined with the darkness on the garden path, to result in his victim not being able to properly describe him to the police. But a prolonged struggle had occurred, and he worried that the woman he’d attacked and her two saviors might be able to identify him.

He reflected on his narrow escape and how he could lower his risk of getting caught. Giving up his attacks was not even a consideration. He derived too much pleasure from assaulting women. Instead, he focused on what he could do to become a better criminal.

After this close call, Ogorzow realized that he needed to make sure that his victims could not scream out for help. So he would immediately choke them with his hands, threaten them with a knife, or hit them over the head with a blunt instrument. He was not sure yet what would work best, but he knew this was a problem he would have to solve if he was to avoid getting beaten up again—or, worse yet, caught by the police.

And he set his sights on a new hunting ground—one that ran right straight through the heart of Berlin, with an almost limitless supply of victims. Soon, he would expand his repertoire and become one of Berlin’s—and maybe Germany’s—most notorious serial killers.

CHAPTER ONE

The Garden Area

Up until after the incident in which he went from hunter to hunted, Paul Ogorzow only attacked women in the garden area near his home. The area where he lived was suburban, but between his home and a nearby commuter train station, there was a large area of garden allotments.

The Germans traditionally have these in cities so that people without space to garden at home have someplace to go to have a small garden of their own. A person can own or rent a small plot of land inside what they call a “colony” and grow ornamental flowers and plants, or, especially during wartime, fruits and vegetables. These spaces tend to have small structures on them where people store their gardening equipment and anything else they need to have an enjoyable day in this facsimile of the countryside. Many colonies allow people to live there during the summer.

In this particular colony, there were small houses that people lived in year-round. This area was actually made up of two allotment garden colonies joined together—Gutland I and Gutland II—but as a practical matter, this was one area of continuous garden plots.

Paul Ogorzow saw people gardening when he walked or rode his bicycle to the nearby train station. He had no need for a garden house since his apartment building had a small garden that he lovingly tended.

A book on the cultural topography of Berlin explained how these allotment gardens, combined into colonies, worked: “Characteristic of the great German cities is the attempt to counterbalance their high residential densities by the creation of gardens for individual use on the city fringes. . . . Unlike the British allotments, mere portioned fields where the wind blasts unchecked through the sodden Brussels sprouts and tools are kept in shanties made of old packing cases, the Berlin garden colonies are extremely orderly and well-organized affairs, made attractive by their mature fruit trees. Behind formidable fences and locked gates, the profusion of flowers, the patches of lawn, and the garden furniture make their primarily recreational function apparent, while the ‘summer-houses’ can approach the solidity and dimensions of cottages, in which the family can spend the night. . . . In the period of acute housing shortage caused by wartime bombing, many ‘summer-houses’ came to be permanently occupied, producing a kind of untidy suburbia.”
¹

Past these allotments, there were suburbs. Around eight thousand people lived in them, including many employees of the railroad company, like Ogorzow. Some of the people who lived in these houses walked home from the train at night through the garden area. They walked in darkness, as the streetlights here were turned off as part of the city’s wartime blackout. Many of these inhabitants were women whose husbands were away in the German military.

Historian Dr. Laurenz Demps, an expert on Berlin during the Nazi era, described this area as follows: “The area of garden plots is directly next to the [train] tracks. We can imagine the allotments of that time, as we know it today. They were usually small garden-plot houses. In 1938, 25,000 families lived in such small garden-plot houses in Berlin. They were very simple; very primitive. The street lighting, path lighting, was simply not there. There was a lot of green. It was very dark and not very busy—especially in the evening.”
²

This was an area that was already poorly lit even before the blackout was implemented. But with the blackout, even the few electric lamps that lit some of the paths through these garden plots were turned off for the duration of the war. It would be hard to intentionally create a better environment for a serial killer and rapist to prowl. Seen from the perspective of the women who lived in the area, it was a scary place to have to walk through to get to and from the train station.

This is where Ogorzow’s attacks on women developed. He started by shining his flashlight on women to startle them. The conditions of the blackout involved serious regulations about what kinds of lights could and could not be used outdoors. So these women would usually be walking without their own flashlights on.

As a reporter living in wartime Berlin explained, “Most people carry small flashlights, but their use is strictly circumscribed. You are supposed to use them only near the ground to avoid tripping over curbstones, and then only for an instant. Should you flash it around to learn your whereabouts or find the street number you are seeking, you will probably be shouted at.”
³
So Ogorzow was allowed to carry a flashlight, but he was violating the rules of the blackout by using it to frighten people.

The only form of light that was permitted to be on at all times outdoors was an eerie green glowing round pin on people’s jackets. It was coated in a phosphorous paint that absorbed energy during the day from the sunlight and emitted a faint glow in the dark. This was not enough light to be able to see where one was going—all it accomplished was enabling other people to avoid walking into you. Or in Ogorzow’s case, it allowed him to see people coming from a distance and to tell if they were alone.

Ogorzow started by hiding out in the garden area during the night and waiting until he saw a woman approaching. He might see her by the glow of her phosphorous pin or the occasional lighting of a flashlight for a split second to check the path. Or he could hear someone coming and tell from a silhouette in the moonlight that it was a woman coming his way. A sudden shining from his flashlight or from the light on his bicycle would startle and disorient her.

While walking in the darkness, this woman’s eyes would have adapted to the low levels of light by dilating her pupils to allow more light into her eyes. There’s more to seeing in the dark though than just having dilated pupils. There are also light-impacted pigments called photopigments that would have built up in her eyes while she was in the dark. Light breaks these down, but in the dark, they continue to build up and result in sensitivity to light.