Read A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin Online
Authors: Scott Andrew Selby
Despite this, the married couple had what they both considered a healthy sex life, with intercourse two to three times each week.
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Paul Ogorzow also had a woman on the side. He’d often sneak away from work to visit her. She was a married woman whose husband was away in the German military. But just as with his attacks on women, his wife had no idea about this part of his life.
Paul Ogorzow would turn twenty-eight about a month after his attack on Mrs. Schuhmacher. He’d been born on September 29, 1912, in the village of Muntowo in what was then East Prussia, a province of the German Empire. This area is now part of northeastern Poland.
He was born Paul Saga, with no father listed on his birth certificate, and had a difficult upbringing as the illegitimate child of Marie Saga, a servant on a farm. There is not enough information about his childhood to know if he engaged in any of the behavior that criminal profilers would later associate with developing serial killers.
A book on teen killers described these behaviors as “the ‘homicidal triad’—also known as the ‘homicidal triangle’ or the ‘psychopathological triad’—a combination of three childhood behaviors that many murderers, especially serial killers, exhibit in their early years. These include enuresis (bed-wetting), pyromania (setting fires), and animal torture. . . . J. M. MacDonald first described the homicidal triad in his article ‘The Threat to Kill,’ published in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, and it is sometimes referred to as ‘the MacDonald Triad.’”
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Whether Paul Ogorzow wet his bed beyond the age that most children stop (around five), or set fires or tortured animals, there’s not available documentation on this period of his life, and those who knew him at that age have passed away. This cluster of behaviors, which has become entrenched in American popular culture as indicative of a young serial killer, is controversial, and some believe it to be without merit in determining future activity. The German Police did not look into whether any of these three factors were present in Ogorzow’s childhood as this was long before this theory was first proposed.
At around age twelve, a man named Johann Ogorzow adopted him. Paul Ogorzow grew up as a manual laborer—first, he was a farmworker, and later he worked at a steel mill, before moving to Berlin and starting work at the railroad company.
It helped his advancement at the railroad company that many of the men with whom he would normally be competing for jobs had left to join the military. So far, he had not been drafted, even in time of war; his job for the railroad was a skilled one that still needed to be done. Also, as a loyal member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazi Party, he was in an advantageous position when it came to promotions. He’d joined the Nazi Party on April 1, 1932, a year before it gained power over Germany. This meant that he had a relatively low party number, and it gave him a bit of status in the Reich, as those who joined before 1933 were considered to be among the party’s true believers. After the Nazis gained power in 1933, many joined the party in order to help their careers, while beforehand it could have been disadvantageous to be aligned with it.
There was no uniform for party members to wear; instead the party issued them a round membership pin. On it a black swastika, with a thin silver border, was set in the middle of a white background. A thick band of red circled the enamel pin, with the words “
National-Sozialistische D.A.P.
” in all-white capital letters wrapped around the swastika.
Ogorzow was more than just a party member though. He was also in the party’s paramilitary organization—the
Sturmabteilung
, also known as the SA, the Storm Troopers, or the Brownshirts. The term “Brownshirts” came from the color of their uniform.
Even among their fellow Nazis, members of the SA were often thought of as a ragtag collection of brutes and thugs. They were used primarily as goons to do the party’s street fighting in the early days of Hitler’s rise to power. Brownshirts terrorized opposing political groups, like the Communists, as well as persecuted minorities such as Jews and Gypsies. After Hitler established his control over Germany, he turned against the leadership of the SA and had hundreds of them killed in 1934 in a purge now called “the Night of the Long Knives.”
Having only been in the SA for two years at that point, Ogorzow held far too low a rank to be purged. In order to help publicly justify this purge, the Third Reich publicized the fact that the head of the SA as well as many of the other purged members were closeted homosexuals. Of course, Hitler had been well aware of this fact before the purge occurred. The Night of Long Knives had been a matter of internal politics and a perceived threat to Hitler’s hold on power, and so the Nazis had murdered some of their own leaders.
Ogorzow fit into the SA, with its working-class culture. It was during his early days in the organization that he saw the most action. Along with other SA men, he fought in pitched street battles against Communists, socialists, and trade unionists. They also beat up those the Nazis considered undesirable, such as Jews, gypsies, and, ironically, homosexuals. Among other tasks, they were used as muscle to prevent customers from entering Jewish-owned businesses.
This violence served as training for Ogorzow in his latter attacks on women. He found that he enjoyed the rush of power he felt in pushing people around and beating them up. And by engaging in such violence, he became more comfortable with it.
In November 1938, the men of the SA took part in a brutal, all-out attack on Jewish citizens of the Reich. The excuse for this attack was an incident that had taken place in Paris on November 7, 1938. Polish-born Jews in Germany were being deported to Poland. But Poland, not yet a conquered country, refused to let them in. It was a nightmare for the thousands of people stuck between these two countries. One such family was Riva and Sendel Grynszpan’s.
Their teenaged son Herschel lived in Paris, and when he heard about the perilous situation his parents were in, he went to the German embassy in France and asked to be brought to an official. He was seen by the most junior official on duty, a man named Ernst vom Rath. Herschel Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, repeatedly. Ironically, vom Rath had expressed anti-Nazi views, including concern over the mistreatment of Jewish people. Ernst vom Rath died two days later on November 9.
The Nazis used this murder as an excuse to engage in organized violence against Jews, while pretending that it was a spontaneous outburst from the population. Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo (
Geheime Staatspolizei
, which means Secret State Police), issued detailed, secret instructions to the SA and the Security Police (
Sicherheitspolizei
) on this matter.
In what has come to be called
Kristallnacht
, also known as the Night of Broken Glass, the SA and other Nazi groups attacked Jews and locations linked to Jews, such as synagogues, businesses, and residences. This took place across Germany and Austria, and was organized such that non-Jewish property was to be protected. So, for example, in Berlin, a synagogue in a Jewish area would be burned, while one next door to an Aryan-owned business would be smashed up instead.
Many young, healthy Jewish men were rounded up and detained, then shipped off to concentration camps. Others were simply beaten to death.
Having been an active part of the SA, Ogorzow became increasingly comfortable with violence. He’d risen to the rank of SA
Oberscharführer
(senior squad leader). It was the second noncommissioned officer rank in the SA, just above his prior rank of
Scharführer
(squad leader).
His activities with the SA desensitized him to beating people. Such violence, of course, was supposed to be directed against perceived enemies of the Nazi Party, not German housewives.
The garden allotments that had been Ogorzow’s hunting grounds, an area he lived near and knew intimately, no longer felt safe to him. While the extensive green areas that filled this place provided him with plenty of cover, and the blackout meant that the area had no lighting in it, he was now afraid.
He’d attacked a woman who he had mistakenly thought was alone, and her brother-in-law and husband had beaten him badly. Even in his prior attacks, a woman screaming out for help had often foiled his plans, and so he thought about a new place where he could attack women and not face this danger.
He passed through the garden area on his way to and from one of the S-Bahn stations near his home. It may have been during one these trips that he realized that the trains themselves could serve as a new, safer, hunting ground for him. He knew them just as intimately as he did the garden area near his home, and by carefully waiting to attack until the only ones in a compartment were him and his intended victim, he could greatly minimize the risk of interruption or anyone hearing his victims’ screams. And the trains themselves were darkened—not the complete darkness of the garden area, but still enough to make them an attractive place for a violent criminal like him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Blackout
The S-Bahn train compartments were dark (a little light was allowed though, so they were merely poorly lit, not pitch-black), as was the city of Berlin, because the Nazi regime had mandated a blackout in order to make it harder for British bombers to hit their targets.
The first British bombs landed in Berlin on August 25, 1940. Little actual damage had been done during that attack (the British only managed to destroy a garden house), but the city was on edge now that the war had finally come to its doorstep.
The famed historian William Shirer was in Berlin that night, and he wrote that despite the “material damage [being] negligible . . . the effect on German morale was tremendous. For this was the first time that bombs had ever fallen on Berlin. ‘The Berliners are stunned [I wrote in my diary the next day, August 26]. They did not think it could ever happen. When this war began, Goering assured them it couldn’t. . . . They believed him. Their disillusionment today therefore is all the greater. You have to see their faces to measure it.’”
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The head of the German air force, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, famously announced about a year before, in September 1939, “No enemy bomber can reach the Ruhr. If one reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Göring. You may call me Meier.”
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By this he meant that he was so confident that the British would never bomb Germany, that if the impossible happened, and Germany was bombed, he would trade in his high-status identity as Göring for the common, everyman status of Meier. It was like a prince saying he would become a blue-collar worker if a certain event came to pass.
Despite Allied bombs raining down on the Ruhr region, and past it, on Berlin itself, Göring did not change his name. However, cynical Berliners, when they thought it safe to do so, would refer to him as Hermann Meier. And air raid sirens became informally known among the embittered as “Meier’s trumpets.”
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The night before Great Britain bombed Berlin, the Germans had accidentally bombed a church and civilian housing on the outskirts of London. Their mission had been to hit an oil terminal. Hitler did not want London bombed.
The prime minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, was furious about this attack and ordered the immediate bombing of Berlin. While their first raid killed no one, the next attack on Berlin killed eight. About two weeks after the first bombs fell in Berlin, Germany began the Blitz (the German word for lightning), a 267-day-long campaign of German bombing of British cities.
Aerial bombardment of cities meant that places like London or Berlin were blacked out during the night so as to make it harder for planes to find targets. Nowadays, planes usually find targets using a global positioning system (GPS), but in World War II that was still thirty years in the future. Nor did those going on bombing runs have the advantage of night-vision goggles. Air-to-ground radar would come into use as the war progressed, but it still was not nearly as useful as being able to see a target. Other means of navigating to targets included astronavigation (used by the British) and radio navigation (used by the Germans).
As a practical matter, pilots needed to actually see targets with their own eyes to know where to bomb. Other ways of bombing tended to result in bombs landing far from their intended targets.
Daylight bombing runs were much more accurate than attacks by night, but with the German air force still a power to be reckoned with and antiaircraft fire coming from batteries on the ground, it was very dangerous for the Allies to fly bombing sorties while the sun shined. Bombers were much slower than fighter planes and were especially vulnerable during the day. At night, painted black, flying high in the sky, such bombers were harder to intercept.
On the other end of the spectrum, during times of storms or heavy cloud cover, while they were safe from enemy fire, it would be hard for bombers to find targets to hit. They would not know if they were above the center of Berlin’s government district or a farm twenty miles away. The key then for planes to find targets to hit was for them to look for the telltale sign of modern civilization—lights at night.
The populations of these cities faced the dangers of a bomb hitting their homes, their places of work, their various modes of transportation, or wherever they happened to be walking. And as William Shirer wrote, the British air force “came over in greater force on the night of August 28–29 [1940] and, as I noted in my diary, ‘for the first time killed Germans in the capital of the Reich.’”
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While the United States would not enter World War II until December 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt had spoken out early on against the aerial bombardment of cities. On September 1, 1939, he proclaimed, “The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity. If resort is had to this form of inhuman barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives.”
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