A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (16 page)

In practice, this meant that the regime would try to keep news of a serial killer under wraps. While the women of Berlin still learned of this case eventually, as gossip spread and they put together for themselves what these “isolated” attacks meant, Lüdtke still could not reach out to the public for the sort of help that he could have requested if he’d been allowed to make this series of attacks public.

This blackout on press about a serial killer riding the rails in Berlin enabled Ogorzow’s attacks to continue. Perhaps even with a massive publicity blitz, he would have been able to keep killing women on the S-Bahn, but such press would have made things much harder for him, as for instance women likely would no longer have traveled alone in the second-class compartments. And perhaps tips would have come in from the public. Just as the blackout that kept Berlin dark at night to protect it from British bombers enabled Ogorzow to attack women in the dark and get away with it, so too did he benefit from the press blackout.

When Ogorzow picked up a local paper to check to see what was written about his attacks, he found little to worry him. Given all the fear of getting caught that he felt immediately after killing a woman, it was a tremendous relief for him to see little to nothing in the papers.

From the perspective of the German authorities, there were two different goals in conflict here: the desire to solve this case versus the desire to control the flow of information in a way that was beneficial to the party.

The Nazi state, as represented by Heydrich, Himmler, and Goebbels, didn’t want to alert people that a serial killer was able to kill women in the capital of Nazi Germany. The fact that they could not protect German women while their men were away fighting threatened to impact the morale of soldiers from Berlin who would want to be back home protecting their loved ones. Moreover, like all authoritarian states, they wanted to create the impression of being very powerful, to deter people from opposing them. So even if someone hated the Nazis, they would be afraid to resist them, as they feared the authorities would quickly capture them.

But if Nazi Germany could not keep a madman from killing the women of Berlin, then their police force looked ineffective.

Professor Dr. Christian Pfeiffer, director of the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony, spoke of these limitations facing the police during the S-Bahn Murderer case: “This demonstrates exemplarily the limits that the police had at the time. If they could have worked as they did, for example, in the Weimar Republic, or as they do now, where it goes without saying that the police will work with the public and the media in a case where it is evident that the criminal who attacked is unknown to the victim, then it would have been more quickly resolved. One can justifiably assert that this serial murder case was so long-winded because the police themselves were not free to act as they had learned to do so.”
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This was different than the case of Mrs. Gertrude Ditter, who was killed in her home in the garden area. At the time the police publicized a reward for that case, they believed it to be an isolated murder, and even Goebbels understood that people would not be alarmed that a murder occurred in Nazi-run Berlin. A serial killer preying on women taking public transportation to and from work was a different story as far as Goebbels was concerned.

Lüdtke also suffered from the Kripo having lost many of its experienced detectives. Those who were Communists or socialists had been fired. Any Jewish detectives were long gone as well.

And yet, despite these limitations, Lüdtke faced pressure from Nebe and Heydrich to solve this crime as fast as possible.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A Killing on the Ground

The same night that he attacked Elfriede Franke, Paul Ogorzow would strike again. This time, though, it would not be on the train.

After he threw Franke’s dead body off the train, he rode the S-Bahn to the Karlshorst station. Even now, after having felt the thrill of attacking Franke, he felt frustrated. He still had a burning desire to sexually assault a woman, a desire that had not been quenched by his killing only minutes before.

Once he arrived at his destination, he disembarked from the train and exited the station. This time he would attack on the ground, where he would have more time if things went right. Perhaps he was not as afraid that a potential victim might scream out for help now that he had killed a woman in a single blow. Regardless, it was clear that he’d grown bolder. Committing two such attacks in one night was unprecedented for him.

Ogorzow stayed on the south side of the S-Bahn tracks between Karlshorst and Rummelsburg. When he was about halfway between these two stations, he came to a stop on Prinz-Heinrich-Strasse, where he found a place to hide. Unlike his other attacks on the ground, this one did not take place in the garden area, which was closer to the Rummelsburg station and north of the train tracks. The location was only about half a mile away, though, which was close enough for the police to make a connection between this attack and the others.

Here, Ogorzow waited in the dark for a woman walking alone from or to the S-Bahn station to pass by his position. In the quiet of the night, he could hear the distinctive sounds of the S-Bahn coming and going.

The train made a loud clickety-clack sound as its wheels rolled on the railroad track. This sound came from the small gaps in the track, called expansion joints, which had been put there on purpose. The metal tracks would expand in the heat of the summer and contract in the cold of the winter. Without these gaps, thermal stress would cause the tracks to buckle in the heat. Modern trains produce much less sound because they mostly use continuously welded rail, which avoids buckling without the need for expansion joints.

The trains of the Berlin S-Bahn also made a distinctive sound because the drive gear of the electric traction motor (GBM-700) produced ascending and descending tones. As the train came into the station, Ogorzow could hear the motor, the clickety-clack wheels on the rail and then the application of brakes. As the train left the station, the accelerating electric motor created tones instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent time in Berlin.

These sounds enabled him to prepare for the moment that someone disembarking from the train might walk past his position.

He didn’t have to wait long. It was only twenty to thirty minutes after he’d killed Elfriede Franke that he found a new victim. It was now in the early hours of Wednesday, December 4, 1940.

He saw a woman walking on the other side of the street from him. No one else seemed to be around. It was hard for him to be certain of this in the dark, but he listened hard and did not hear anyone else out at this hour.

Her name was Irmgard Freese and she was nineteen years old.

Paul Ogorzow didn’t say anything to her, but simply removed the iron rod he’d used earlier that night to kill Franke. He raised the rod and hit Miss Freese in the head, knocking her out. She fell down on the ground. Now that she was knocked out, he ripped off much of her clothing and raped her.

Afterward, he hit her again in the head, a total of three more times, crushing her skull and damaging her brain. Although he was trying to kill her, she was somehow still alive. She didn’t feel a thing during these final moments of the attack, though, as she did not regain consciousness. Otherwise, she would have felt excruciating pain with all the serious damage that Ogorzow had done to her.

The police later characterized her status during the final stages of this attack as near death.

Paul Ogorzow never checked his victims’ pulse or breathing to see if they were dead or still clinging on to life. He seemed to assume in such circumstances that if they were not dead, they would be soon enough given how badly he had injured them.

Ogorzow left Freese’s body out in the open, returned to his place of work at the S-Bahn train signal station, and went to sleep there. It was an isolated building on the outskirts of the train station, and he sometimes slept there when he didn’t feel like returning to his wife and two children in their apartment.

Miss Irmgard Freese’s body was found around 4:30
A.M.
She still was alive, but just barely so, when people walking by discovered her. She was rushed to the hospital. A detective was there the entire time just in case she regained consciousness and could give a statement. From the damage done to her clothing, it was obvious to the police that this was a sex crime. Unlike with the women thrown from the train, the motive here was clear.

Despite the policeman’s vigil, Irmgard Freese never said a word. She remained unconscious from the moment she was found until she died at the hospital.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Connecting the Garden and Train Attacks

Dr. Waldemar Weimann conducted the autopsy on Irmgard Freese’s body right away. His report concluded, “Death by brain hemorrhage due to a severely fractured skull. The injuries originated from a blunt, non-edged object.”
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This was the second woman’s body he’d autopsied that day with blunt weapon injuries to the head. And he’d reviewed photographs of a prior victim as well. So it was very much in his mind that the weapon used, as well as the body being found close to an S-Bahn station, suggested there could be a connection here.

He wasn’t the only one thinking this. Wilhelm Lüdtke was also puzzled, as it appeared to be the same killer, but this killing had not taken place on the train—though it had occurred around the time that Elfriede Franke was thrown from the S-Bahn.

Dr. Weimann told Lüdtke that he could not be certain that the same weapon had been used on Elfriede Franke and Irmgard Freese, but that their injuries were consistent with this. He also couldn’t confirm in any other way that it was the same attacker.

Despite this limitation, he was asked repeatedly about this by the police, including Zach, Lüdtke, and late that night, by Arthur Nebe himself. The head of the entire criminal police force for the Third Reich wanted to know if the man throwing women off the train was the same one who had sexually assaulted and killed a woman near an S-Bahn station around the same time.

Later in life, Dr. Weimann reflected on this moment as follows: “I knew I disappointed my friends in the Kripo. I could imagine the kind of pressure they are under: Goebbels accuses Himmler that the criminal investigation was not in a position to ensure safety on the vital train systems. Himmler blames Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office and supervisor of the criminal police. Heydrich makes Nebe crazy and so on. I knew how much prestige was at stake here. But I also knew that criminal investigation rarely gets done well when prestige issues play a role.”
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With these two attacks on women in different places—on the ground and on an S-Bahn train—within a short time period, the police faced the question of whether these were the work of the same criminal or if there were two different attackers of women prowling in the darkness of this Berlin night. Either way, it seemed ominous.

If it was the same perpetrator, then this was a huge escalation for him to attack two women in the course of less than an hour. Before this night, there had been a substantial time period between attacks. Also, the attacks on the train did not appear to involve sexual assault, while this attack on the ground clearly had.

If there were two separate men—one attacking women on the train and one attacking them on the ground in an area adjacent to a train station—then it seemed like a huge coincidence for these two different attackers to both strike within such a short time of each other and in such close proximity. Also, there were some similarities in the most recent attacks, such as the use of a blunt object.

In looking back on this moment in the case, when it was unclear if the police were dealing with one man or two different offenders, Professor Hans-Ludwig Kröber of the Institute for Forensic Psychiatry at Freien Universität Berlin, recently said, “When analyzing the cases, both options seemed possible.”
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While it was far from certain that the police were dealing with a single offender, they came to believe that this was more likely than the possibility of there being two different attackers.

One of the main detectives on this case, Georg Albert Wilhelm Heuser, later wrote about this in an article he jointly authored with Lüdtke. Born February 27, 1913, in Berlin, Heuser had studied law and then applied for police work. He pretended to have a Ph.D. in law and used a “Dr.” in front of his name, but he had not actually earned his doctorate.

Georg Heuser never joined the Nazi Party, but he did later commit war crimes. For now, though, he was a Kripo detective assisting Lüdtke with trying to catch the S-Bahn Murderer.

Heuser and Lüdtke wrote regarding this moment in the case: “Two murders by the same perpetrator at almost the same time in different crime scenes seemed somewhat far-fetched.”
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The attacks on the train seemed to lack a motive, as there was no sexual assault or robbery, and the victims appeared to be chosen by circumstances. The women’s sole connection to their attacker was that they both were traveling on the S-Bahn, while it was dark out, and they were the only ones in their compartment.

In sharp contrast to these mysterious assaults on women riding the S-Bahn, the attacks on the ground, for the most part, had a clear sexual component to them. If it were only one perpetrator, his actions during this one evening suggested a whole new motive to his past crimes, which meant that how the police had been thinking about this suspect was wrong.

This was the first victim the police were aware of who had been sexually assaulted. An examination of her body had found semen inside her. Ogorzow had committed prior sexual assaults, but they had all taken place in the garden area and not been connected by the police to the activities of the S-Bahn Murderer.