Mrs. Ditter was twenty years old with two young children. Her husband, Arthur Ditter, was away in the military. With so many men away fighting, it had become easier for someone like Paul Ogorzow, who was still in Berlin, to find married women who were willing to have an affair.
Ogorzow visited Mrs. Ditter for the first time that night, and she let him into her home at Kolonie Gutland II, path 5a, number 33. Each house in the garden area had an address of Kolonie Gutland I or II, then a path number and letter, and finally a house number.
They started off talking. It began as a casual encounter, the sort of prelude before two people who barely know each other commence an affair. It was a small house and they were in the kitchen, while Mrs. Ditter’s two small children were sleeping in the living room.
Ogorzow wanted to keep Mrs. Ditter comfortable with his presence until he was ready to attack, so he was careful not to say anything that might alarm her. The last thing he wanted was for her to figure out that something was wrong before he began his assault.
Just as with some of his train attacks, there was an abrupt shift in their interaction when Ogorzow decided that now was the time he would strike. The switch between normal behavior and killer was a fast one for him. It was a conscious decision, made when he felt that it was safe for him to attack. He had complete control over this moment, when he crossed the line from the acceptable to the criminal.
Without any warning, Ogorzow abruptly ended their conversation with a violent attack on Mrs. Ditter’s person.
He began this attack by grabbing her with both of his hands wrapped around her slender neck. He squeezed so hard that he fractured her hyoid bone. “The hyoid bone forms part of the axial skeleton and two characteristics make it unusual (for a bone): it is a single U-shaped bone that does not have a partner, and it does not articulate with any other bone,” a textbook on forensic biology explained. “It is found in the anterior region of the neck between the mandibles and the larynx and its function is to act as a sling to support the tongue and for some of the neck and pharynx muscles. Damage to the hyoid bone, especially one or both of the horns of the ‘U,’ is a characteristic sign of manual strangulation.”1
In cases with only skeletal remains, a broken hyoid bone is a strong indicator that the person was strangled. It is hard to break it otherwise.
Despite this serious injury, Mrs. Ditter was still alive. Paul Ogorzow kept one hand on her neck, to hold her steady, while removing his other hand. He used his free hand to take a knife out of his pocket and then stabbed her in the neck. His knife cut severed her left carotid artery and she quickly bled out. As she died, she became Ogorzow’s first murder victim.
Ogorzow then fled the scene. He walked out the front door. None of Mrs. Ditter’s neighbors saw him leave her place. This was not surprising given the darkness of the blackout and the fact that most people were asleep at this time. He walked through the garden area until he reached the suburban neighborhood where he lived. Ogorzow reached his apartment on Dorotheastrasse 24, where his family was likely already fast asleep. His wife and small children had no idea that he had just crossed an invisible line by killing someone.
The timing of Mrs. Ditter’s murder was quite strange as it coincided with a very turbulent period in her life. The authorities believed that she led what they considered to be an inefficient life, and they had planned to remove her two small children from her care and place them in an orphanage. They had previously warned her about this possibility.
This was the work of the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt), known by the acronym of NSV. This was a social welfare organization created by the Nazi Party. Among its various responsibilities was child welfare.
The man responsible for carrying out this order, Konrad Braun, arrived at Mrs. Ditter’s house around noon on October 4. No one answered his knocks, and he discovered that the door to the front garden area of her home was unlocked. He let himself in, and then found that the door to the house itself was also unlocked. He then entered Mrs. Ditter’s home and walked around, looking for her.
With the conditions of the blackout, it was hard to see inside the house. Windows that had been blocked to prevent light from going out also stopped light from coming in.
In the kitchen, Braun lit a match to better see, and discovered Ditter’s body. It was immediately apparent to him that Gertrude Ditter (maiden name Barth) was deceased. Her long black hair was tucked behind her neck, exposing the bruises on it. She had a scarf on, but it hung loose on her so it covered her collarbone, not her neck area. She was wearing a dark-colored loose dress or nightgown with thigh-high stockings held up by a garter belt. Mrs. Ditter was not wearing shoes.
Her body was propped up where she had died, with the clutter in the small kitchen working to keep her vertical. Her right foot was under a small table while her head was stuck between this table and a kitchen container. Her right hand lay on top of a bench.
The children themselves were fine. They were found in the living room of the tiny home. One was in his cot, while the other was in a stroller.
Braun then contacted the local police to report his grizzly discovery. When the uniformed officers arrived, they briefly considered the possibility of suicide, given that Mrs. Ditter was found dead on the very day that the government was to take away her children and that they saw no signs of defensive wounds on her body.
Suicide fell under the jurisdiction of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, known as Orpo), who handled relatively lower-level police matters. These were mostly uniformed police, whose distinctive green uniforms resulted in their nickname—the Green Police. They included administrative police who often did not need to wear uniforms—they did the kind of work for which many other countries used civilian workers.
However, people do not normally commit suicide by manually strangling themselves and then stabbing themselves in the neck. So the police on the scene quickly decided it was likely a homicide.
With it being a homicide, the Orpo referred the case to the Berlin Kripo’s homicide squad at about a quarter past three that afternoon. And so the Kripo promptly took over responsibility for this case from the Orpo, who had the case for only a few hours. If it had been a suicide or an accident, the Orpo would have handled this matter on its own. There was a clear hierarchy between these two groups, with the Kripo above the Orpo in status, power, and responsibility.
Criminal Commissioner Zach now headed the investigation. At this point, it was a routine murder case. Just as in contemporary America, detectives wore plain clothes, not uniforms. One of the main differences between their dress and that of contemporary detectives was that they generally wore hats outdoors, as that was the custom of the time.
As they did not have uniforms, these detectives needed a way to quickly reveal their authority to take over a crime scene such as Mrs. Ditter’s house. For this purpose, they had warrant discs. An expert wrote that these “were die struck, exactly like a coin, and were of very high quality. The police agency identification number assigned to each officer was hand-punched into the space provided on the reverse side of the disc.”2 The side with the number said, “Staatliche Kriminalpolizei” for State Criminal Police and the front side had the German imperial eagle clutching a swastika encircled by a wreath.
The disc itself had a hole punched in it so it could be kept on a chain, secured to the detective’s belt like a skateboarder’s wallet. While the police had identification cards, they were not supposed to be used in circumstances such as these, when flashing one’s warrant disc was the way to gain entry to a house. A warrant disc functioned in much the same way as a police shield or badge does today.
In investigating this case, the Kripo detectives observed, “Immediately nearby the deceased—namely, under her right hand on the ground—there was a kitchen-knife with the blade under a dirty cloth. Whether this knife was the one used in the
murder is not yet clear. Fingerprints have not yet been found on the knife.”3
They sent the knife to be tested for fingerprints and to determine whether it was the murder weapon. The Forensic Institute of the Security Police at the Office of the Reich Criminal Investigations Department examined this kitchen knife carefully, with all the latest scientific tests.
After a thorough investigation, they determined, “Human blood was not able to be detected on the kitchen knife. Additionally, no other meat or fat remnants were found on the knife. Beyond that, it can be explained with certainty that this knife cannot be considered as the murder weapon. This fact is especially evidenced by the detail that the fine layer of mold on the handle and blade was intact, which could not have been the case if this knife had been used in the last few days. Further, there was a dark crumb, about four millimeters long, stuck firmly to the point of the knife, which had nothing to do with blood, but was rather made up of plant-root, sand, and seeds. A little clump at the back handle end was also only made up of sandy soil and small bits of plants. Red areas on the back of the knife turned out to be rust; here, also small specimens of little feathers were found which are not from chicken or duck.”4
The murder weapon was not found on the scene at all. It was a knife that Ogorzow had brought to the scene of the crime and taken with him when he left. So there was no weapon for the police to examine.
Dr. Dolgner, based nearby in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, examined the body before it was moved. He declared Mrs. Ditter officially dead. His preliminary examination revealed the cause of death to be a stab wound on her left carotid artery.
The Kripo arranged for Mrs. Ditter’s body to be delivered to Dr. Waldemar Weimann so that he could conduct an autopsy.
Dr. Weimann dictated a transcript of his findings. He observed signs of asphyxiation, including hemorrhaging marks in the eyes. He did a thorough check of Mrs. Ditter’s fingers, hands, arms, and legs and found no signs of defensive wounds. This lack of defensive wounds, in an attack that involved a knife, suggested that the victim knew her killer. The totality of evidence suggested to Dr. Weimann that Mrs. Ditter invited her attacker into her home and he then strangled her with his hands before he attacked her with a knife. So that by the time the knife was part of the attack, she was not able to defend herself.
Given the lack of defensive wounds, the Kripo had someone they very much wanted to question. Then, as now, the first suspect when a woman was murdered was often her husband. He was in the German army, which had him stationed in Potsdam at the time of the murder. The distance between there and Berlin was only about thirty miles, but the husband was not free to come and go from his barracks.
The police worked very fast to locate him, however, and find out precisely where he had been during this crime. They arrived at Arthur Ditter’s barracks just hours after his wife’s body was discovered. The police were locking him into a timeline and a history of his relationship with his wife before her body was even cold.
The police interrogated him and then typed up a very detailed five-page statement with all the information that he had provided them about his now deceased wife, Gerda, and his whereabouts for all times between when she was last seen alive and when her body was discovered by Konrad Braun. Arthur Ditter signed this document, as did Kripo Detective Zach.
Mr. Ditter gave the police his work and educational history in addition to background on his relationship with his wife. They’d met as kids at school, and their mothers in turn had also been school friends. When Gertrude turned sixteen, their relationship became a romantic one. Gertrude’s mother did not approve of this relationship, as she wanted her daughter to marry a government official and believed that Arthur’s prospects in life were not great. A big part of this, according to Arthur’s mother, was that Arthur was not a German citizen.
The complicated change in control of territory in Europe in the early twentieth century resulted in Arthur’s father being considered a Czech citizen. This was a huge problem for Gertrude’s mother.
Arthur’s mother, confusingly named Gertrud Ditter, the same name as his deceased wife except without the “e” at the end of her first name, explained this citizenship issue to the Kripo detectives: “Because my husband was born an Austrian; his home town fell in 1919 to the former Czechoslovakia and, through this, my husband became a Czech citizen. Gerda’s mother did not want her daughter to marry a Czech man. My husband and I wrote to the Führer that he was born German and, therewith, Arthur became a citizen.”5
By the Führer, she meant Adolf Hitler. Presumably someone in his office handled this matter and it never rose to Hitler’s personal attention. Many Germans wrote to Hitler personally, expecting that he could handle matters for them. In this case, it worked.
The young couple married in November 1938 and had two children, a daughter named Helga and a son named Wolfgang. When Ogorzow murdered Mrs. Ditter, Helga was around four months old and Wolfgang was a bit over a year and a half old.
Mr. and Mrs. Ditter had purchased their garden house in Kolonie Gutland II for one hundred and fifty reichsmarks. The associated fees for this place, what Germans call rent and Americans call maintenance fees, were sixteen reichsmarks a year. This was very little money—Mr. Ditter made much more than this in a single week.
As Mr. Ditter explained, it was his wife’s decision to continue to live in this garden house: “I gave my wages almost exclusively to my wife so that she could keep herself busy. I kept almost nothing for myself because I neither drink nor smoke. Recently, when I was employed as a track shifter, I was giving my wife about forty-five reichsmarks a week. She was frugal and was able to make do with this amount of money. However, she almost always told others that she didn’t have any money. That was a habit of hers. But she always had groceries in storage. I always got along well with my wife. There were never serious arguments. It only happened two times in our marriage that we bickered—because I blamed her for not being tidy enough or watching the children enough. My wife waved it off and said she couldn’t manage the work—it was too much. I always wanted to move into a real apartment. My wife was against this, though. She wanted to save that rent money.”6
If they had moved to a proper apartment, instead of the small colony house, perhaps Gertrude Ditter would not have suffered this terrible fate.
The German army had drafted Mr. Ditter into military service. He told the detectives that this meant he had no free time during which he could have visited his wife in Berlin: “During my military service, I haven’t had a single vacation. I was only allowed to leave once by myself, and that was to go to the dentist. Later, other comrades drove me to the dentist. The last time I was there was at the end of September 1940. Otherwise, I haven’t left the barracks except for performing military duties. Also, I was not in Berlin in the last few days. During my time as a soldier, I have only been in Berlin once, and that was to the parade for the Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano. But that was still at the end of the last month. I didn’t get to see any relatives at that time.”7
Arthur Ditter informed the Kripo of all of his recent activities: “Yesterday, I was working until about 5 P.M. I was shooting. After returning from shooting, I ate lunch and then received the command to report by the gunnery sergeant. The sergeant told me secretively that my wife had died and that I had vacation until Sunday evening at 10 P.M. The day before yesterday, on Thursday the third of October 1940, I had service in the barracks. We had shooting. At 5 P.M., we were finished with shooting—that means we had to clean the guns until 6 P.M. After this, I had to write a resume. The company leader made me do this. Then, I had to tidy my things, clean my uniform, boots, etc., and I went to bed at about 8:30 or 8:45 P.M. At 9:00 P.M. is curfew. Surely I did not leave the barracks on these days or in the evening. My comrades from barrack room 94a can attest to this.”8
The police were able to verify the information that he gave them, and so Arthur Ditter was
quickly cleared as a suspect.
Mr. Ditter did provide detectives with some additional information. He didn’t know who would do this to his wife, but he mentioned a dispute with his neighbor, Hermann Herlitz of garden house number 32. This was over the pigeons that Mrs. Ditter kept at their property. She also had hens and rabbits, but the pigeons were the basis of this dispute. While Mr. Herlitz, like many of the people who lived in this colony area back then, also had animals, it was the noise of the pigeons that upset him.
Mr. Ditter alleged that Mr. Herlitz picked similar fights with a large number of neighbors over petty, neighborly disputes. There was nothing to indicate that Mr. Herlitz had used violence in any of these altercations though.
The police still investigated him and interviewed mutual neighbors of his and the Ditters’, but that line of investigation went nowhere. They also talked to Mr. Herlitz’s girlfriend of five years, Auguste Bohm, and she explained the dispute over the pigeons. This turned out to not be much of a dispute, as besides a few harsh words over it by Mr. Herlitz, nothing had happened. As for Auguste Bohm, she expressed her displeasure at Gertrude Ditter’s pigeons by not greeting Mrs. Ditter when she saw her in the streets.
Auguste Bohm provided an alibi for Herlitz. Bohm said to the police, “When Herlitz came home as usual on this Thursday evening, shortly before 6 P.M., he first ate something and then got feed for our animals. He was not away for more than an hour. When he came back, it was still light outside. After this, he didn’t leave our property. We went to bed really early, as is usual in recent times. It was probably about 8 P.M. Herlitz hardly left our bedroom during the night—I would have noticed. When he gets up in the night, I almost always hear it. The next morning, he went to work as usual. Even then he couldn’t have gone to Ditter’s garden house because he went in the direction of path 5a towards Triftweg.”9
A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin Page 7