A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (26 page)

Lüdtke kept the room darkened, but turned on a bright light so it illuminated this macabre exhibit.

Ogorzow and Lüdtke spent some time sitting there in silence. Suddenly, Ogorzow pleaded with him, saying, “You gotta help me!”
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Ogorzow explained that he was asking this as a loyal party member and SA
Oberscharführer
(senior squad leader). Given the violence Ogorzow had taken part in as a member of the SA, when he and his fellow brown-shirted thugs beat Jews and smashed up Jewish places of business and worship, he desperately hoped that his loyalty to the party might be enough to excuse his killings.

Lüdtke manipulated Ogorzow’s pleas as a way to obtain a confession. Just as modern-day police may pretend to sympathize with a suspect so as to elicit the suspect’s version of events, so did Lüdtke take advantage of this opening that Ogorzow had given him.

He told Ogorzow that before they could discuss what could be done to help him, Lüdtke needed to know what exactly he had done. Of course, Lüdtke had no intention of helping Ogorzow. His crimes were horrific, and the justice system in Nazi Germany would not let the murder of Aryan German women go unpunished merely because the perpetrator was a party member and Brownshirt.

For Lüdtke, his career was potentially on the line. His superiors knew that he had a likely suspect in custody, and his performance was being monitored.

Lüdtke bore primary responsibility for the investigation into the S-Bahn Murderer. He had demanded and employed large numbers of men and women on this case. Even with all these resources, and the large rewards, he had yet to solve this crime. He’d had an embarrassing moment when he’d believed the case to be solved with his arrest of the man whose shoes matched the shoeprints found by the body of Frieda Koziol. After all the excitement that had generated, it had been a huge letdown for all involved when the arrested man turned out to be not the killer, but just a carpenter who took advantage of the blackout to peep on women.

The pressure on Lüdtke to close this case came not just from those above him, like Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kripo, and his boss, director of the Reich Main Security Office Reinhard Heydrich, but also from the public. Lüdtke later wrote, “Rarely has the work of the Berlin criminal police, particularly homicide, been of such strong public interest in Berlin, as in the handling of the S-Bahn murders. There were often bitter words one heard from the public, especially those of East Berlin, which was most threatened by the actions of the S-Bahn Murderer, which grew worse, the longer they were kept waiting on the clearance of these crimes. This was understandable given the severity and the accumulation of crimes.”
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While some in positions of power in the Third Reich could screw up at work and not worry about repercussions because of their longtime loyalty to the Nazi Party and connections within the party and government, Lüdtke had to succeed on his own merits. So the pressure was on for him to make sure that Ogorzow had indeed committed these crimes and to get an airtight confession from him to close the case.

For Paul Ogorzow, his life was on the line. He knew that he was fighting to keep his head on his shoulders. If he did not manage to find the right words to get out of this, he understood that the German government would quickly try, convict, sentence, and execute him. And just like the poor souls in the French Revolution, he would die under a blade falling in a guillotine.

He still had hope that he might figure out a way to not only save his life, but also mitigate the damage this arrest would cause him. If he denied everything, maybe he would be able to walk out of the police station a free man. He could return to his wife and kids and cherry trees. Or if there was too much evidence against him, perhaps as a party member, Lüdtke would cut him a break and let him go, or arrange for him to be convicted of a lesser offense.

Paul Ogorzow would never take full responsibility for his attacks on women. Even as he was pushed into a corner and made to feel like he needed to admit certain details of what he’d done, he continued to hold out hope that there was a way he could survive this.

Lüdtke stuck to the line that if Ogorzow wanted his help, then Ogorzow would need to tell him in detail exactly what he’d done. Ogorzow was torn because he did believe that Lüdtke had it in his power to help him and that he might do so on the basis of Ogorzow’s loyalty to the party and rank in the SA, but he did not want to further incriminate himself.

Lüdtke used all the evidence at his disposal to try to convince Ogorzow that the Kripo already had more than enough to connect him to these crimes. Lüdtke was hoping that this argument, combined with his suggestion that he would help Ogorzow once he admitted what he’d done, would result in a confession.

Paul Ogorzow fell for this, but with a twist of his own. Ogorzow admitted to the attacks. However, he had yet another trick up his sleeve. He decided to confess to the attacks in a manner that contradicted the evidence. Ogorzow hoped to say enough to get Lüdtke to help him, but also have a way out if there was no help and the state tried to use this confession against him. He could see from the skulls that it was obvious that he had used a blunt instrument to damage the heads of some of his victims; he would lie and say he had used something else.

So Ogorzow falsely claimed that he used a knife in one of the attacks, in which he’d actually used a heavy blunt instrument. He lied about the rest of his attacks by saying that he’d punched his victims with his bare hands. A confession has to match up with the facts of the case. One in which Ogorzow’s claims are contradicted by the evidence would be problematic, at the very least. Like a game of cat and mouse, a back-and-forth occurred wherein Lüdtke kept trying to get a proper confession out of Ogorzow, and Ogorzow attempted to weasel his way out of trouble.

When Lüdtke pressed his suspect on the method of death, Ogorzow said it could have been strangulation or punching with his fist or stabbing.

Only by carefully and thoroughly going over the evidence, including the skulls, did Lüdtke finally get Ogorzow to admit the truth. Lüdtke used the skulls to explain that it was impossible that fists or a knife caused the holes in them.

At this point, Ogorzow was physically reacting to the dire situation he was in. The blood had gone out of his face and he was shaking. He no longer had the energy to tell an obvious lie with the evidence of the truth right in front of him. It did not occur to Ogorzow to try to tell a new lie, that this damage must have been caused by injuries related to falling from the train. It was beyond his expertise to tell if these injuries could have been caused in that way, although unbeknownst to him, Dr. Weimann had already ruled that out based on his examinations of where the bodies were found and the nature of the injuries to these skulls.

When Lüdtke asked Ogorzow directly, “What did you beat these women to death with?” Ogorzow finally answered him truthfully. “With a lead cable.”
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In Lüdtke’s opinion, this was the moment that Ogorzow broke. Lüdtke described Ogorzow looking “ashen” and “trembling” when he answered this question.
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Afterward, he freely admitted to all of his murders, in both the garden area and on the S-Bahn. He even wrote up an account of his crimes in his own words.

The police learned that he had gone back to visit only one of his victims. After he’d killed the first woman on the train, he’d gone to work. Then, when he was off duty, he’d returned to her body. Instead of getting the rush he’d expected, he’d felt sickened by being confronted with what he’d done. Since then, he’d avoided seeing his handiwork. This was why it was so hard for him to see the two living victims in the garden area and the five skulls in the interrogation room. While many serial killers enjoy visiting their victims’ remains, Ogorzow could not handle it.

As for his two modi operandi—one, attacking women on the S-Bahn and then tossing their bodies off the train while it was between stations, and two, attacking women in the garden area adjacent to the S-Bahn—he explained that he switched between them based on where he believed it to be safer for him to operate. The train had the advantage that no one could sneak up on him, he could see that a compartment was empty before he attacked, and he could dispose of the body en route, while the garden area had the advantage that he could take his time with his victims.

Serial killers are generally thought of in terms of a single modus operandi, and this made things harder for the police. For example, his moniker as the “S-Bahn Murderer” only referred to one of Ogorzow’s two hunting grounds. Of the eight murders he committed, five were on the S-Bahn and three had been in the garden area.

Now that the police had their man, the limits imposed by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels regarding the press were lifted. From his perspective, this case no longer made the Nazi state look bad. Instead, it showed the resourcefulness of the German Police in being able to solve a difficult crime.

On July 18, a major Berlin newspaper,
Berliner Morgenpost
, ran a front-page article with the definitive headline of
THE BERLIN S-BAHN MURDERER CAUGHT!
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The article stated, “No previous crime had occupied the Berlin public as completely as the series of murders committed by the 28-year-old Paul Ogorzow.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Excuses

Even while making a full confession in writing, Ogorzow still had one last idea for how to avoid being executed for his crimes.

He thought that if he somehow blamed all his attacks on a Jew, this combined with his party and SA membership might be enough to obtain some leniency from the Nazi criminal justice system.

If convicted for his various crimes, he faced the death penalty. So he desperately needed a compelling reason for the German state not to take his life. He was in a tough position, as he had murdered eight women. And not just any women, but German housewives and young women who were working in factories that produced the goods needed to keep the war going. Some of these women had men serving in the German military machine. In Nazi Germany, these were victims the state would feel the need to avenge.

Ogorzow had also taken advantage of the blackout to commit his crimes. This alone was reason enough for the state to take his life. In November 1939, the Berlin Special Court had sentenced a man to death for committing a single, nonviolent property crime during the blackout. The defendant had snatched a woman’s purse and been caught. The prosecutor in that case successfully argued to the court that it “had to set an example” as “the Special Court was a kind of drum-head court on the home front, with responsibility to protect it from criminals. . . . The front soldier must absolutely be assured, that the solid wall of the inner front cannot be worn down by sub-humanity.”
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With such a decision in the case of a purse-snatcher taking advantage of the wartime darkness in Berlin, Ogorzow faced a near certainty of death for his own much, much worse blackout misdeeds.

The Reich minister of justice wrote an open letter to all German judges that discussed blackout criminals. Although this letter was written about a year after Ogorzow’s trial, the reasoning in it regarding how to treat those who took advantage of the blackout conditions was not a new development. It articulated sentiments that the Special Court in Berlin already held regarding the need to protect the home front through the use of the death penalty.

Reich minister of justice Otto Thierack wrote in this letter:

At a time when the best of our people are risking their lives at the front and when the home front is tirelessly working for victory, there can be no place for criminals who destroy the will of the community. Those in the administration of justice must recognize that it is their job to destroy traitors and saboteurs on the home front. The law allows plenty of leeway in this regard. The home front is responsible for maintaining peace, quiet, and order as support for the war front. This heavy responsibility falls especially to German judges. Every punishment is fundamentally more important in war than in peace. This special fight is targeted especially against those designated by law as “pests.” Should a judge decide after conscientious examination of the criminal act and of the perpetrator’s personality that a criminal is a “pest,” then the seriousness of this determination must also be firmly expressed in the harshness of the verdict. It is a matter of course that a plunderer, who reaches for the possessions of another after a terror attack [bombing] by the enemy, deserves only death. But every other culprit who commits his crimes by exploiting the circumstances of war also sides with the enemy. His disloyal character and his declaration of war [on the German people] therefore deserve the harshest punishments. This should especially be applied to criminals who cowardly commit their crimes during blackouts. “I don’t want,” the Führer said, “a German woman to return from her place of work afraid and on the lookout so that no harm is done to her by good-for-nothings and criminals. After all, a soldier should expect that his family, his wife, and relatives are safe at home.”

The majority of German judges have recognized the immediate needs of the moment. The death sentence that the Special Court handed out to the 18-year-old assailant of the defenseless soldier’s wife, and to the “work-shy” purse-snatcher, placed the protection of the people above all other interests. There are, however, still cases in which the personal circumstances of the culprits are placed above the interests of the necessary protection of the community. This is shown in the comparison of the judgments listed above. The cunning, nighttime handbag robbery perpetrated by a culprit with prior convictions and the 21 thefts committed by the 19-year-old worker were wrongly punished with four years in prison. The decisive factor [in sentencing] is not whether stealing the handbag was legally theft or robbery (which, by the way, does not depend upon whether the bag was carried tightly or loosely); it is not whether the sex offender caused a specific damage with his offense. That he cowardly and cunningly attacked a defenseless woman, and endangered the security of the darkened streets, makes him a traitor. The protection of the community, above all, requires that punishment in such cases serve as deterrence. Prevention here is always better than reparation. Every sentence given a “pest” that is too lenient sooner or later damages the community and carries in itself the danger of an epidemic of similar crimes and the gradual undermining of the military front lines. It is always better for the judge to quell such epidemics early than to stand helpless later against an infected majority. In the fourth year of his prison sentence the criminal should not get the impression that the community’s fight against him is waning. On the contrary, he must always feel that German judges are fighting just as hard on the home front as the soldiers are with the foreign enemy on the military front.
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