Authors: Roger Moorhouse
unease in the gathering gloom. Berliners had been forced to adapt to
many novelties in those first months of the war – rationing had been
introduced and the threat of air attack was ever present – but it was
the blackout that gave every one of them a jolting, chilling reminder,
night after night, that Germany was at war.
As if such concerns were not enough, Berliners soon found a new
peril stalking the night-time streets of their city. In the autumn of
1940, a woman’s body was discovered in her home in the eastern
suburb of Friedrichsfelde. The victim, a twenty-year-old mother of
two named Gerda Ditter, had been strangled and stabbed in the neck.
Her home, a small wooden building in an area of allotments, shacks
and summer houses, showed no signs of robbery or forced entry.
There were no witnesses.34
To make matters worse, the murder appeared to be part of a pattern.
Three other women had been stabbed in the same district over the
previous year. None of them had been robbed or sexually assaulted
and all had survived – but the coincidence of location and method
42
berlin at war
suggested that a single suspect might be responsible for all four crimes.
In addition, two further assaults had taken place nearby; one woman
had been dazzled by a man with a torch, before being beaten uncon-
scious; and a second had been throttled and then thrown from a moving
train. All the offences had been committed under cover of darkness,
with the attacker exploiting the blackout to facilitate both his approach
and his subsequent escape. As a result, no useful description of the
suspect was available, other than the fact that he was male, of slight
build and of average height.35
A month later – on the night of 4 November 1940 – the suspect
struck again. This time, a thirty-year-old woman was attacked on a
train travelling between the stations of Hirschgarten and Köpenick in
the south-east of Berlin, not far from the location of the previous
attacks. As before, the victim had been hit over the head in the near
darkness of the blacked-out carriage and thrown from the moving
train. Fortunately for investigators, however, she had survived and was
able to tell police that her assailant had been wearing the uniform of
German Railways. In addition, the weapon used in the attack – a length
of lead piping – was found in a nearby rail carriage.
Another month later, and two more cases confirmed to the detec-
tives of the Berlin serious crime bureau, the
Kriminalpolizei
– or Kripo
– that they were dealing with a vicious serial killer. In the early morning
of 4 December, a woman was found unconscious by the roadside,
close to the railway lines in Karlshorst. Nineteen-year-old Irmgard
Frese’s skull had been fractured with a blunt instrument, and she had
been raped. She died later that day in hospital without regaining
consciousness.
That same day, just as news of this latest victim was circulating at
Kripo headquarters, investigators received reports of the discovery of
a second body, barely 500 metres away from the first. Elfriede Franke
– a twenty-six-year-old nurse – was found close to the railway line at
Rummelsburg. She had been thrown from a train and had suffered a
fractured skull.
Accidental deaths on the railways during the blackout in Berlin were
a rather common occurrence. In December 1940, as the
Kriminalpolizei
investigation was getting under way, there were twenty-eight deaths
registered on the capital’s railways, twenty-five of which were directly
attributed to the blackout.36 They were caused by people unwittingly
a deadly necessity
43
stepping off platforms in the darkness, or being hit by speeding trains
while crossing unlit tracks and sidings. Typical of such cases was that
of one Gerda May, who slipped on the darkened platform at Bellevue
that December and fell into the path of an oncoming train. Her
mangled body, like those murdered in Karlshorst and Rummelsburg,
was found next to the tracks.37 It could be argued, therefore, that the
officers of the Kripo were not only hampered by the fact that their
suspect was operating under cover of darkness. They also found it
difficult to sift accidental deaths, or even suicides on the railways, from
those that might feasibly be considered as murders. The blackout, it
seemed, was obstructing them at every turn.
For this reason, perhaps, the killer’s next victim was initially misin-
terpreted as a suicide. Three weeks after the double murder, on 22
December, another female corpse was found, also close to the railway
tracks and also with a fractured skull. Investigations determined that
the victim, thirty-year-old Elisabeth Büngener, had a history of
serious illness and had been diagnosed with depression. Moreover,
her body had been found at Rahnsdorf, fully eight miles east of
Karlshorst and Rummelsburg, where the other victims had been
found. Accordingly, the initial Kripo report concluded with the suspi-
cion that the cause of death was suicide – that the victim had died
jumping from the S-Bahn train.38
This was no suicide, however, and, within a couple of weeks, two
additional victims demonstrated as much. First, on 29 December, the
body of forty-six-year-old Gertrud Siewert was found close to the
railway at Karlshorst. Like the others, she had a fractured skull and
appeared to have been thrown from a train. A week later, on 5 January
1941, the body of twenty-eight-year-old Hedwig Ebauer was found in
similar circumstances near Wuhlheide. Both cases, the Kripo concluded,
fitted the profile of the previous four murders and the earlier assaults,
and were assumed to have been the work of a man already known
to all Berlin as ‘the S-Bahn Murderer’.
The realisation that a serial killer was stalking the darkened streets
of the capital caused considerable alarm in Berlin. With the majority of
the city’s menfolk away serving in the armed forces and many women
now drafted in to work long hours in factories and businesses, it
was easy to see how a form of mass hysteria might have resulted.
Well aware of the public’s concerns, the authorities were forced to
44
berlin at war
tread a fine line between providing adequate information and
provoking panic. As one senior police officer warned at the time: ‘We
should not exaggerate the whole thing, [and] drive the people of Berlin
crazy.’39 So, though the popular press covered the murders, at least in
their essentials, it is worth noting that the more serious
Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung
did not. Its Berlin edition failed to make any mention of the murders in December 1940, in spite of the fact that four women
had been killed in that month. The
Völkischer Beobachter
, meanwhile,
mentioned only one case – that of Gertrud Siewert – and averred that
it was most likely to have been an accident.40 It is not clear whether
there had been orders from on high to this end, but it stands to reason
that there would have been a policy of not reporting news stories that
would reflect badly on German society.
In truth, a certain dose of hysteria was already in evidence, not
least in the Kripo investigation, which had begun to reflect the racial
and political prejudices of the time. One officer, for instance, suggested
that the suspect might be a Jew, explaining himself with the contention
that large numbers of Jews were then working on German Railways.41
Others, it seemed, speculated on whether the killer might be a British
agent.
More plausibly, the Kripo had to consider whether their suspect
could be a foreign labourer. By the autumn of 1940, after the successful
Blitzkrieg
in the west, Berlin was awash with foreign workers, shipped
in – usually against their will – to meet the manpower demands of
the city’s industrial and commercial sectors. Coincidentally, that foreign
presence was particularly noticeable on the stretch of railway where
the murders and assaults occurred. Not only were Italian, French
and Polish labourers a common sight in the factories of the area –
especi ally working for German Railways – but at nearby Wuhlheide,
there was an
Arbeitserziehungslager
, a form of concentration camp for
foreign workers who had committed crimes. It did not take an enor-
mous leap of imagination to conclude that one of those countless
labourers might be the culprit. The Kripo acted accordingly. Nearby
foreign labourers’ camps were placed under a nightly curfew, requests
for information in numerous languages were distributed, and identity
checks were made on the foreign personnel working for the railway.42
In addition, the authorities took some practical steps both to protect
women travelling on the S-Bahn and to catch their killer. A reward of
a deadly necessity
45
10,000 Reichsmarks was offered for information leading to an arrest.
Fingertip searches of the various crime scenes were carried out and a
number of large-scale, night-time sweeps of the area were undertaken.
The police presence on the railway was also increased. Officers patrolled
the stations and platforms and even volunteered to accompany woman
travelling alone at night. Meanwhile, investigators examined the shift
patterns of over five thousand railway employees to see which ones
coincided with the times of the murders.
Kripo methods were more imaginative still. Male officers in drag
were first placed on the trains to pose as ‘bait’, riding the S-Bahn at
night so as to draw the murderer into an attack. When this failed, their
female colleagues were asked to fill the role as well. Though they were
not armed, they were at least equipped with reinforced headwear to
protect them from attack.43
These measures were not entirely unsuccessful. They did not lead
directly to an arrest, but it seems they might have given the murderer
a fright. One night that winter, a female Kripo officer, acting as ‘bait’,
was travelling alone in a second-class carriage on the S-Bahn when
she was approached by a man matching the description of the killer.
Following a brief exchange, however, the man became alarmed and
bolted out of the train as it was approaching a station. After evading
the police pickets on the platform, he disappeared into the darkness.
In another incident, a police patrol discovered a man hiding in a train
carriage in a siding at Erkner, at the end of the line that ran through
Karlshorst and Rummelsburg. When he was approached by police
officers, he ran off.
Perhaps because of these heightened measures, the killer – who
had struck five times in barely a month – became much more sporadic
in his attacks. The next assault took place fully five weeks after the
last of the murderous spree that had filled December and early January.
On the night of 11 February, a woman’s body was found by the rail
tracks near Rummelsburg. Johanna Voigt was thirty-nine and had
suffered horrific head injuries before being thrown from a train.
As if to confirm this new-found caution, the killer made his next
– and final – attack five months later, in early July 1941. He also changed
his
modus operandi
. Switching away from making his assaults on the
trains, he reverted to his earlier tactic of attacking women in the alleys
and allotments in Friedrichsfelde – the same place where he had killed
46
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his first victim, Gerda Ditter, nine months earlier. There, in the early
morning of 3 July 1941, the body of thirty-five-year-old divorcee Frieda
Koziol was discovered. She had died from a fractured skull inflicted
by a single blow with a blunt instrument. The Kripo investigators
concluded that she had been hit from behind and then sexually
assaulted. She had had no chance to defend herself.44
At this point, the detective work of the Kripo at last began to bear
fruit. For one thing, the latest crime scene had given investigators a
crucial piece of evidence: an impression of a rubber-soled shoe,
presumably from the suspect. In addition, as a result of the painstaking
analysis of the shift patterns of railway employees, eight suspects were
brought in for interrogation. One of these was a twenty-nine-year-old
assistant signalman, Paul Ogorzow, who had been employed on the
S-Bahn between Rummelsburg and Karlshorst since 1938. Upon initial
interview, Ogorzow had impressed his interrogators. Confident and
coherent, he was described as ‘assiduous and industrious’ and ‘happily
married with two children’. A Nazi Party and SA member to boot,
Ogorzow appeared to be such a solid, upstanding member of German
society that the primary interrogation concluded: ‘After these obser-
vations, further enquiries regarding Ogorzow are suspended.’45
However, in the ongoing investigation Ogorzow’s name kept coming
up. He was labelled by colleagues as an outspoken misogynist. And,