Authors: Roger Moorhouse
more importantly, one of his workmates stated that he had seen him
jumping the perimeter fence of the railway and wandering off while
on duty. On 12 July 1941, Paul Ogorzow was arrested and formally
questioned again. Alibis were checked, forensic evidence gathered and
shoeprints compared. Six days later, after a lengthy interrogation, he
finally admitted to eight cases of murder, six cases of attempted murder
and a further thirty-one cases of sexual assault.
By way of a defence, Ogorzow attempted to chime with the Nazi
Zeitgeist
, claiming that his predatory and sexually aggressive behaviour
had been caused by an unconventional treatment for gonorrhoea
prescribed for him by a Jewish doctor. He might feasibly have had
some success with this anti-Semitic line of argument. After all, at least
one member of the Kripo investigating team – Georg Heuser – would
go on to forge a murderous career as commander of one of the
Einsatzgruppen
, the Nazi execution squads that slaughtered Jews en
masse across eastern Europe.46 However, the
Kriminalpolizei
gave
a deadly necessity
47
Ogorzow’s defence little credence, and cast him instead as a simple
sexual predator. In their final report, on 22 July 1941, they described
him as being ‘of a completely cold and calculating nature, without
any nerves or any inhibitions when it came to satisfying his sexual
urges’.
Barely two days later, at dawn on 25 July 1941, Paul Ogorzow was
executed by guillotine in Plötzensee prison. He expressed no regrets.47
The Kripo report concluded that he had ‘willingly and consciously
exploited the blackout’ in carrying out his crimes. The enforced dark-
ness of wartime Berlin, it said, ‘had given him greater opportunity
for his attacks . . . and had facilitated his escapes’.48 The blackout, it
seems, had been his ablest and most accommodating accomplice.
Of course, for the majority of Berliners the perils they faced during
the blackout were much more commonplace and mundane than those
represented by the ‘S-Bahn Murderer’. But, crucially, they were no less
deadly. Deaths attributed to the blackout continued to be shockingly
high for the first two years of the war: through 1940, for instance,
thirty Berliners died, on average, every month from blackout-related
accidents. One victim for every day of the year.49
Yet, curiously, those statistics drop off sharply during 1941. Though
accidental death rates remained fairly high – with average figures in
winter of around 100 per month – the numbers attributed to the
blackout dropped to only a handful. Either the figures were being
massaged, or the Berlin public had finally come to terms with life in
the darkness.
Throughout the war, the German authorities did not relax their guard
and continued to remind Berliners of the correct application of blackout
measures. Month after month, instructions, reminders and new regu-
lations poured forth, all of which were communicated to Berliners
through public information leaflets, articles in the press, or just the
bawled orders of the air raid wardens.
The supreme irony, however, was that, just as the blackout regu-
lations were being heightened, they were becoming irrelevant.
Technological advances, such as the development of radar, would
soon supersede the rationale given for the blackout in the first place,
and render all such efforts rather superfluous. Though radar had been
in development in Britain as well as Germany for many years, the
48
berlin at war
emergence of the British ‘H2S’ apparatus provided the significant
breakthrough. With this system – which became operational in 1943
– radar was able to reveal different types of terrain on the ground
and thereby provide a crude image of the land below the aircraft.
The images were far from perfect. The Chief of Bomber Command,
Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, for instance, learned early in 1943 that ‘there
was sometimes little or no relation between the real shape of a town
and the image of it that appeared in the H2S apparatus’.50 Some
quipped that the technology’s code name (the same as the formula
for hydrogen sulphide) was coined because ‘it stinks’. Nonetheless,
H2S picked up water very well, allowing the competent navigator to
find his targets by examining the rivers, coastlines and other patterns
appearing on the small five-inch screen before him.
This technology was to have important consequences for Berlin, a
city whose extensive network of rivers and lakes made it, potentially
at least, an easy target to identify. A chart produced in the summer
of 1943 showed some of the features that an RAF navigator might
expect to see; and – ominously for Berliners – it revealed a surprising
amount of detail. The city’s rivers and lakes were clearly visible: from
the Müggelsee to the east, with the River Spree snaking towards the
city centre, to the Havel River to the west, opening into a complex
of lakes – Wannsee, Havelsee and Tegelersee – before dis appearing to
the north-west. Though the city centre was largely an indeterminate
mass of white, some more defined built-up districts, such as Potsdam,
Spandau and the industrial area of Siemensstadt, could also be easily
made out. Most importantly of all, perhaps, the city’s numerous green
spaces and parks were also visible. Not only could the airport of
Tempelhof to the south-east be seen, but even the oblong of the
Tiergarten – in the very heart of the city – was clearly defined.51 Any
one of these locations could easily be used by an attacking bomb crew
for orientation, or as an aiming point.
H2S was not the radical breakthrough in radar technology that some
have suggested.52 It was certainly useful for crews attacking in darkness
or confronted by heavy cloud cover, as it meant that the
y
were no
longer entirely dependent on the normal, visual, points of reference.
But, though an improvement on traditional night-time navigation
methods, it was vastly inferior to visual aiming. It could not lead its
crews to a particular spot, or even to a particular suburb, but it could
a deadly necessity
49
help them to find a particular city – and even, once arrived, to adequately
navigate their way around it. And in this sense at least, H2S was of
profound importance. Though they couldn’t have known it, the people
of Berlin – dutifully carrying out their blackout measures, trying to
make their city invisible from the air – were wasting their time.
Despite this, the German authorities did not relax their vigilance.
In the summer of 1944, for instance, the body responsible for such
measures, the
Reichluftschutzbund
, or ‘Reich Air Defence Corps’, was
complaining to the German press that ‘in spite of its long existence,
the blackout was still not being carried out carefully enough’. ‘This
neglect’, it went on, ‘is primarily to be attributed to idleness, thought-
lessness, even irresponsibility.’53
Such reminders fell increasingly on deaf ears, however. Despite their
conscientious compliance with the blackout legislation in the early
phase of the war, some Berliners were clearly starting to ignore the
instructions. As the Wehrmacht’s ‘mood reports’ of the final months
of the war make clear, there were many complaints that the blackout
was being imperfectly applied. As one complainant recorded:
During an air raid on 2 January [1945], one could observe how a stream
of people emerged from the bunker in Fichtestrasse in Kreuzberg;
almost all of them with brightly lit torches. It was like a torch-lit parade.
Even when the flak started firing, it did not change. The police are not
bothered by it. The same scene could be observed that same night near
the bunker in Rosenthal.54
By that time – with Berlin exposed to night and day air raids, France
and Belgium liberated, and the Soviet army poised on the River Vistula
– Nazi Germany was standing on the very edge of the abyss. It seems
reasonable to conclude that the people of Berlin had other, more
pressing worries, than the filters on their pocket torches.
3
A Guarded Optimism
After the excitement and upheaval of those first days of the war, life
soon settled down for the majority of Berlin’s population and, once
again, assumed a veneer of normality, which the conflict – initially at
least – only rarely disturbed. Despite the profound shock that most
had experienced with the outbreak of hostilities, the differences that
they witnessed to their everyday lives were, in practical terms, really
rather subtle.
Indeed, for the opening phase of the war, it appears that a conscious
effort was made in Berlin to maintain some sense of normality, with
entertainment and sporting schedules enjoying more emphasis and
interest than in peacetime. ‘You can feel the effort here to make life
as normal as possible’, wrote William Shirer that October:
Berlin today has one of the heaviest sport programs of the year. The
races at Hoppegarten will attract a big crowd this afternoon. Besides
this the following events are scheduled in Berlin alone: one track-meet,
a bicycle race between Germany and Hungary, two hockey matches,
two rugby-football games, one wrestling match, one amateur boxing
show, one weight-lifting contest, two hundred handball games and one
hundred soccer matches.1
He was not mistaken. On the orders of the ‘Reich Sport Leader’, the
gloriously named Hans von Tschammer und Osten, sporting events
were, as far as possible, to remain unaffected by the war. An inter-
national rowing regatta scheduled to take place at Berlin-Grünau in
early October went ahead as planned. The high point of the racing
calendar – the Berlin Grand Prix – was held that autumn over 2,400
metres in the Hoppegarten, with a purse of 100,000 Reichsmarks.
a guarded optimism
51
Football, as one of the most important mass sports in the Third Reich,
was not slow to follow suit. Though the regional and national cham-
pionships were temporarily suspended with the outbreak of the war,
Berlin’s football clubs embarked on a cup competition of their own,
which – appropriately for the times – was named the Danzig Cup.
Aside from sport, there was a veritable plethora of other events to
distract Berliners. That autumn, the capital’s cinemas saw a number
of highlights, such as the courtroom drama
Sensationsprozess Casilla
,
starring Heinrich George, which was intended to mock the American
way of life. Most notable, perhaps, was a film about the life of the
biologist Robert Koch starring Emil Jannings in the title role. Jannings,
who was one of Nazi Germany’s foremost stars of the silver screen,
had starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel
, and had been
the very first recipient of an Oscar for Best Actor.
Elsewhere in the capital, there was much to entertain: from
Aida
,
La Traviata
and
Il Forza del Destino
in the city’s opera houses, to variety at the Winter Gardens, and a performance of the Goethe play
Götz
von Berlichingen
at the Schiller Theatre. It is little surprise, therefore, that Shirer concluded, ‘reading the sports pages and the theatre pages
of the morning papers today, you would hardly believe there was a
war on’.2
Shirer was right, but there were many other pages that would have
left the reader in little doubt that he was living in momentous times.
All newspapers had been subjected to additional editorial requirements
with the outbreak of war, which aimed at preventing their reports
from unwittingly giving any assistance to Germany’s enemies. In prac-
tice, these rules led to some subtle but nonetheless noticeable changes.
No longer, for instance, could newspapers feature a weather forecast,
for fear that such information might aid enemy air forces. Nor was it
permitted to publish anything that would reflect negatively on the
progress of the war or the state of morale on the home front. Those
readers who wanted something beyond the boasts and platitudes of
the Propaganda Ministry had to become expert in the art of reading
between the lines.
That first autumn and winter of the war were profoundly interesting
times. It had begun with the successful conquest of Poland, a deci-
sive victory that would have been unthinkable twenty years before.
52
berlin at war
There were other successes. Much was made in the German press
that winter, for instance, of the heroic return of Günther Prien, the
commander of
U-47
, which had sunk the British battleship
Royal Oak
at anchor in Scapa Flow in October. Prien became an instant celebrity
and was awarded the Knight’s Cross, the first sailor of the Kriegsmarine
to be so honoured. Yet, Germany had not had things all her own way.
For all the back-slapping that surrounded Prien, it was also known