Read A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin Online
Authors: Scott Andrew Selby
While some purse snatchers who committed their crimes during the blackout received death, others received a few years in prison. As this open letter to German judges explains, the government wanted judges to focus on the impact of crimes on the home front as opposed to the personal circumstances of the perpetrator. As the German state had Ogorzow dead to rights for these crimes, his only hope was to try to get the court to overlook the danger he posed to the women of Berlin and instead contemplate his personal circumstances.
And so Ogorzow wrote in his confession, “A few years ago I had sex with a stripper and then went to a Jewish doctor. The Jew, who knew that I was a party member, has, out of hatred of the Nazis mistreated my gonorrhea. The consequence of which affected my state of mind. I would like this considered for sentencing purposes. Therefore, I am not responsible for my actions. Also, please bear in mind that I’m a party member.”
3
By his own account, Paul Ogorzow contracted sexually transmitted diseases on three different occasions. Each time occurred during his marriage but involved consensual sex with a woman who was not his wife. The first time had been in Berlin in 1934. The second occurrence was in Poland in 1940, during the German occupation of that country. This third, and final, incident happened in German-occupied Paris in 1940.
The German authorities took Ogorzow’s multiple infidelities and related contractions of sexually transmitted diseases as reflecting poorly on his moral character. They noted that he was only away for short times, a matter of weeks, in Poland and France, yet managed to contract venereal disease during both trips. Combining this with his earlier STD, they felt that he did not care about keeping his marriage vows and was unable to control his sexual impulses.
Ogorzow claimed to have first contracted gonorrhea in 1934 and, when he noticed that he was sick, to have been referred to a Jewish doctor by the name of Wilhelm Schwarzbach.
4
According to Ogorzow, he did not know this doctor was Jewish when he first went to him. When he found this out six months later, he had already undertaken expensive treatments that the doctor had promised would cure him and he’d felt that it was “unfortunately too late to let go of him.”
5
In Ogorzow’s self-serving recounting of these events, the doctor prescribed injections and pills that not only did not cure his gonorrhea but also made his health worse. He claimed the doctor intentionally treated him poorly because he knew Ogorzow was a party member, and this then caused his various hospital stays for all sorts of different conditions.
Gonorrhea is an ancient and very common sexually transmitted disease. Commonly known as “the clap,” it produces symptoms that Paul Ogorzow probably noticed when he went to urinate and felt a tremendously painful burning sensation. The disease is now usually treated with a course of antibiotics. However, in the 1930s, German doctors commonly used a form of colloidal silver, sometimes in conjunction with other forms of treatment. Antibiotics were in use then, but they were not at the point of easily curing this disease.
While gonorrhea does cause terrible damage to the human body, this does not include creating in someone an irresistible compulsion to kill women. Perhaps this excuse would have worked better if Ogorzow had had an advanced case of another sexually transmitted disease, syphilis, which can make someone crazy. Even tertiary-stage syphilis, however, while it is commonly referred to as turning brains into Swiss cheese, does not result in someone becoming a highly organized serial killer.
In addition to blaming this doctor, Ogorzow also brought up various head injuries he’d sustained over the course of his life while suggesting that they could have contributed to his compulsion to attack and kill women. These included suffering a blow to the head from a fall on the ice in his youth. He claimed to suffer from bad headaches, which he now interpreted as signs that there was something wrong with his brain. He also brought up a stomach condition that had been attributed to nerves. And so, according to Ogorzow, his criminal actions toward women were the result of a drive, a compulsion, arising from an untreated derangement.
He asked in writing for placement in a mental hospital: “The offenses which I committed and admitted to in protocol are all based in this unendurable sickness. I remorsefully acknowledge that I was not supposed to do it, but an impulse arose and during the situation I had a sudden blackout because of the sickness. I ask to please be taken to a psychiatric clinic. Signed, party member Paul Ogorzow.”
6
Ogorzow hoped that his various medical excuses, blaming a Jew, and his party membership would combine to save his life.
The authorities did not care about these excuses. They did however have a doctor examine him to see if he was mentally ill or if this claim of an STD making him attack women had anything to it. The doctor reported that Ogorzow was physically and mentally fit and that there was nothing to his excuse of an STD treatment gone wrong having caused him to stalk and murder women. Of course, this doctor may not have been a disinterested expert. He may have been inclined to produce the result that the authorities wanted to hear. But even a completely objective doctor would have had a hard time believing Ogorzow’s self-serving excuses.
Ogorzow also claimed to have desired not to kill women, but only to stun them so he could sexually assault them. He wrote in a short addendum statement to the police, “I would add that I have not beaten the women in my mentally ill state (that I have already put on record) with a piece of lead wire and a piece of iron with the intention to kill them but for the purpose of sexual intercourse.”
7
He tried to make use of the blackout as part of his excuse, saying that he could not see if the women he attacked were “young, old or pretty.” He somehow thought this might make him appear more sympathetic to the court and perhaps persuade the judges that his actions were those of someone who was not mentally well and not the actions of a normal sexual offender.
He also tried blaming women as a whole, saying that “he had a certain hatred of women” owing to his having contracted sexually transmitted diseases from them. While he referred to his wife as “a little frigid,” he did not blame her for his attacks. And he did point out how much he loved his son. It appears he was trying to play the family man card as well.
Paul Ogorzow would find out soon what the court thought of his excuses. Justice, such as it was in Nazi Germany, moved swiftly in this case. Ogorzow’s trial was scheduled for only two weeks after his initial arrest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Trial
On July 20, 1941, the Nazi Party officially revoked Ogorzow’s membership. The next day, the Kripo mailed to the NSDAP office for Berlin, on Hermann Göring Street, Ogorzow’s party member book (NSDAP card number 1,109,672). Also on July 21, the Kripo transferred Ogorzow from their direct control to a detention center in Moabit, Berlin.
On July 22, the Kripo concluded their work in this case. They named it after the final victim in the case, so it became “Homicide Koziol.” Lüdtke and his detective Georg Heuser signed their final report and sent it by messenger to the prosecutor’s office.
The Berlin Special Court (
Sondergericht
) would try Ogorzow. Ironically, the general amnesty decree for imprisoned Nazis that freed Paul Ogorzow from prison back in 1933 was followed by a decree that set up the special court that would now try him. On March 21, 1933, Chancellor Adolf Hitler and Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen signed into law the special courts. Unlike with the amnesty decree, then-President Paul von Hindenburg did not sign this document.
The idea of the special courts was to try political offenses, as opposed to purely ordinary criminal offenses. Inspired by the brutal efficiency of military court-martials, these courts were to proceed quickly, without the use of juries. The need of the Nazi-controlled state to quickly deal with what its organs considered to be internal threats greatly outweighed the rights of the accused.
The jurisdiction of these courts continued to expand as the Nazis solidified control over the state and, later, as they waged war throughout Europe. Those accused of committing crimes generally were much better off if they were able to appear before more traditional criminal courts. Unfortunately for Paul Ogorzow, although he’d committed what we would now consider to be ordinary crimes, as opposed to political crimes, his terrible deeds fit numerous criteria used to determine if the special courts should handle a case. These included crimes that threatened the public order, took advantage of the blackout, or involved violent assaults, among other criteria.
There were no appeals from this kind of court, so whatever judgment and sentence the court handed to Ogorzow would be final.
1
The judges would decide his fate, not a jury of his peers. The court would appoint a defense attorney without input from the accused, and his powers would be extremely limited. As one author put it, “The characteristics of the [special courts] thus violated the legal principle of due process and fulfilled the desire of National Socialist authorities for pronouncing harsh sentences rapidly.”
2
Moreover, unlike in the contemporary American criminal justice system, a death sentence meant a life measured in a matter of hours or, at most, days. There would be no long stays on death row, for years or even decades, while appeals worked their way through the court system.
The attorney general at the Court of Justice, as the prosecutor at the Special Court, indicted Paul Ogorzow on July 23, 1941. The prosecutor for the case would be Deputy Prosecutor Neumann. The prosecutor indicted Ogorzow for crimes “in Berlin in the years 1939 to 1941 by 14 independent acts in serious acts of violence, namely, eight murders and six attempted murders by dangerous means.”
3
The specific charges were from “§ 1 of the regulation against violent criminals from 5 December 1939 in connection with § 211, 43, 73, 74 of the Criminal Code.”
4
In a press statement released by the chief of police in Berlin on the same day as this indictment, the police explained why Ogorzow was only being tried for these fourteen crimes and not for any of the many sexual assaults and other crimes he’d committed in the garden area near the Karlshorst S-Bahn station before he started attacking women on the S-Bahn.
The press release stated, “Countless further criminal offenses of the murderer, in particular the moral offenses committed by him, are not being considered for the accusation because the punishments expected for these deeds hardly carry any weight.”
5
By “moral offenses,” this statement meant the attacks on women that did not rise to the level of violence required for an attempted murder charge, or the death required for a murder charge. There were serious punishments against such crimes, including long terms in prison if all the punishments for all these offenses were added together. However, such punishment paled in comparison to the death penalty that was a potential punishment for the attempted murder and murder charges that Ogorzow faced. As such, it was a practical decision for the German criminal justice system to focus on these fourteen crimes.
On July 24, 1941, Ogorzow’s trial was held at the Special Court III of the Berlin Regional Court. The trial lasted only about six hours, with the judgment issued at 4:40 that afternoon.
Ogorzow’s wife spoke to the court to ask for mercy on the grounds that he was good to her and his family, other than his bouts of jealousy. This plea for Ogorzow’s life fell on deaf ears.
The first words of the court’s decision, underlined and on the top of the page, said, “In the name of the German people!”
6
This court was very much an institution of the Nazi government, and it believed that its right to judge a man and to sentence him to death flowed from the German people via the Nazi Party.
The court considered Ogorzow’s defense of mental disease or defect, also known as an insanity defense. Courts around the world had and continue to have very different tests for what mental capacity means in regard to whether a person is responsible for his actions. Some common tests include whether the defendant, at the time of his actions, knew the difference between right and wrong. Another, much stricter, test is whether someone would have done the same action even if a policeman had been standing nearby watching him.
For instance, if a mentally ill person thought he was fighting off muggers when he was actually kicking innocent passersby, would that person still do this even if a cop were there? But Paul Ogorzow would have failed this insanity test, since he would not kill a woman if a cop were watching him. He would control himself and wait until it was safe to commit the crime.
The German law regarding this issue was contained in the German Criminal Code (
Strafgesetzbuch
, or
StGB
), section 51, paragraphs 1 and 2. If Ogorzow had any chance of not being sentenced to death for his heinous crimes, it would have to come down to one of these two possible defense pleas detailed in German law. If he fell into either category, he might survive.
The first possibility was one of his being considered as not having committed an offense at all. Paragraph 1 stated, “An act does not constitute an offense if the actor at the time of the commission of the act was either unable to realize the forbidden nature of his act or unable to act in accordance with proper understanding because his consciousness was impaired or because he has suffered either pathological mental derangement or mental infirmity.”
7