A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (3 page)

A textbook on psychology described what happens when someone who has been in the dark a long while is suddenly exposed to light: “You would experience a bright flash of light and perhaps even pain as the large number of available photopigments makes your eyes very sensitive to the light. It would take about 1 minute for your eyes to adjust to the light.”
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For the woman suddenly, and unexpectedly, hit with a bright light, this meant that she had trouble seeing and might even feel some pain from the light. If this light came from some sort of non-threatening source, like a street lamp malfunctioning and accidentally turning on despite the blackout, it would have been frightening enough. Or if someone walking the other direction was using a flashlight despite the rules and accidentally hit her with its beam. But here, there was no accident—instead the light seemed to come out of nowhere. Even worse, after the first few times, a man yelling crude sexual innuendos and threats accompanied this flash of light.

A typical reaction to this fright was to run yelling in a search for help. However, it could be hard to explain just how terrifying this experience was. It was the sort of thing the police could easily dismiss as a prank, albeit a particularly malicious one.

To the women it happened to, though, this felt like something out of a horror film. A late night or early morning walk through a garden area with meandering paths, suddenly interrupted by a man who’d been lying in wait for just such a moment. A bright flash, some yelled words, and the ominous feeling that things could suddenly take a turn for the worse if this man decided to launch an actual physical attack.

For Paul Ogorzow, the thrill he’d felt when scaring women just by blinding them with a flashlight quickly faded. Next, he started yelling abusive, vulgar things at them as well. When this no longer gave him a rush, he upped the stakes by actually grabbing or punching women. Like a drug addict who needs to use more and more to get the same high, Ogorzow felt compelled to take things further with his victims. Eventually, he escalated to sexually assaulting women and then, finally, to killing them.

Like most serial killers, he did not start out by murdering his victims. Rather, it was a slow process of escalating violence. Famed FBI profiler John Douglas wrote about how this works, explaining that a developing predator “sets about to practice more of the acts that leave him feeling powerful and satisfied, sorting out the factors or actions that get in the way of the experience. He discovers expanded areas and situations where he can practice his domination and control of others. And he learns from his own experience, perfecting his technique to avoid detection or punishment. He learns how to become a success at what he does. The more success and satisfaction he has, the tighter that feedback loop becomes.”
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John Douglas went on to give an example of this process: “The young man whose particular thing is voyeurism may move on to fetish burglary of things belonging to women he spies on. Once he becomes comfortable with breaking and entering and knows how to get away with it, he may then escalate to rape. Depending on the circumstances, if, for example, he realizes he could be identified by his victim if he doesn’t take preventive action, rape can end in murder. And if he then finds that killing gives him an even greater arousal and an increased sense of power and satisfaction, he’s entered a new dimension of control and the murders very well might continue.”
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Paul Ogorzow engaged in just this kind of increasingly violent behavior. Before he started attacking women on the commuter train system, Ogorzow escalated to attempted murder in the garden colony near his home.

Around one in the morning on August 13, 1939, Ogorzow prowled in this garden area looking for a female victim. World War II had not yet started, but it was clear that war was coming. Three months before, the German government had issued regulations that called for the immediate implementation of measures required for a blackout. While the actual blackout would not start for another two weeks, public spaces, such as the garden area, already had their lighting shut off. The idea was that with a very short amount of notice, the population would be ready to cut off light from escaping into the night.

Ogorzow hunted in the dark, hoping to find a woman walking to or from the nearby train station. At this hour, it would most likely be a factory worker coming home from a long shift producing weapons or other industrial materials needed for the German war effort. That would be a plus for him as it increased the odds that the victim would be too tired to put up much of a fight. And her focus might be on just getting home and going to bed, instead of paying full attention to her surroundings.

He spotted a woman in her early forties, Lina Budzinski, and followed her as she walked down the dark paths to her home. She could hear his footsteps. Frightened, she ran to her property, entered the garden plot in front of her small house, and started to close the gate behind her. While closing the gate, she heard the heavy breathing of Ogorzow struggling to catch up with her. When she was just a few feet from safety, Ogorzow hit her from behind, knocking her to the ground. She was unable to scream for help, as the blow to her head dazed her.

Ogorzow did not say anything to her during this attack. They were still outside, in the small garden in front of her home. Although Miss Budzinski was too out of it to yell, she was still conscious. She had suffered a concussion. This injury resulted in her temporary inability to speak or otherwise fully control her body. There were a whole host of other symptoms that accompanied this, including having difficulty thinking clearly, but for now, the most pressing matter by far was whether she would be able to do something that would enable her to survive this attack.

She could see and hear everything that was happening to her and tried desperately to get her body to work. She wanted more than anything to run away, or at least scream out for help from her neighbors.

The silence made her attacker seem all the more ominous. With the hit on her head, and the darkness of the no longer lit garden area, it felt hard to understand how this man had emerged out of nowhere to attack her.

While she was still in a daze, she felt the sharp pain of a knife entering her back and being pulled out. And then her attacker stabbed her again, hard. The pain was excruciating. Ogorzow removed his knife, raised his weapon up in the air and plunged it down fast for a third stabbing. If Miss Budzinski did not manage to overcome her head injury and do something, she would soon die at Paul Ogorzow’s knife-wielding hand.

For a fourth, and final, time, he used his knife to penetrate her back. There was blood running out of her body in five different places now—the four knife wounds and the hit to her head.

Somehow, she managed to overcome her head injury and flee from her attacker. Perhaps all the adrenaline running through her system helped. She made it into her house and slammed the door behind her, this time successfully keeping Ogorzow out.

Ogorzow quickly fled the scene. Miraculously, Miss Budzinski survived this attack. At the hospital, the surgeons patched her up well enough for the police to talk to her. As her attacker never said a word, she could not tell them anything about what he sounded like or what he might have been thinking during this brutal attack.

The police questioned her extensively about the assault. The elimination of lighting on the public paths of the garden area, though, meant that Miss Budzinski had seen very little of her attacker. All she could tell the police was his approximate size.

While the police in Nazi Germany struck fear into the hearts of the many people who had good reason to be afraid of the regime, as a nonpolitical Aryan woman, Miss Budzinski would have had no such concerns. These policemen were not here to investigate her, but to try to learn what they could to help catch the man who had done this to her. And so she cooperated with them fully.

The police still considered her a potentially useful witness and hoped to use her eventually to identify her attacker. If they ever caught a suspect, they wanted to at least see if she could identify him as her attacker.

Despite the trauma, after the attack Lina Budzinski stayed in Berlin, where she later married and took the last name of Mohr.

CHAPTER TWO

The Detective

Murder and attempted murder were investigated by the Criminal Police (
Kriminalpolizei
, or Kripo), which generally handled nonpolitical serious crimes. Police Commissioner Wilhelm Karl Lüdtke was in charge of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Kripo in Berlin, which dealt primarily with homicides.

A single attack on a woman was not a high-profile enough case to require Lüdtke’s direct participation in the investigation. It was only later, as the victims increased in number and women were killed, that he took charge.

Lüdtke was lucky to have a job with the police at all, let alone a high-ranking position in Berlin. In 1939, he was not a party member, even though many of those with ambitions to get ahead in the German bureaucracy had joined after the Nazis took power in 1933. And the true believers had joined before then.

Back when there were other parties to vote for, he had been a member of the German Democratic Party. It was a social liberal party that believed, among other things, in protecting the rights of ethnic minorities such as German Jews. Lüdtke, though, had more problems than just not being a Nazi and having been a supporter of a now-disbanded liberal party; he’d openly worked against the Nazis prior to 1933.

He was born on June 22, 1886, in the small town of Alt Fanger in what was then Pomerania, Germany, and now is northwestern Poland. His father, Karl Johan Lüdtke, was a farmer and his mother, Johanna Lüdtke (maiden name Pansch), was a housewife. He graduated from high school in Pomerania at eighteen and then joined the German army. He served in the army from 1904 to 1909, which was before World War I. When his military service ended, he became a uniformed policeman in Frankfurt, Germany.

In August 1914, he was promoted to the Criminal Police (Kripo). World War I had begun just the month before, so there was room in the ranks to move up as other policemen left to join the war.

If he had stayed in this relatively nonpolitical position, Lüdtke would have likely never had a run-in with the Nazis, but in 1929, he was promoted to run the political police in Frankfurt and Harburg-Wilhelmsburg. He’d worked his way up the ranks and was now a criminal commissioner.

He held this job from 1929 to the start of 1933, a time period filled with bloody and murderous street battles between the different political forces vying for control of Germany. The Communists and Nazis were the two main groups that Lüdtke was supposed to keep from killing each other. With this job, he made powerful enemies when he interfered with Nazi party rallies, among other actions.

On January 30, 1933, as a result of his work running the political police department, he lost his job with the Kripo. The regional leader of the Nazi Party in Eastern Hanover, Otto Telschow, had Lüdtke removed from office. As the Nazis consolidated power in early 1933, Lüdtke was tried in front of a disciplinary court for interferences with the public activities of the Nazi Party, such as demonstrations and rallies. Although it had been his job at the time to do precisely that, the Nazis were not interested in the fact that he had just been following orders.
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Despite this black mark on his Kripo record, Lüdtke managed to use the connections he’d built up over the years in the police to get a new job and keep his rank. He left behind the region of Eastern Hanover and started work in Berlin on May 1, 1933. He now tried to stay out of political matters and concentrated on solving the crimes belonging to the department he ran, the Serious Crimes Unit of the Berlin Kripo.

CHAPTER THREE

The Footrace

In 1939, Ogorzow was still developing his method of attack. With Miss Budzinski, he had hit her first on the head to incapacitate her and then proceeded to stab her repeatedly. During other attacks, he had used his hands to choke the women he attacked so that they physically were incapable of yelling for help. In his early days, he had mostly used his fists to beat up women, which did nothing to stop their screams.

Paul Ogorzow was worried about possible repercussions from his attack on Lina Budzinski. She was still alive, and he was not sure if she had been able to see him well enough in the dark to identify him. He had not been wearing a mask or otherwise covering his face, so if she had gotten a good look at him, he could be in serious trouble. He waited though and nothing happened. No one came looking for him and no posters went up with a drawing of his likeness.

Despite the risk it entailed, he eventually returned to the garden area to harass and attack women. He was afraid, though, that he might get caught, and so he reverted to engaging in lower-level offenses again for a while, such as yelling at women and scaring them with his flashlight.

Once he became comfortable with this level of activity, he returned to a more serious level of crime. Four months after he had almost killed Lina Budzinski, he was ready to violently attack, and maybe even kill, the next woman he came upon who was alone in the darkness.

By now, World War II was well under way. On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact. A week later, on September 1, Germany attacked Poland. That same night, the blackout officially began in Germany.

In September, a number of countries, including France and the United Kingdom, declared war on Germany. The United States declared that it would be officially neutral. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland as well. In early October, the Soviets and the Germans occupied all of Poland. They divided the country between themselves.

At 1:15 in the morning of December 14, 1939, Ogorzow spotted a woman walking alone in the garden area. Her name was Hertha Jablinski. While her first name sounds strange in English it was not that unusual in Germany at the time—Hertha was one of the names of the ancient German fertility goddess Nerthus.