A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (18 page)

So one avenue of investigation was to look at any Jewish people who worked for the railway, which at this point in time would mean a low-level menial laborer, such as a cleaner. However, the police did not find anyone within this labor pool that they believed to be a viable suspect.

If the Kripo were merely looking for a scapegoat, all they needed to do was pick up a German Jew and frame him for it. Perhaps one who worked cleaning toilets at S-Bahn stations. But it was important to Lüdtke to catch the actual killer. Besides, the perpetrator of these crimes would probably kill again, and that would make the police look bad if they already had someone in custody for the crimes.

The idea also took root that the attacker could be a foreign spy trying to sabotage the Reich. Gossip spread among the police that the perpetrator was working for the British to undermine morale in Berlin. It was true that women were growing afraid to ride the S-Bahn to and from their factory jobs, and these factory jobs were essential to the German war effort. Also, this theory was built on the idea that men who’d left Berlin as part of the military would grow upset when they learned of the attacks and would wish to return home, where they could protect their female loved ones. As such, these crimes would hurt morale among soldiers from Berlin.

Other police officers leaned toward the theory that the attacker was a foreign laborer. Even though it did not explain how the perpetrator spoke perfect German or had a uniform, this angle was carefully investigated. One possibility was that the attacker knew German, despite being a foreigner, or knew a little German and so could fake his way through the language for limited interactions. In many, though not all, of the attacks, the perpetrator did not speak at all. As for the uniform, in this scenario, perhaps a foreign laborer had stolen one or made a fake uniform that looked real enough in the dark.

Citizens of conquered countries, such as Poland, were forced to work in factories in Berlin. The German authorities investigating the S-Bahn killings paid particular attention to slave laborers from Eastern Europe, as they believed them to be racially inferior to Aryans. And so the police looked into whether anyone from the labor camps could have been unaccounted for during the time of the attacks. They also took a careful look at any non-Jew not of Aryan descent working for the railroad.

This suspicion toward foreigners posed a problem for the authorities. Foreign laborers formed an essential part of Germany’s war effort, and a growing fear of them on the part of Berliners could potentially disrupt the important work they did. Although Germany fought this war in the name of creating more living space for pure Aryans, it ironically decided to import large numbers of foreign laborers into Germany to do the work that the war required. German men were already mobilized to fight, and women were increasingly doing factory work as well.

The technology of the time required large amounts of manual labor to move earth and work machines. There was a wide spectrum of foreign laborers who did such tasks, ranging from those imprisoned in camps, who were worked to death, to those who came from countries allied with Germany and had many more freedoms.

The investigation was necessarily limited to those workers who were not imprisoned and who had access to the trains. Many laborers had curfews and were not allowed to ride on public transportation such as the S-Bahn. Others lived in barracks or similar group accommodations that enabled the authorities to keep track of their comings and goings.

These racially motivated approaches to solving these crimes did not lead anywhere. While these lines of detection did waste police resources, they did not stop the investigation from going forward, and Lüdtke stayed focused on other ways to try to catch the killer.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Rummelsburg S-Bahn Station

While the police investigated the garden assaults to see if they were connected with the attacks on the S-Bahn, they also took another look at the October 4, 1940, murder of Mrs. Gertrude “Gerda” Ditter.

Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke realized that if the garden attacker and the train killer were the same person, he might also have killed Mrs. Ditter. And since this murder had occurred between the first two attacks on the S-Bahn, before the third one, which marked the first actual murder on the train, then Mrs. Ditter would have been the perpetrator’s first homicide.

The murder took place inside of a house, which varied from the garden attacker’s usual pattern of assaulting women outdoors. So the police were not even certain that the garden attacker and the killer of Mrs. Ditter were one and the same, let alone that this same man was the S-Bahn Murderer. Even so, they decided to take a second look at her case.

They had no witnesses to the attack on Mrs. Ditter, but they did have survivors of attacks in the garden area. Lüdtke put the information he had about the garden area attacks together with what he knew about the S-Bahn attacks. The eyewitness descriptions of the attacker roughly matched up, but these were so vague that they fit a huge number of the men in Berlin. Given the darkness of the blackout, the descriptions provided to the police did little to help. The witnesses didn’t notice any distinctive marks, such as tattoos or scars.

While Ogorzow had neither of these, he did have an improperly set broken nose that resulted in an oversized right nostril. No one had noticed this yet, at least no one who had lived to describe her attacker. His ears stuck out a bit, and his hair was thin, but these details too went unnoticed in the confusion of the attacks and the darkness of the blackout.

All the police had to go on in terms of a physical description from the garden attacks was an age range of thirty to forty, but even that had to be considered rough, as it was hard to tell someone’s age in the dark. So his age could have easily been twenty-five or forty-five for all the police knew. As to height, the police had descriptions of around five feet four inches to five feet six inches.

A major difference between the description of the attacker in the garden area and the description by the S-Bahn victims was that on the S-Bahn the perpetrator always had on a uniform, while only two of the many victims in the garden area reported that their harasser was wearing a uniform. And these were two of the most low-level incidents, where Ogorzow had flashed a light at women to startle them during the blackout and yelled crude things. All the other attacks in the garden area so far had involved a man who appeared to be wearing civilian clothing. Again, given the darkness, Ogorzow could have been wearing his uniform during many of these attacks and his victims did not notice it.

So while it was a breakthrough that Lüdtke made a connection between these two different areas of attack, the S-Bahn and the garden area, including the killing of Mrs. Ditter, for now it added little actionable intelligence to his operation to catch this killer.

The fact that none of the attacks happened on the U-Bahn provided the police with a possible clue as to the attacker’s identity. Different companies ran the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn. So this might mean that the killer had a connection to the company that ran the S-Bahn, the National Railroad. Of course, the police could not be certain of this. There could be other reasons why the killer chose to use the S-Bahn for these attacks.

The police were able to narrow down the killer’s hunting ground even more because it was only along one part of a single S-Bahn route. He preyed on women in otherwise empty second-class carriages between the Rummelsburg and Friedrichshagen stations. Back then, this line was called
Schlesische Bahn
. Two experts on the S-Bahn explained that it had this name “as it was the suburban line near the main line to the former part of Germany called Schlesien. From 1930 on all lines had internal ‘names,’ that were not shown to the public. For example after reconstruction of the route to Erkner it got the internal name ‘train group E.’”
¹
The
Schlesische Bahn
is still in use today. After the reunification of Germany, it was named S3.

Lüdtke realized this was the route for him to monitor. He posted at least one officer at all times on each of eight stations along this line. He started with Rummelsburg followed by Karlshorst, Wuhlheide, Köpenick, Hirschgarten, and Friedrichshagen. He then went a bit beyond the killer’s normal route to include two additional stations past Friedrichshagen. These were Rahnsdorf and Wilhelmshagen. (These eight stations did not include Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg as that station was not then open to the public.)

The detectives that Lüdtke placed on the train stations wore railroad uniforms so people would assume that the company that ran the S-Bahn employed them and they were not police officers. Detectives also worked ticket booths at S-Bahn stations while wearing
Reichsbahn
uniforms. While checking people’s tickets, they would try to observe if there was anything suspicious about a passenger that suggested he might be their suspect.

However, this got the police nowhere. Without a decent description of the suspect, they could not hope to find him just by looking at train riders.

Lüdtke decided to take an active approach to this investigation—instead of waiting for the next victim to be discovered, he set out bait to tempt the killer. There were policewomen in the Kripo, which provided Lüdtke with the opportunity to try to trick the killer into attacking a police officer.

While the Gestapo in Berlin had women working for it as well, they held purely administrative positions. So when the Gestapo needed a woman for a job, such as to try to seduce a heterosexual male spy or some other gender-specific task, they were forced to use someone without proper training for such activities.

The Kripo, however, had actual police officers that were women. In 1927, Miss Friederike Wieking organized a small number of female police into a unit of the nationwide criminal police force. She retained her authority when the Nazis gained power, and her female police department became the Female Criminal Police (
Weiblichen Kriminalpolizei
, or WKP). Of the many section heads in the RHSA, she was the only woman.

Lüdtke approached Wieking to find out about using her female police as part of his plan to catch the S-Bahn Murderer. She agreed to assign some of her policewomen to this task. But when Lüdtke wanted to arm these women with handguns so they could protect themselves if they did run into the killer, Wieking refused. She did not believe that women should be armed. Instead she saw the role of women policemen as assisting male police with gender-specific tasks, but not to be their equals.

This was yet another frustration for Lüdtke, as it meant that he needed to make sure that a policewoman riding the S-Bahn had male backup close enough to be able to help her if she were attacked, but far enough away and out of sight so as not to deter the killer from striking. Lüdtke was well aware that the killer only attacked women traveling alone, so his inability to train these women in how to use firearms and provide them with handguns was a serious problem.

Despite this limitation, he elected to go ahead and try using policewomen as decoys on the train. He had policewomen dressed in fashionable civilian clothing ride the S-Bahn, accompanied at a distance by a male police officer. A policewoman would ride the second-class compartment alone while a male companion would try to keep watch from the adjacent third-class compartment.

On this route, there were two different types of railroad cars used by the S-Bahn in the 1940s. Only one of these types could be used with female decoys, for with the other kind it would not be possible for them to have male backup. The cars built in the 1920s had doors between the second-class compartment and the adjacent third-class one. These trains used “engine cars” and “control cars,” with the final control car featuring a second-class compartment connected by doors to a third-class compartment. With this setup, a female police officer could ride in second class, the only class in which Ogorzow ever attacked his victims, while an armed male police officer would be waiting in the adjacent third-class compartment. He would be ready to burst through the door between compartments at the first sign of trouble.

The newer trains, built mostly in the late 1930s, had “engine cars” with “trailer cars.” The trailer car with the second-class compartment had no door connecting it to third-class or any other part of the train. There were solid walls on each end of the compartment. The use of female decoys would not work with these trains as there was nowhere for male help to be waiting. Even with the darkness in the train, it would be very difficult to hide a male cop in the second-class compartment, and if anything looked off, the criminal would not strike. It’s possible that Ogorzow favored one kind of train over the other, but the police were not aware of any such preference and so they used female police in the older kind of train.

If Wieking had granted Lüdtke’s request to train and arm the female police, this might have worked. At one point, it almost did anyway. Using a female police officer, the Kripo narrowly missed catching Ogorzow. He was riding the S-Bahn, looking for a woman to attack. He entered a second-class compartment and saw that there was a woman already riding in it. She was alone and no one else boarded this compartment with him.

As the train started moving, he walked toward this woman, while mentally and physically preparing to attack her. What he did not yet realize was that this woman was a female police officer in disguise. She was not dressed in a uniform, but instead was traveling undercover in fashionable civilian clothing. She did not have a firearm, but did have a male police officer riding in the adjacent third-class compartment, waiting by the door between compartments for a signal that he should rush through to her aid. It was hard to communicate between compartments and it would take time for her to get help, so this was a serious flaw in Lüdtke’s plan.

Somehow, just as Ogorzow was close enough to attack the woman, he realized that she was a cop. He knew already from his own observations, his friends in the SA, and his fellow railroad workers that there were female police officers riding the S-Bahn, waiting for the killer to strike.