A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (29 page)

EPILOGUE

After the Berlin police had caught the S-Bahn Murderer, the regime reversed its previous ban on publicity regarding this case, since now that it was solved it would no longer generate fear in women who needed to travel alone, but would serve to highlight the effectiveness of the Third Reich in solving crime.

The day after Paul Ogorzow’s execution, the police issued the following press release to highlight their work in catching him:

The Chief of Police in Berlin

Newspaper/print.

Berlin local announcements

Date: July 26, 1941. Number: 178

Karlshorst S-Bahn Murderer Executed

The judiciary press office in Berlin discloses:

Paul Ogorzow, who was sentenced to death and long-lasting suffering this Thursday by the Special Court of Berlin as a parasite to the people and violent offender of civil rights, was executed on Friday. In many instances, Ogorzow used the darkness on the S-Bahn to attack women and throw them out of the train. He also committed multiple murders and murder attempts in the garden area of Berlin-East.

On Thursday of last week, the serial woman killer, whose gruesome deeds put the people of Berlin-East in fear and dismay, was captured by the police after painstaking investigation. A week later, the trial–thanks to the commendable cooperation between the criminal police and judiciary–was able to be carried out against him. Yesterday, the death penalty of this beast in human form was carried out. The public greeted this quick execution of the law with satisfaction.
¹

This press release praised the rapidity with which Ogorzow went from arrest to trial to execution. The government was proud of the level of “cooperation” between the police and the courts. The idea was that the courts and the police worked hand in hand to eliminate those people from German society who posed a threat to the well-being of the Third Reich and the German people. There is a very different view of the role of the courts and police in a democratic society with civil rights, in which the courts serve as a protection against the police arresting the wrong person or violating a suspect’s rights.

They referred to Paul Ogorzow as the “Karlshorst S-Bahn Murderer” because some of his crimes took place near the Karlshorst S-Bahn station and he lived near there. In time, though, the garden attacks faded from the popular imagination in comparison to the more dramatic attacks that took place on the train itself. As such, he became known as simply the S-Bahn Murderer.

In addition to the fleeting attention brought to this case in the news media, it occurred to the Nazi higher-ups that there was value in promoting additional awareness of the Kripo’s effective work in catching a killer.

Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote to
Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler that a series of detective novels based on the successes of the German Police could help boost faith in the capabilities of the Reich. Himmler, in his position as chief of German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, approved of this project.

The first book in this crime fiction series was to be based on the Paul Ogorzow case. Nebe in turn agreed to this proposal as this case made him look good and he was a consummate lover of detective novels. The head of the Reich Chamber of Writers, Wilhelm Ihde, wrote
Death Rode the Train
(
Der Tod fuhr im Zug
) under the pen name of Axel Alt. It cost 1 reichsmark and featured a font on the cover that made the title look like a moving train. This pulp fiction version of the case was a huge best seller—the first printing of five hundred thousand copies quickly sold out.

A professor of German studies recently wrote that this “novel is representative of the dominant tendency of the period to celebrate the work of the criminal police while avoiding any portrayal of the totalitarian apparatus that surrounded criminal politics in the Third Reich.”
²

It was a work of fiction that built on the actual police file in this case. The author changed Ogorzow’s name to “Omanzow,” but the German reading public knew exactly whom he was writing about, as these crimes, once solved, had been heavily publicized.

Wilhelm Lüdtke spent the rest of the war in Berlin with the Kripo.
³
He’d already served in the German army in World War I and he was fifty-five years old by the time he closed the S-Bahn Murderer case.

In April 1943, Lüdtke received a promotion to the rank of
Kriminalrat
(detective superintendent) and received additional training at a police school in Prague. He continued to run the homicide division in the Berlin Kripo, however. On February 1, 1944, he was promoted to become the Kripo personnel chief in Berlin, which involved additional responsibilities but did not require him to give up his position running the Berlin homicide division.

While he was not drafted into military service, Lüdtke was a member of the SS (number 52239) and was issued an SS uniform. He had the mid-level SS officer rank of
Hauptsturmführer
. But he was not assigned to a special SS unit, nor had he volunteered to join the SS. In 1938, everyone in the Kripo who was not already a member of the SS had been required to join it.

Although many detectives in the Kripo could stay in plain clothes, for his new duties, Lüdtke often wore a uniform. It was the same uniform worn by Kripo detectives in occupied territory, as they were not allowed to be in plain clothes there. They wore an SS uniform in field gray.

For Wilhelm Lüdtke, the SS unit he was assigned to was the Security Police in Berlin. In practice, this meant little in addition to his normal Kripo duties.

He was in Berlin until the bitter end. While others, like Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, fled when Hitler killed himself and the Russians came pouring in, Lüdtke stayed. When asked after the war about his work experience, in the denazification questionnaire called a
Fragebogen
, he wrote that he worked for the Berlin Kripo until “
Zusammenbruch
,” which meant the “collapse.”
⁴

Berlin surrendered to the Soviets on May 2, 1945. It was chaos as the Red Army moved in and took control of the city. While many other Germans destroyed their uniforms and papers, Lüdtke continued to wear his. If it had been a uniform specific to the Criminal Police, he might have been fine. Instead, he was wearing an SS uniform.

On May 8, 1945, the Soviet secret police arrested him. He fell into the automatic arrest category as a member of the SS. They held him for less than two months, releasing him on July 2, 1945, as they felt that his duties as a Criminal Police officer did not merit incarceration.

Wilhelm Lüdtke stayed in Berlin, in the American sector, but was not able to rejoin the German Criminal Police. It took time for him to go through the denazification process, as he had been arrested by the Soviets while in an SS uniform. He collected witnesses to explain that his SS rank of
Hauptsturmführer
had been automatic and that while many Kripo officers in Berlin had been able to avoid wearing a uniform, there had been times that he believed it to be part of his duties to wear his uniform. The fact that this uniform belonged to the SS was a problem for Lüdtke. He went through a lengthy process before being able to persuade the authorities that he had not been a member of the SS in any meaningful way, but that it had been an automatic part of his job with the Kripo.

In addition, he was reaching retirement age, having been born in 1886. He’d been a policeman for thirty-five years, and even once he was denazified, he would be too old to rejoin the force, even if they would otherwise be willing to take him back.

While he did have a modest pension, he took supplemental work as a private detective for coffee import and export firms in Berlin and Hamburg from 1945 to 1951. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) described this work as follows: “[Lüdtke] is gainfully employed as an investigator by a group of coffee merchants interested in the suppression of smuggling operations involving the unauthorized import of coffee from [East Germany] to Western Berlin. He also works in an inofficial capacity for the Zollfahndungsdienst (customs investigation unit) of the Berlin Senate.”
⁵

In April 1951, the CIA recruited him for full-time work; before then he’d done some part-time work for them on a case-by-case basis. He’d received no punishment as part of his denazification process, so the CIA was not concerned that he had been a member of the SS, although they did research his background thoroughly. They periodically had concerns about the Soviets having held him for two months, but his account of how that happened made sense. At one point, the CIA subjected Lüdtke to a lie detector test that asked if he’d told the truth about that arrest and if he had been recruited by the Soviets as an agent. He passed.

The CIA noted in Lüdtke’s file that this had been an “automatic arrest for the Soviets, since subject was apprehended in SS uniform. At the time, the German police branch of which he was a member had been assimilated into the SS, and such uniforms and rank designations were a matter of course.”
⁶

He worked for the CIA as an undercover asset in Berlin as part of three different Cold War operations against the Soviets and the Polish Communists. He did this out of a combination of hatred of Communism and financial hardship. Lüdtke found it hard to live on his pension. He used this fact for his cover story to his friends and neighbors, who knew him as a retired policeman earning extra money on the side as a free-lance part-time private investigator.

In addition to paying him a tax-free salary, the CIA also promised him that if the Soviets and/or East Germans invaded Berlin, if possible they would evacuate him and his wife.

For his first job with them, the CIA gave him the cryptonym of CAUTERY-4. He was being run by the CIA’s REDCAP program to encourage Communists to defect to the west. The CIA provided him with fake credentials for the “Economic Assessment Unit” under the name of “Ernst Hartmann.”
⁷

REDCAP eventually reassigned him from Operation Cautery to Polish operations, specifically Operation Besmirch. His cryptonym then became BESMIRCH-2.

For the Polish operations, Lüdtke received a new cover. He was now doing research for newspapers and had all the right credentials, including a counterfeit investigator’s pass. The CIA described his mission for BESMIRCH as follows: “Mission: [Wilhelm Lüdtke] knows that his activities are directed toward the establishment of a support mechanism which could mount and support clandestine operations in Poland. Subject knows that we are interested in obtaining intelligence reports on the transit railroad traffic from East Germany to Poland and the USSR. [He] is also aware of our interest in the barge traffic to Poland and illegal border crossers in the East German/Polish border area of Guben to Gorlitz.”
⁸

When Project BESMIRCHED ended, the CIA still valued Lüdtke as an agent, so they assigned him to Project BECRIPPLE. He now had the codename of BECRIPPLE-2.
⁹
CIA records summarized this operation as follows: “BECRIPPLE Project (1954–60) provided Polish operations run from Berlin and other Stations/Bases with support assets such as a secure safehouse . . . ; garage for a German plated vehicle; an agent/cutout for obtaining credit investigations on persons of operational interest; an agent for monitoring local Polish emigre activity; an agent for obtaining clandestine photographs of West Berlin Polish installations and other support facilities.”
¹⁰

The CIA valued Lüdtke based on his extensive police experience and his knowledge of how German bureaucracies work. While they thought his appearance was too noticeable for more than very short-term surveillance work, they complimented his work as an interrogator, legman, and spotter. The CIA noted that he “is a good interrogator and an adept handler of people.”
¹¹
This was the same skill set that had enabled him to get Paul Ogorzow to confess.

The CIA terminated his services on July 10, 1957. They paid him a severance bonus and gave him a way to reach them that would be good for one year in case the Soviets came after him during that time. The reasons cited in his file for his dismissal were “over-use, compromise, and ill health.”
¹²
“Compromise” in the intelligence community has a different meaning than in everyday life. They meant that his cover may have been blown, and other intelligence services, such as those of the Soviet, East German, and Polish governments may have known he was spying for the Americans. As for his ill health, he was now in his seventies so it was normal for him to have trouble with the various activities being a spy entailed. The last page in his CIA file is a short letter to the chief of the CIA Berlin base notifying him that Wilhelm Lüdtke died from cancer in August 1957 and was buried in Berlin.

Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kripo, was assigned in 1941 to be in charge of one of the mobile killing squads (
Einsatzgruppen
) that followed the Nazi advance into Soviet territory. It was common for police officials to be assigned to
Einsatzgruppen
, which carried out massacres of Jews, Gypsies, Soviet political commissars, and others the Nazi regime wanted eliminated. These groups slaughtered well over a million men, women, and children.