At the Karlshorst station, Ogorzow saw that there was already a female passenger sitting in the second-class train compartment. She was alone. He boarded the train, and it was just the two of them in this section as the train started to move.
With every assault Ogorzow committed on the S-Bahn, he became more confident in his actions. This translated into less and less hesitation before his attacks, as well as the increasing use of overwhelming force at the start of each attack. This evolution in Ogorzow’s assaults was the result of a combination of overcoming any internal barriers to using violence, such as societal norms and fear of being caught, and learning from past mistakes to become a more efficient criminal. Whereas before he first made small talk or waited a station or two before taking action, now he struck right away, as soon as the train was under way.
Like with many things in life, the more he did these attacks, the more comfortable he became with them. As with his early days as a Brownshirt, when he first took part in pitched street battles against Communists and other rivals to the Nazis, he grew desensitized to using violence. After the Nazis had seized power, when Ogorzow and his fellow Storm Troopers beat up German Jews and destroyed their property as part of Kristallnacht, he shed any inhibitions he may have had against attacking innocent civilians who wanted no part of his violence.
Ogorzow didn’t want to risk losing this opportunity, in the event that the female passenger left at the next station or someone else entered the train’s second-class section. And he knew that his time was limited. Once he attacked, he felt that he needed to throw his victim from the train before it reached the next station.
The passenger was Elfriede Franke, a twenty-six-year-old nurse wearing her uniform. The attack was as vicious as it was sudden. Ogorzow pulled the iron rod out of his jacket sleeve and went over to Franke. Without saying anything, he hit her hard over the head with it.
He’d learned from his last attack. When he’d hit Elizabeth Bendorf a month ago, he had not used enough force to achieve his goal of incapacitating her. Instead, she had managed to fight back against him, despite multiple blows to her head. This time he made sure that he did not make the same mistake.
The blow came down so hard on Elfriede Franke that it shattered her skull and damaged her brain. She fell down onto the train’s floor. She was dead.
Even with the speed and effectiveness of his attack, there still was not much time for Ogorzow to enjoy this moment. He never had much time with his victims on the train, as the interval between stations was so short. He would have liked to have more time, but this was a drawback he accepted as the cost of using the S-Bahn for his attacks.
He set down his weapon and walked over to the compartment door to open it. Unlike with his last attack, this time when he turned around and returned to his victim there were no surprises.
He had dragged his last victim by her feet to the open door. There’s no reason to believe that he did things any differently this time. Staring out into the darkness of blacked out Berlin with the cold winter wind rushing over him, he felt excited.
He experienced a kind of cocaine-like high—a feeling of being all-powerful—as he threw Elfriede Franke’s body into the night. Although this moment felt amazing to him, he needed to return to the real world, starting with the mundane task of pulling the handle to close the door when he was done.
As wonderful as he felt, there still was an element of frustration. He was not able to commit a rape on the train, as there was never enough time. Even here, where he had acted right away and killed his victim with a single blow, he still was not able to sexually assault her corpse. Over the course of his many attacks, when it came to sexually assaulting a woman, he did not seem to care one way or the other if she was alive, dying, or recently deceased.
He never left a victim on the train to be there when it arrived at the next station. The first time the reason for this was his fear of being caught. Since then, he’d learned that he also enjoyed dumping the bodies out of the train, so it now served two purposes—protecting him and the pleasure of the act itself.
He’d tried to kill on the S-Bahn twice before and failed. But now, in the early hours of Wednesday, December 4, 1940, Paul Ogorzow had committed his first successful S-Bahn murder.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Examining the Body
Just three hours after Ogorzow murdered Elfriede Franke, the police stood around her dead body. They were next to the train tracks between the Karlshorst and Rummelsburg S-Bahn stations. It was still nighttime, and the heavy-duty lamps the detectives used to light up the crime scene provided the only visible illumination in a city otherwise cloaked in darkness. The light gleamed off the gold bracelet still on the victim’s wrist. Her pocketbook was nearby. There had been no robbery. The only thing stolen from her was her life.
Although the blackout was still in effect, the police were able to use their discretion in lighting up this scene. If they heard an air raid warning, they would instantly spring into action and cut all the lights they were using.
Dr. Waldemar Weimann, the well-known forensic pathologist, thought it was an air raid siren when a driver for the Kripo woke him in the middle of the night to come to this crime scene. Once he arrived, the Kripo asked him to examine the body where it was found along the railroad tracks. He was able to estimate the rough time of death, but the detective on the scene wanted more information from Dr. Weimann than he was able to provide.
After looking over Elfriede Franke’s corpse, Dr. Weimann wrote in his memoirs that he was asked about the cause of death as follows:
“Death by a blow or just by the fall?” asked Detective Zach, who was standing beside me at the accident site.
“Do you have maybe an X-ray machine with you?” I replied angrily.
“After all, I would be grateful if I could have your finding today,” said Zach. . . . [Zach] seemed to detect my reluctance [to do a postmortem that quickly]. He pulled me aside and said, ‘This is the third case of this kind . . . on this route.’”1
This was the first time Dr. Weimann had heard anything about this situation. Zach explained to him that two women had been thrown from the S-Bahn before and had remarkably managed to survive, one by landing in sand and the other living to talk to police despite sustaining major damage to her body.
There was more. The detective told the doctor that the first victim had strangulation marks on her neck, while the second said she’d been hit on the head. As an expert in forensic medicine, the doctor was curious what other evidence the police had beyond the second woman’s word that a man had hit her. Detective Zach said that in addition to injuries related to being thrown from a train, a doctor was able to find evidence of a blow from a tool of some sort.
As Dr. Weimann recalled, he then asked, “Who was this medical examiner?”2
The response was a surprise: “Well, you yourself, doctor.”3
In thinking back, it made sense to him. Dr. Weimann wrote, “First, I was angry, I remembered those ominous radiographs. They had been sent to me one day out of the Reich Criminal Police Office ‘with a request for expert opinion.’ Otherwise unspecified were the Who, When, Where, How and Why—the golden ‘W’s of the coroner. I had to the best of my expertise and knowledge expressed the judgment of: ‘Flawless skull and skull base rupture by impact on a flat surface. In addition, localized fractures, possibly by impact with a blunt object.’”4
Dr. Weimann was a curious man, and the first question that popped into his mind after realizing that he’d already consulted on the related attack, under mysterious circumstances, was “Why the secrecy?”5
Detective Zach told him that it was because Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of propaganda, wanted this kept quiet. For Dr. Weimann, this answer made perfect sense and required no follow-up questions. He was well aware that Nazi Germany was a country in which the flow of information was tightly controlled by the government.
The doctor was thinking about what could motivate a man to throw women off the train, given that he was not stealing anything from them. He asked about it being a sexual offense, but the detective told him that the first two victims said that nothing of that sort had happened. Besides, they could see for themselves that Elfriede Franke still had all her clothes on and they were not disturbed any more than one would expect from such a terrible fall. There was nothing to suggest that any of these women had been molested.
Dr. Weimann left the crime scene to accompany the body as it was driven to the morgue.
What neither Dr. Weimann nor the police realized at the time was that the doctor had already examined a third woman, Gertrude Ditter, killed by the same perpetrator who attacked Elizabeth Bendorf and Elfriede Franke. They would not make that connection for a while to come, as Mrs. Ditter was found in her home in the garden area and had been killed with a knife, as opposed to being hit on the head and thrown off an S-Bahn train.
Dr. Waldemar Weimann was also a psychiatrist, and as this case developed, he would provide the police with assistance in understanding the possible motive and thinking of the man who did these crimes. Weimann was born in Cologne, Germany, on November 3, 1893, which meant that he was forty-seven years old when Ogorzow killed Elfriede Franke on the S-Bahn.
He looked the part of a serious man of science. Dr. Weimann’s ears stuck out, and his thin, dark hair was receding. In later years, it would turn white. He had a large nose, a small chin, and dark eyes. While working, he wore a white lab coat, dress shirt, and tie.
In 1930, Dr. Weimann founded the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Berlin and became its first director. He also served as the chief medical examiner for Berlin. He later wrote of the murders committed by Paul Ogorzow, “From the myriad of large cases that I worked there, one stands out, which is one of the most interesting in criminal history.”6
Dr. Weimann was arguably one of the best known and respected forensic pathologists in Nazi Germany. He’d dealt with high-profile cases before, including examining the body of the Nazi martyr SA Sturmführer Horst Wessel following his murder in February 1930. After his death, the Nazis made a song he wrote the lyrics to called “The Horst Wessel Song” their official party anthem and unofficially the co-national-anthem of Germany. The song is now banned for most uses in Germany and Austria.
At the morgue, Dr. Weimann learned that Elfriede Franke’s killer had hit his victim with a blunt instrument before throwing her from the train. However, Dr. Weimann was not able to determine exactly what the weapon was.
As Detective Zach had confided in Dr. Weimann, the police had immediately put together that the individual who killed this woman was most likely the same one who had previously thrown two other women from S-Bahn trains.
So Detective Zach visited Dr. Weimann in the morgue and brought with him the heavy piece of lead cable that the police had recovered from the S-Bahn second-class train compartment after the attack on Elizabeth Bendorf. This was the same cable that Ogorzow had also used on Julie Schuhmacher.
As Dr. Weimann recalled, the detective displayed the lead object and asked:
“Could it have been something like that?” asked Detective Zach and hands me a piece of heavy lead wire, about two thumbs thick and fifty centimeters long.
“Quite possibly,” I said.7
The doctor could not be certain that the same type of weapon had been used in this latest attack, but it was at least consistent with the newer findings. In fact, it was a different sort of blunt metal object that had been used—an iron rebar rod, not a piece of lead-encased telephone cable.
The police had not yet connected the S-Bahn assaults with the earlier attacks in the garden area. Besides the different locations, the garden attacks involved a very different modus operandi than Ogorzow used on the train—choking and stabbing versus hitting with a blunt object and throwing from a train.
Then, as now, police considered the nature of a violent crime and grouped together victims who had been attacked in a similar way. Women harassed while walking home or stabbed or strangled at their home were not seen as being in the same category of criminal offenses as women hit with a blunt object while on the S-Bahn and then thrown from the train. Also, the garden attacks often had an obvious sexual assault component, while the attacks on the train did not.
These two different areas and kinds of attack were considered by the police to be separate matters. For the time being, Paul Ogorzow had this going in his favor.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Kripo
Now that someone had died, the S-Bahn attacks became a high-priority case, assigned to the office of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Kripo in Berlin. This office was primarily concerned with capital offenses such as homicide.
Elfriede Franke was the first person killed on the S-Bahn by Paul Ogorzow. Before her, two women had been thrown out of the moving train with only minor injuries. Franke’s death changed the case and bolstered the credibility of the first two victims, so the police now felt certain that they were telling the truth and a stranger had thrown them from the train for no reason of which they were aware.
The head of this Kripo unit, Police Commissioner Wilhelm K. Lüdtke, took charge of the investigation on the same day as Franke’s murder, December 4, 1940. He was then fifty-four years old.
Lüdtke held his position despite his lack of Nazi convictions. He was not even a party member until April 1, 1940, which was unusual for someone at his high level in the police hierarchy. He did not join out of political belief, but for practical reasons.
He’d joined the party exactly eight years to the day after Paul Ogorzow had. As a result of Lüdtke joining so late, he had a high party number of 8,015,159. As a point of comparison, Ogorzow’s party number was almost seven million members lower at 1,109,672.
As of September 1939, the Kripo was part of the RHSA, which was short for the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). Heinrich Himmler, a very powerful Nazi official, was the chief of the German Police (Chef der Deutschen Polizei) and the head of the SS (Reichsführer-SS).
Theoretically, in regards to his running the German Police, Himmler should have reported to the Reich minister of the interior (Wilhelm Frick), but as a practical matter, his only real boss was Hitler himself. A once classified Allied document on the German Police explained: “As Commander in Chief of the SS, however, HIMMLER was directly responsible to HITLER alone, the Supreme Commander of the SS, and was, therefore, in a position to circumvent the authority of FRICK, the Minister of the Interior.”1
Under the dictatorship that was Nazi Germany, Hitler had absolute power and reported to no one. His decisions were final.
Himmler formed the RHSA by merging various police and security organizations into one entity directly under his control. In essence, he took the intelligence agency of the SS (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD) and combined it with the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or SiPo). The SiPo included the Criminal Police (Kripo) and the Gestapo. With the reorganization of German police forces into the RHSA, the SiPo no longer existed as an actual organization, but people continued to use the term informally to refer to those portions of the RHSA that used to belong to the SiPo.
A notable exception to the gathering of police forces into the RHSA was the Orpo, the ordinary police. Himmler ultimately controlled them as well, but through a different administrative structure. He had a trusted underling who ran the Orpo: chief of the Ordnungspolizei Kurt Dalüge. A historian described Dalüge as “a vast thug of a man nicknamed ‘Dummi-Dummi’ by his detractors.”2
Himmler looked like a bookish bureaucrat, with his wire frame glasses, round face, and small mustache. He did not look particularly Aryan—Himmler had hazel eyes and receding brown hair. Moreover, he was terrible at sports and suffered from a variety of minor health problems.
Himmler was born in Mun
ich on October 7, 1900, and had studied agriculture in college. He was a failed chicken farmer in the mid to late 1920s. He’d joined the Nazi Party early on, in 1923, with a low card number of 14,303. He later joined the SS (Schutzstaffel) with the extremely low number of 168. It was in this organization that he rapidly rose in rank. Later on, he became one of the key architects of the Holocaust, responsible for the murder of millions of people.
To run the RHSA, Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich as its director. Heydrich had run the Gestapo before this reorganization and been a part of the purge of SA leaders known as the Night of the Long Knives. He was a key architect of Kristallnacht, and later of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads on the Eastern Front) and the Holocaust.
Heydrich was a handsome young man, born on March 7, 1904, in Halle an der Saale, Germany. He had an oval-shaped face, with a high forehead and close-cropped blond hair. Unlike Himmler, he fit the Aryan ideal of being tall, skinny, athletic, good-looking, blue-eyed, and blond. He was also a ruthless believer in the Nazi cause and a mass murderer many times over. His nicknames included the Blond Beast, the Hangman, and the Butcher of Prague.
As director of the RHSA, Heydrich presided over seven administrative divisions, known in German as Ämter, which can be translated as “offices.” The first office (Amt I) dealt with personnel. The second division dealt with organization, administration, and law. So both of these can be understood as dealing with administrative matters for the RHSA.
Amt III was responsible for “spheres of German life,” which included German culture, ethnic Germans inside conquered territory, and intelligence gathering within Germany. The domestic office of the SD (Inland-SD) formed the core of this new department.
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