A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (17 page)

The killer’s prior victims had been attacked on the S-Bahn and left for dead with no motive that the police had been able to determine, and it was strange to have someone killing women for no other reason than the pleasure of killing itself. Ogorzow had not had time to molest the first or the third victim, and while he did touch the second victim, there was no evidence of it, given the damage to her clothing sustained by falling from the train. And she was unconscious at the time, so she had no idea what had happened to her between her passing out on the train and her waking up on the ground. She did not know that Ogorzow had touched her after he’d knocked her out. Since she didn’t know this, neither did the police.

Wilhelm Lüdtke wanted to talk to Dr. Weimann about what motive there might be for a man to hit women on the head and then throw them from a moving train. As Dr. Weimann recalled, “Commissioner Lüdtke asked this question [of possible motive] to me the next day on the phone. It was pretty late in the evening. I had spent the whole day dissecting bodies and longed for my home. ‘If you have the time and inclination, we can discuss it over a glass of wine,’ I suggested to Lüdtke.”
⁵

Lüdtke took him up on his offer and came over that evening to Dr. Weimann’s home. Weimann invited him into a room that he’d turned into his home library. Amidst his large collection of books, they sat down and talked about these recent attacks on women.

The main question they grappled with was the nature of the train killer’s motive, if there were two separate killers acting simultaneously. If they removed the recent attack on the ground from the equation, they were left with the question of what would motivate a man to throw women from the train. Sexual assault and robbery were both out. People often kill out of jealousy, revenge, hatred, and so forth, but it seemed to them that might explain a single case but not multiple cases. Especially as the cases appeared to be opportunistic, where the killer did not know his victims before they encountered each other on the train.

If such attacks happened today, police might think of the possibility that there had been a single crime with a typical motive, like jealousy, that was being covered up by having it appear to be part of a string of random murders. There was a famous case like that in the United States in 1986, when Stella Nickell killed her husband by adding poison to his over-the-counter painkillers and then tried to cover it up by killing a stranger with the same kind of poisoned product. In this way she tried to make the murder of her spouse look like part of a random product-tampering case, like a recent case involving a well-known pain reliever. Ogorzow’s attacks on the train, however, were novel, so this copycat element was not present.

Police Commissioner Lüdtke had already given a lot of thought to this matter of motive. He’d developed a theory that the killer was mentally ill, someone who was very aggressive and enjoyed killing for its own sake. In accordance with this possibility, the police had been looking for someone who got into fights and hurt people at the slightest provocation.

During their meeting, he and Dr. Weimann considered this possibility, as well as related ones, such as a killer with various mental or physical health problems—schizophrenia, severe epilepsy, or a brain injury. This fit into the world of the Nazis, with their belief in eugenics and their institutionalized disdain for people with these sorts of health conditions.

Finally, Lüdtke brought up the possibility of these attacks being sexual in nature, even though the women on the train were not sexually assaulted, as far as they knew.

This made sense to Dr. Weimann. Given his background in psychiatry, he understood that something could be sexually motivated even without any overtly sexual act occurring. He thought of Szilveszter Matuska, who blew up two trains—near Berlin in August 1931 and close to Budapest in September 1931. He killed more than twenty people and injured around two hundred. Dr. Weimann believed one version of this criminal’s motive—that he did this for a sexual thrill.

Given this example, Dr. Weimann answered Lüdtke’s question in the affirmative—there could be a sexual motive here, even for the train attacks. This was the right answer as far as Lüdtke was concerned. He hadn’t wanted to predispose Dr. Weimann to answer this way, but now that Weimann had given his expert opinion, Lüdtke had something to show him.

Lüdtke opened his briefcase and took out a detailed map of the garden area where Paul Ogorzow had been harassing and attacking women. “Now see and be amazed,” Lüdtke said.
⁶

This map was covered in all kinds of notes and symbols. Lüdtke explained that they marked where thirty-two different offenses against women had occurred recently: “It began when women walking alone were lit with a flashlight and harassed with obscene yelling. The dirty phrases gradually became fisticuffs, which grew to abuse and eventually to attempted and completed rape. In some cases the perpetrator choked victims, others were stabbed, but most of them received heavy blows on their head, with a blunt object.”
⁷

With these two attacks in quick succession, Lüdtke had seen the possibility of a connection between the attacks on the train, the very recent attack on Irmgard Freese near a train station, and the attacks on women in the garden area.

He had also made another key connection. Lüdtke had been on the scene at Mrs. Ditter’s death, so he explained that case to Dr. Weimann as well. Geographically, it was in the same garden area as the attacks on women detailed in his map, but the pattern was different, as it took place inside the victim’s home and not on the dark trails of the garden colony.

Mrs. Ditter’s case had grown cold, but connecting it with the other attacks could give the police a new take on their investigation.

Dr. Weimann was not yet convinced that this was the same man, especially when they looked at the map and took into account the activity on the S-Bahn and where the lead telephone cable originally came from. It all seemed too spread apart to him.

Now Lüdtke shared the one small detail that would change Dr. Weimann’s mind: “One fact makes me suspicious,” the commissioner said, “Since the first woman was thrown from the train, [the police] have not heard of any more attacks in the garden area.”
⁸

This all made sense to Dr. Weimann. He knew how sexual attackers escalated over time, so it made sense to him that an offender would start by flashing a light on women walking in the dark and eventually graduate to rape and murder.

Now that Wilhelm Lüdtke had confirmation from an expert that he was onto something, he put his detectives to work learning more about the garden attacks and Mrs. Ditter’s murder. Assuming that the same attacker was behind these crimes and the S-Bahn attacks, the police now believed that the train killings had some kind of sexual motive behind them.

Dr. Weimann was concerned that if this was the work of one man, then the short interval between the recent attacks suggested that the high the killer felt from attacking women was wearing off more rapidly, so he needed to kill more often. In this respect, Dr. Weimann viewed a serial killer in much the same way as a drug addict, as someone who needs more and more of a given stimulus in order to experience the same high he did when he started this activity.

One of the first things the police did on December 4, after having found two bodies, was to put up posters in S-Bahn stations with details of the murder of Elfriede Franke. The posters called for anyone with information to talk to the police. They did not mention the other murders. The police were treating this call for information as something limited to a single, discrete crime.

The police were torn because they wanted to ask the public for information, which might provide useful leads, but they did not want to alarm people with the news that a serial killer was on the loose. Nor did they want to advertise that the Nazi state was unable to protect the women of Berlin while their men were out fighting on the front.

Paul Ogorzow read the poster, which included a generous reward offer of ten thousand reichsmarks. This was a large amount of money. For comparison, a single reichsmark would buy five third-class S-Bahn tickets good for one-way trips in the city center fare zone. Another way to understand how much money this was is to consider the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Ditter had bought their garden house for a mere one hundred and fifty reichsmarks.

After seeing this poster, Ogorzow worried that the police were going to all this effort to try to catch him. He was well aware that ten thousand reichsmarks was a lot of money. Although he had no accomplices and he had not confided in anyone about his crimes, it still concerned him that someone might have noticed something about him worth reporting to the police. In addition, the reward meant that the police considered catching him a high priority and would not skimp on resources when trying to solve the murder and the attempted murders that he’d committed on the train.

He was relieved, though, to find that the police had a vague description of him that lacked any specific detail that would single him out from the masses of other men in Berlin it could describe. From the information contained in the reward posters, they did not appear close to catching him. So while these posters and the high reward they announced worried him, this was not enough to frighten him into giving him up his murderous ways.

Meanwhile, Lüdtke ordered that a new kind of suspect be pursued. He had his men look through crime reports for incidents where a man aged somewhere between his mid-twenties and his forties (there was no need in Nazi Germany to focus on the white part) violently attacked women in Berlin and sexually assaulted them. His theory was that this criminal would have started with assaults, then progressed to rapes, and only now escalated to murders.

The only crimes that this approach discovered were two sets that he was already considering—the man who had committed a number of attacks on women in the garden areas of a Berlin suburb and the man throwing women from the S-Bahn. Both men were in the same age range, wore a uniform during their attacks, and were known to use blunt objects to hit their victims on the head.

The garden attacker took advantage of the blackout to approach women alone in the dark and often assaulted them from behind so they could not later identify him. Only two of the garden victims were able to give a description of their assailant—they both said that he was wearing a uniform that appeared to be consistent with a railroad uniform. Although the garden attacker mostly choked his victims or hit them with a blunt instrument, he had occasionally used a knife, which the police did not see in the S-Bahn cases.

The rail tracks between two S-Bahn stations—Rummelsburg and the similarly named, adjacent stop of Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg—bordered the south of the garden area. The Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg station, however, was not accessible to the public. It had been opened in March 1902, but only for the use of railroad personnel. There was a large workshop nearby it run by the
Reichsbahn
, and so they occasionally used this station. This stop would only be made available to passengers on the S-Bahn starting on January 5, 1948.
⁹

All the garden attacks took place within walking distance of these stations, and these stations were also along the route that the S-Bahn Murderer used for his attacks, which further suggested to the police that there could be a connection between the attacks.

However, the police were far from certain about this connection. Lüdtke still had some doubts that same man would engage in attacks on both the train and on the ground at almost the same time. These back-to-back criminal offenses struck him as highly unusual.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Wrong Kind of Suspect

Thinking about who might be carrying out these attacks did not take place in an ahistorical vacuum. Instead, the police were influenced by the beliefs of the Nazi Party. The racist ideology of Nazism suggested that the perpetrator was likely to be a non-Aryan.

Jews, of course, were the great scapegoats of the Third Reich, and so there was some speculation that it could be a man of Jewish heritage behind these attacks. There were still German Jews in Berlin. They had not yet been sent to concentration camps to be murdered.

Despite the racist depictions of Jewish people in the omnipresent Nazi propaganda, it was not yet possible simply to look at a man and tell if he was Jewish. But Jews could be identified by their paperwork, and later the German government forced them to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing.

If someone of Jewish descent were committing these crimes, then the victims would likely have noticed that their attacker was particularly skinny. Jews received much worse food rations than non-Jews and so were unlikely to fit the limited description that the police had of the man committing murders on the S-Bahn.

There was another major problem in considering Jewish suspects. In Berlin, there was a curfew of 8
P.M.
for Jews. It had started in September 1939, so if someone Jewish was committing these crimes, he was doing so while violating the curfew. This seemed unlikely, especially as the police presence on and around the S-Bahn had increased in the wake of the attacks, making it virtually impossible for someone Jewish not to get arrested for a curfew violation. Ironically, the very restrictions placed on Jewish people protected them from being likely suspects in these crimes.

Jewish people were forced to work in menial jobs in Berlin, including jobs related to the S-Bahn. As a book on Jews in Nazi Berlin explained, “In May 1939 all Jewish men in Germany between 18 and 55 and all women between 18 and 50 were ordered to register for labor deployment with the appropriate department of their respective Jewish Communities. Eyewitness reports confirm that Jews were consistently deployed in work alien to their own profession. Doctors, lawyers, writers, and academics were often forced to perform the dirtiest tasks: trash collection, toilet cleaning for the Reich Railways, clearing snow in winter, cleaning jobs in the chemical and textile industries, and so forth. Or they were relegated to physically exhausting tasks such as quarrying and construction work or to strenuous and monotonous jobs in the metal and electrical industries.”
¹