A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin Read online

  A SERIAL KILLER IN NAZI BERLIN

  * * *

  The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer

  SCOTT ANDREW SELBY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2014 by Scott Andrew Selby.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eBook ISBN 978-1-101-60639-1

  Selby, Scott Andrew.

  A serial killer in Nazi Berlin : the chilling true story of the S-Bahn murderer / Scott Andrew Selby.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-425-26414-0

  1. Ogorzow, Paul. 2. Berliner S-Bahn (Germany) 3. Serial murders—Germany—

  Berlin—Case studies. 4. Serial murder investigation—Germany—Berlin—Case studies.

  5. Berlin (Germany)—History—1918–1945. I. Title.

  HV6535.G33B477 2013

  364.152'32092—dc23

  2013032412

  FIRST EDITION: January 2014

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and

  Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the author nor the publisher is responsible

  for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  Dedicated to all the victims of the S-Bahn Murderer

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  List Of S-Bahn Stations on Key Route

  Chronology Of Background Events—August 1939 to July 1941

  Dramatis Personae

  Author’s Note on Sources

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: The Garden Area

  CHAPTER TWO: The Detective

  CHAPTER THREE: The Footrace

  CHAPTER FOUR: Do Not Cry Yet

  CHAPTER FIVE: A Blow to the Head

  CHAPTER SIX: A Family and Party Man

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Blackout

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The First S-Bahn Attack

  CHAPTER NINE: The Investigation Begins

  CHAPTER TEN: The First Murder

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: A Blunt Object

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Death on the Train

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Examining the Body

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Kripo

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Killing on the Ground

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Connecting the Garden and Train Attacks

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Wrong Kind of Suspect

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Rummelsburg S-Bahn Station

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Uniforms, Decoys in Drag, and Another Murder

  CHAPTER TWENTY: The Attacks Continue

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Volunteer Duty

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Push to Catch the Killer

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: A Dangerous Gambit

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: A Red Herring

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: In Police Custody

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The Interrogation

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Confession

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Excuses

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: The Trial

  CHAPTER THIRTY: A Date with the Executioner

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  For Further Reading

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Index

  About The Author

  Photographs

  In the coming war we shall fight not only on land, on sea, and in the air. There will be a fourth theatre of operations—the Inner Front. That front will decide on the continued existence or the irrevocable death of the German nation.

  HEINRICH HIMMLER, SEPTEMBER 19371

  LIST OF S-BAHN STATIONS ON KEY ROUTE

  Ostkreuz

  Rummelsburg

  [Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg—

  not open to the public during this time]

  Karlshorst

  Wuhlheide

  Köpenick

  Hirschgarten

  Friedrichshagen

  Rahnsdorf

  Wilhelmshagen

  Erkner

  Fangschleuse

  Hangelsberg

  Fürstenwalde

  CHRONOLOGY OF BACKGROUND EVENTS—AUGUST 1939 TO JULY 1941

  1939:

  AUGUST 23 Germany and the Soviet Union sign a nonaggression pact

  SEPTEMBER 1 Germany invades Poland (widely considered the start of World War II)

  SEPTEMBER 3 The UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, and France declare war on Germany; a German U-boat sinks an unarmed British passenger ship, starting the Battle of the Atlantic

  SEPTEMBER 5 The United States declares neutrality regarding this conflict

  SEPTEMBER 17 The Soviet Union attacks Poland

  OCTOBER 6 Germany and the Soviet Union now occupy a divided Poland

  1940:

  APRIL 9 Germany invades Denmark and Norway; Denmark surrenders

  MAY 10 Germany begins the invasion of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg; Luxembourg is occupied

  MAY 14 The Netherlands surrenders to Germany

  MAY 28 Belgium surrenders to Germany

  JUNE 9 Norway surrenders to Germany

  JUNE 22 France signs an armistice with Germany

  AUGUST 24 Germany accidentally bombs a church in London

  AUGUST 25 The UK bombs Berlin

  SEPTEMBER 7 The Blitz begins—Germany bombs London and other British cities on purpose

  SEPTEMBER 27 Japan, Italy, and Germany sign the Tripartite Pact—establishing the Axis Powers

  1941:

  FEB 20 German and British land forces fight in Libya

  APRIL 6 Invasion of Yugoslavia by Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy

  APRIL 17 Yugoslavia surrenders to Germany

  APRIL 27 Greece surrenders to Germany

  JUNE 22 Germany breaks its pact with the Soviet Union and invades it

  JULY 31 Hermann Göring orders Reinhard Heydrich to plan the Final Solution of the Jewish question (i.e., the Holocaust)

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  KEY VICTIMS

  ELIZABETH BENDORF Attacked November 1940 on the S-Bahn

  LINA BUDZINSKI Attacked August 1939 in the garden area

  ELISABETH BÜNGENER Attacked December 1940 on the S-Bahn

  GERTRUDE “GERDA” DITTER Attacked October 1940 in the garden area

  HEDWIG EBAUER Attacked January 1941 on the S-Bahn

 
ELFRIEDE FRANKE Attacked December 1940 on the S-Bahn

  IRMGARD FREESE Attacked December 1940 outside the Karlshorst station

  HERTHA JABLINSKI Attacked December 1939 in the garden area

  GERDA KARGOLL Attacked September 1940 on the S-Bahn

  FRIEDA KOZIOL Attacked July 1941 in the garden area

  GERTRUD NIESWANDT Attacked July 1940 in the garden area

  JULIE SCHUHMACHER Attacked August 1940 in the garden area

  GERTRUD SIEWERT Attacked December 1940 on the S-Bahn

  JOHANNA VOIGT Attacked February 1941 on the S-Bahn

  KILLER

  PAUL OGORZOW S-Bahn employee

  LAW ENFORCEMENT AND GOVERNMENTAL PERSONNEL

  JOSEPH GOEBBELS Minister of propaganda, gauleiter of Berlin, Reichsleiter

  GEORG HEUSER Kripo detective

  REINHARD HEYDRICH Director of the RHSA

  HEINRICH HIMMLER Chief of the RHSA and the SS

  WILHELM LÜDTKE Kripo police commissioner

  ARTHUR NEBE Head of the Kripo (RHSA Amt 5)

  DR. WALDEMAR WEIMANN Forensic pathologist and psychiatrist

  AUTHOR’S NOTE ON SOURCES

  I’ve tried to minimize the use of endnotes in this book to make it a more enjoyable read. If information is not cited, it is either commonly known, such as dates of key events during World War II, or it comes from the Kriminalpolizei file on the criminal investigation into the S-Bahn murders. The original documents from this investigation are at the Landesarchiv Berlin, A.Pr. Br. Rep. 030-03 Tit. 198B Nr. 1782–1789.

  PROLOGUE

  The woman looked to be alone. That was Paul Ogorzow’s first mistake. He was so eager to attack her that he went with this initial impression instead of taking the time to make sure there was no one around that could save her.

  She was walking along a pathway through the gardens of suburban eastern Berlin in an area known as Berlin-Friedrichsfelde. Although she was near the station from where she could catch a train that would whisk her into the heart of Berlin, this residential area felt like the countryside. She’d walked this path between residents’ allotments many times, through the lush gardens with their cherry trees, chestnut trees, apple trees, carrots, onions, potatoes, hedges, and assorted bushes and grasses.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Paul Ogorzow hunted for victims in this area. He stalked and attacked women who were walking by themselves at night. And night had acquired new meaning in wartime Berlin—a government-imposed blackout meant the only meaningful illumination here at this hour came from the night sky.

  He looked rather average—on the short side of medium height, white, with short black hair parted on the left. He mostly was clean-shaven, although he sometimes had a wisp of a mustache. His eyes were a bit beady, his lips thin, his hair thinning, and his ears stuck out, but his only truly noticeable feature was his nose. The left nostril looked normal, but the right nostril was oversized, the result of a broken nose he’d suffered in his youth that had not been properly set.

  He sometimes wore his uniform during his attacks, in which cases that was generally all his victims noticed. His railway uniform, though, looked somewhat like many other uniforms worn during the Third Reich. In the dark, and with the suddenness of his attacks, it could be hard to observe the details that would reveal exactly what kind of uniform he was wearing.

  This was not Ogorzow’s first time looking for a woman to assault. By now, he’d emerged from the darkness to attack around thirty different women here. So far, the confusion of the war had helped him avoid much police attention, but he’d also been careful to attack his victims only when he felt confident that he could safely overpower them.

  Taking advantage of the darkness on this evening, he rushed his victim. She only saw him coming at the last moment, when she reacted by screaming as loud as she could. Ogorzow wrapped his large hands around her neck and started squeezing, hoping to silence her and render her unconscious. She fought him though, tooth and nail, enough to be able to continue to breathe, and even to scream.

  What she knew—and he did not—was that help was only a short distance away. Her husband and brother-in-law were nearby, and she hoped they would hear her screams and come to her aid.

  They were horrified to hear her yelling for help and rushed to the scene. Ogorzow was a man of some strength, as he’d worked in manual and farm labor for most of his life, but he was not a big man. Also, he had expended a lot of energy trying to subdue his victim by the time the two men came upon him.

  The husband and brother-in-law violently grabbed Ogorzow and yanked him off his victim. They began to pummel him. Once they were done beating him, they yelled at him that if he were still alive, then they would turn him over to the police.

  Ogorzow had just experienced a sudden reversal of fortune—one moment, he felt as powerful as God, able to control whether his victim lived or died, his hands squeezing around her throat, and the next, he was being beaten by two men. He worried that they might kill him or, if he survived, alert the authorities so they could arrest him.

  In the darkness, Ogorzow was able to break away from his attackers and hide among the numerous bushes and trees in this area. He knew this place well, having spent time here at night, looking for victims to attack. These two men searched for him, but they eventually gave up and took their loved one away for medical attention. By the time the three of them reported this incident to the police, Ogorzow was safe at his nearby home.

  Afterward, Ogorzow thought back on his mistakes. Besides having attacked a woman who was not alone, he had left behind three witnesses. He’d counted on the speed of his attack, combined with the darkness on the garden path, to result in his victim not being able to properly describe him to the police. But a prolonged struggle had occurred, and he worried that the woman he’d attacked and her two saviors might be able to identify him.

  He reflected on his narrow escape and how he could lower his risk of getting caught. Giving up his attacks was not even a consideration. He derived too much pleasure from assaulting women. Instead, he focused on what he could do to become a better criminal.

  After this close call, Ogorzow realized that he needed to make sure that his victims could not scream out for help. So he would immediately choke them with his hands, threaten them with a knife, or hit them over the head with a blunt instrument. He was not sure yet what would work best, but he knew this was a problem he would have to solve if he was to avoid getting beaten up again—or, worse yet, caught by the police.

  And he set his sights on a new hunting ground—one that ran right straight through the heart of Berlin, with an almost limitless supply of victims. Soon, he would expand his repertoire and become one of Berlin’s—and maybe Germany’s—most notorious serial killers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Garden Area

  Up until after the incident in which he went from hunter to hunted, Paul Ogorzow only attacked women in the garden area near his home. The area where he lived was suburban, but between his home and a nearby commuter train station, there was a large area of garden allotments.

  The Germans traditionally have these in cities so that people without space to garden at home have someplace to go to have a small garden of their own. A person can own or rent a small plot of land inside what they call a “colony” and grow ornamental flowers and plants, or, especially during wartime, fruits and vegetables. These spaces tend to have small structures on them where people store their gardening equipment and anything else they need to have an enjoyable day in this facsimile of the countryside. Many colonies allow people to live there during the summer.

  In this particular colony, there were small houses that people lived in year-round. This area was actually made up of two allotment garden colonies joined together—Gutland I and Gutland II—but as a practical matter, this was one area of continuous garden plots.

  Paul Ogorzow saw people garden
ing when he walked or rode his bicycle to the nearby train station. He had no need for a garden house since his apartment building had a small garden that he lovingly tended.

  A book on the cultural topography of Berlin explained how these allotment gardens, combined into colonies, worked: “Characteristic of the great German cities is the attempt to counterbalance their high residential densities by the creation of gardens for individual use on the city fringes. . . . Unlike the British allotments, mere portioned fields where the wind blasts unchecked through the sodden Brussels sprouts and tools are kept in shanties made of old packing cases, the Berlin garden colonies are extremely orderly and well-organized affairs, made attractive by their mature fruit trees. Behind formidable fences and locked gates, the profusion of flowers, the patches of lawn, and the garden furniture make their primarily recreational function apparent, while the ‘summer-houses’ can approach the solidity and dimensions of cottages, in which the family can spend the night. . . . In the period of acute housing shortage caused by wartime bombing, many ‘summer-houses’ came to be permanently occupied, producing a kind of untidy suburbia.”1

  Past these allotments, there were suburbs. Around eight thousand people lived in them, including many employees of the railroad company, like Ogorzow. Some of the people who lived in these houses walked home from the train at night through the garden area. They walked in darkness, as the streetlights here were turned off as part of the city’s wartime blackout. Many of these inhabitants were women whose husbands were away in the German military.

  Historian Dr. Laurenz Demps, an expert on Berlin during the Nazi era, described this area as follows: “The area of garden plots is directly next to the [train] tracks. We can imagine the allotments of that time, as we know it today. They were usually small garden-plot houses. In 1938, 25,000 families lived in such small garden-plot houses in Berlin. They were very simple; very primitive. The street lighting, path lighting, was simply not there. There was a lot of green. It was very dark and not very busy—especially in the evening.”2