A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (9 page)

In Berlin, the basements of many buildings became makeshift air raid shelters for their residents. Despite the Nazis’ long-term awareness of the devastating possibility of aerial bombardments on their cities, they did not adequately prepare for this situation. While high-level government officials like Adolf Hitler could take refuge in bomb shelters built deep underground and with enough reinforced concrete to protect them even if a bomb hit, normal Berliners had to use the basement of the house or apartment building they lived in.

While such basements offered some safety, if a bomb hit them directly, the residents huddled inside would be unlikely to have enough protection to survive. Despite this grim reality, the people of Berlin became used to the sound of the air raid siren at night and the race to some sort of shelter.

This process was especially stressful for women with children, who were responsible for quickly taking their offspring to relative safety. A journalist for
Life
magazine described the daunting routine Berlin women with children had to go through each night: “Every mother must prepare for a nightly air-raid alarm before going to bed. In addition to the ordinary clothing, warm underclothing, long stockings and a coat must be placed on each child’s bed. For small children a heavy cap and blanket are also necessary. A suitcase must be constantly ready for a hurried descent into the air-raid cellar. First, the suitcase must contain all the important documents and identification papers, then provisions for the children such as cakes of zwieback, picture books for the larger children and toys for the smaller ones. Then a small towel must be provided for each and naturally diapers for the babies. Each evening before going to bed the mother must fill a thermos bottle with fennel tea and also prepare the bottle for the baby. After placing these in the suitcase, she closes it and places it with the gasmasks in a position where it can be easily grasped.”
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This was a tremendous amount of work to go through on a nightly basis. And visits to the air raid shelter could easily last three or four or more hours on any given evening. This often meant an entire apartment building’s worth of tenants, including small children and babies, crammed into the basement. All the while, it was possible that death would rain down from above. It was a nerve-wracking experience that often resulted in a loss of sleep.

Paul Ogorzow’s family often had to go through this experience without him. Unlike many families in Berlin, he was not serving in the military, but he would still be gone many nights either working or, unbeknownst to his wife and kids, prowling for women to attack. So it would be up to his wife, Gertrude, to take their young son and daughter to the basement shelter of their four-story brick apartment building. When the neighbors asked where her husband Paul was, she would answer that he was at work, and if it was past his regular hours, she would tell them that he was working overtime, as that was the lie he told her.

While many Jews in Berlin were ordered by the government to help with building air raid shelters and turning basements into shelters, they were prohibited from using any shelters that had Aryans in them. So if there had been any Jews in the Ogorzows’ building, they would not have been allowed to use the shelter with their neighbors but would have had to risk the bombing run without the imperfect, but better than nothing, protection of the basement.

After a bombing run by the British, the streets of Berlin were often strewn with new piles of rubble. The hospitals would fill up with the injured and the morgues with the dead. Once people started dying from bombs dropped in Berlin in August of 1940, the population grew scared that they might die in the night.

And so the people of Berlin were already not feeling safe in the dark, even before Paul Ogorzow actually killed anyone.

CHAPTER TEN

The First Murder

As October 3, 1940, turned into October 4, Paul Ogorzow headed out into the night. He was not hunting for victims on the train, though, or in the garden area. This time he already had a specific target in mind—a woman he’d met on the S-Bahn.

Three or four days beforehand, Ogorzow had been standing at the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station when he saw Mrs. Gertrude “Gerda” Ditter waiting for a train. He went up to her and asked if he could visit her sometime. She said yes and told him where she lived. It was an address in the garden colony area of Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, where Ogorzow had formerly prowled for women to attack.

Mrs. Ditter was twenty years old with two young children. Her husband, Arthur Ditter, was away in the military. With so many men away fighting, it had become easier for someone like Paul Ogorzow, who was still in Berlin, to find married women who were willing to have an affair.

Ogorzow visited Mrs. Ditter for the first time that night, and she let him into her home at Kolonie Gutland II, path 5a, number 33. Each house in the garden area had an address of Kolonie Gutland I or II, then a path number and letter, and finally a house number.

They started off talking. It began as a casual encounter, the sort of prelude before two people who barely know each other commence an affair. It was a small house and they were in the kitchen, while Mrs. Ditter’s two small children were sleeping in the living room.

Ogorzow wanted to keep Mrs. Ditter comfortable with his presence until he was ready to attack, so he was careful not to say anything that might alarm her. The last thing he wanted was for her to figure out that something was wrong before he began his assault.

Just as with some of his train attacks, there was an abrupt shift in their interaction when Ogorzow decided that now was the time he would strike. The switch between normal behavior and killer was a fast one for him. It was a conscious decision, made when he felt that it was safe for him to attack. He had complete control over this moment, when he crossed the line from the acceptable to the criminal.

Without any warning, Ogorzow abruptly ended their conversation with a violent attack on Mrs. Ditter’s person.

He began this attack by grabbing her with both of his hands wrapped around her slender neck. He squeezed so hard that he fractured her hyoid bone. “The hyoid bone forms part of the axial skeleton and two characteristics make it unusual (for a bone): it is a single U-shaped bone that does not have a partner, and it does not articulate with any other bone,” a textbook on forensic biology explained. “It is found in the anterior region of the neck between the mandibles and the larynx and its function is to act as a sling to support the tongue and for some of the neck and pharynx muscles. Damage to the hyoid bone, especially one or both of the horns of the ‘U,’ is a characteristic sign of manual strangulation.”
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In cases with only skeletal remains, a broken hyoid bone is a strong indicator that the person was strangled. It is hard to break it otherwise.

Despite this serious injury, Mrs. Ditter was still alive. Paul Ogorzow kept one hand on her neck, to hold her steady, while removing his other hand. He used his free hand to take a knife out of his pocket and then stabbed her in the neck. His knife cut severed her left carotid artery and she quickly bled out. As she died, she became Ogorzow’s first murder victim.

Ogorzow then fled the scene. He walked out the front door. None of Mrs. Ditter’s neighbors saw him leave her place. This was not surprising given the darkness of the blackout and the fact that most people were asleep at this time. He walked through the garden area until he reached the suburban neighborhood where he lived. Ogorzow reached his apartment on Dorotheastrasse 24, where his family was likely already fast asleep. His wife and small children had no idea that he had just crossed an invisible line by killing someone.

The timing of Mrs. Ditter’s murder was quite strange as it coincided with a very turbulent period in her life. The authorities believed that she led what they considered to be an inefficient life, and they had planned to remove her two small children from her care and place them in an orphanage. They had previously warned her about this possibility.

This was the work of the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization (
Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt
), known by the acronym of NSV. This was a social welfare organization created by the Nazi Party. Among its various responsibilities was child welfare.

The man responsible for carrying out this order, Konrad Braun, arrived at Mrs. Ditter’s house around noon on October 4. No one answered his knocks, and he discovered that the door to the front garden area of her home was unlocked. He let himself in, and then found that the door to the house itself was also unlocked. He then entered Mrs. Ditter’s home and walked around, looking for her.

With the conditions of the blackout, it was hard to see inside the house. Windows that had been blocked to prevent light from going out also stopped light from coming in.

In the kitchen, Braun lit a match to better see, and discovered Ditter’s body. It was immediately apparent to him that Gertrude Ditter (maiden name Barth) was deceased. Her long black hair was tucked behind her neck, exposing the bruises on it. She had a scarf on, but it hung loose on her so it covered her collarbone, not her neck area. She was wearing a dark-colored loose dress or nightgown with thigh-high stockings held up by a garter belt. Mrs. Ditter was not wearing shoes.

Her body was propped up where she had died, with the clutter in the small kitchen working to keep her vertical. Her right foot was under a small table while her head was stuck between this table and a kitchen container. Her right hand lay on top of a bench.

The children themselves were fine. They were found in the living room of the tiny home. One was in his cot, while the other was in a stroller.

Braun then contacted the local police to report his grizzly discovery. When the uniformed officers arrived, they briefly considered the possibility of suicide, given that Mrs. Ditter was found dead on the very day that the government was to take away her children and that they saw no signs of defensive wounds on her body.

Suicide fell under the jurisdiction of the Order Police (
Ordnungspolizei
, known as Orpo), who handled relatively lower-level police matters. These were mostly uniformed police, whose distinctive green uniforms resulted in their nickname—the Green Police. They included administrative police who often did not need to wear uniforms—they did the kind of work for which many other countries used civilian workers.

However, people do not normally commit suicide by manually strangling themselves and then stabbing themselves in the neck. So the police on the scene quickly decided it was likely a homicide.

With it being a homicide, the Orpo referred the case to the Berlin Kripo’s homicide squad at about a quarter past three that afternoon. And so the Kripo promptly took over responsibility for this case from the Orpo, who had the case for only a few hours. If it had been a suicide or an accident, the Orpo would have handled this matter on its own. There was a clear hierarchy between these two groups, with the Kripo above the Orpo in status, power, and responsibility.

Criminal Commissioner Zach now headed the investigation. At this point, it was a routine murder case. Just as in contemporary America, detectives wore plain clothes, not uniforms. One of the main differences between their dress and that of contemporary detectives was that they generally wore hats outdoors, as that was the custom of the time.

As they did not have uniforms, these detectives needed a way to quickly reveal their authority to take over a crime scene such as Mrs. Ditter’s house. For this purpose, they had warrant discs. An expert wrote that these “were die struck, exactly like a coin, and were of very high quality. The police agency identification number assigned to each officer was hand-punched into the space provided on the reverse side of the disc.”
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The side with the number said, “
Staatliche Kriminalpolizei
” for State Criminal Police and the front side had the German imperial eagle clutching a swastika encircled by a wreath.

The disc itself had a hole punched in it so it could be kept on a chain, secured to the detective’s belt like a skateboarder’s wallet. While the police had identification cards, they were not supposed to be used in circumstances such as these, when flashing one’s warrant disc was the way to gain entry to a house. A warrant disc functioned in much the same way as a police shield or badge does today.

In investigating this case, the Kripo detectives observed, “Immediately nearby the deceased—namely, under her right hand on the ground—there was a kitchen-knife with the blade under a dirty cloth. Whether this knife was the one used in the murder is not yet clear. Fingerprints have not yet been found on the knife.”
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They sent the knife to be tested for fingerprints and to determine whether it was the murder weapon. The Forensic Institute of the Security Police at the Office of the Reich Criminal Investigations Department examined this kitchen knife carefully, with all the latest scientific tests.

After a thorough investigation, they determined, “Human blood was not able to be detected on the kitchen knife. Additionally, no other meat or fat remnants were found on the knife. Beyond that, it can be explained with certainty that this knife cannot be considered as the murder weapon. This fact is especially evidenced by the detail that the fine layer of mold on the handle and blade was intact, which could not have been the case if this knife had been used in the last few days. Further, there was a dark crumb, about four millimeters long, stuck firmly to the point of the knife, which had nothing to do with blood, but was rather made up of plant-root, sand, and seeds. A little clump at the back handle end was also only made up of sandy soil and small bits of plants. Red areas on the back of the knife turned out to be rust; here, also small specimens of little feathers were found which are not from chicken or duck.”
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