A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

by Scott Andrew Selby

  A once classified Allied document on the German Police explained that this office “directs the principal functions of the SD inside Germany. . . . The main task of Amt III is the collection, by open and secret methods, of information concerning all events and tendencies liable to affect the maintenance of Nazi power at home and abroad. It supervises all ‘spheres of German life’ (deutsche Lebensgebiete) and gathers intelligence for the control of all religious, cultural, and economic activities, but especially for the suppression of anti-Nazi elements.”3

  Amt IV was the Gestapo, which this Allied document on the German police explained was “mainly concerned with investigating and crushing any opposition to the Nazi regime.”4 There were few, if any, meaningful legal limits on their power. A favored method they used to detain people was to place them into protective custody. The prisoner would sign his own request to be placed into such custody. If he refused to sign it, the Gestapo would beat him until he did.

  A subdepartment of this office (RSHA Referat IV B4), run by Adolf Eichmann, dealt with Jewish affairs and evacuation. Eichmann would eventually play a major role in the planning and execution of the Holocaust.

  The Kripo formed Amt V. The Allied handbook on the German Police explained that this office, “which is also known as the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt (RKPA), is the national Headquarters of the Reichskriminalpolizei (Kripo, Criminal Police), controlling the network of criminal police offices. . . . The RKPA developed out of the old preußischen Landeskriminalamt (Prussian Criminal Police Headquarters), whose functions consisted only of the combatting of crime in the normal sense of the term. The RKPA, however, under the Nazi regime, has not only expanded the concept of ‘combating’ to include ‘prevention’ in the most ruthless sense; it also plays an important part in the investigation and prosecution of what are today called ‘political crimes,’ but would formerly have been regarded at the most as venial offences. The line dividing cases of interest to the Gestapo and those within the field of the Kripo has in many instances become rather vague.”5

  A history of the Third Reich elaborated on this blurring of lines between the Gestapo and the Kripo: “The Gestapo was clearly the dominant partner vis-à-vis the police in general, while the twelve thousand or so criminal investigators, under Arthur Nebe, began to be indistinguishable from their political colleagues.”6

  The remaining two offices dealt primarily with matters outside of Germany itself. Amt VI handled “espionage, sabotage and subversion in occupied and enemy countries.”7 The foreign intelligence agency of the SD (Ausland-SD) formed the basis of this office.

  Amt VII, added in 1940, mostly handled propaganda, specifically, “Amt VII deals mainly with occupied and satellite countries and is concerned with the preparation of political warfare material and the conduct of ideological supervision, especially in the academic field.”8

  Dr. Jens Dobler, an expert on the Berlin police during the Nazi era, discussed the potential overlap between the Gestapo and Kripo forces under this reorganization. “The Gestapo security service and the criminal investigations department (Kripo) were joined together into the Reich’s Department of Security. This definitely did not lead to a bettering of the work methods. Conversely, sometimes both the Gestapo and the Kripo were handling the same cases simultaneously. Many Kripo officers who were made into members of the Gestapo attempted to get back to the supposedly ‘un-political’ Kripo, but, of course, the Kripo were exactly as political—supposed ‘criminals,’ or minorities were deported by the Kripo into concentration camps.”9

  For Police Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke this meant that he needed to be wary of potential Gestapo interference in his case. In addition, his ultimate superiors were more concerned about making the Nazi state look good than they were with stopping a killer of women. He was fortunate that the head of the Kripo did care about the case, but there were more powerful men whose priorities lay elsewhere.

  As the head of RHSA Amt V, Arthur Nebe was in charge of the Kripo. Having been born in Berlin on November 13, 1894, he had fought in World War I. During this war, he experienced firsthand the horrors of poison gas attacks on two separate occasions. He survived however, and after the war he joined the Criminal Police in Berlin in 1920. He quickly worked his way up in the organization. By 1924, he’d achieved the rank of police commissioner. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1931. After the Nazis seized power, the Kripo was transformed several times, first into a truly national criminal police force and later by merging with the SiPo. When that happened in 1936, Nebe was placed in charge of the Kripo. He stayed in charge of it when the RHSA was formed.

  Nebe had a large nose, beady eyes, thick eyebrows, and graying hair slicked back with a part on his left. Today we might say he bore more than a passing resemblance to the actor Sir Ben Kingsley, if Kingsley still had his hair. At the time of the first murder on the S-Bahn, Nebe was forty-six years old.

  Nebe’s long history with the Berlin Kripo and his rising through the ranks translated into his caring about this case being solved through the application of proper police work. However, he too had to report to someone higher up than him, a consummate Nazi who couldn’t have cared less about a serial killer of women, as opposed to what was in the interest of the Nazi Party.

  With the creation of the RHSA, Nebe ran Office V (the Kripo) and he reported to Heydrich and Heydrich’s boss, Himmler. Over the years, Nebe grew to hate Heydrich and Himmler, and secretly plotted against them and Hitler. He was very careful to hide his hatred of his superiors, as he wanted to keep his job and his life. And so he regularly lunched with both of them, making small talk about the criminal cases of the day and pretending to like them.

  One history of the Third Reich contained this line describing Nebe’s strange role in it: “Arthur Nebe, the head of the SS Reich Criminal Police Office, a figure so morally challenging that he is virtually airbrushed out of many accounts of the resistance.”10 Nebe would go on to conspire against Hitler and to commit horrific war crimes, but at the start of Paul Ogorzow’s attacks on women riding the S-Bahn, he was busy running the Kripo.

  The Kripo detectives in this case worked out of a massive brick building informally referred to as “the Alex” in a shorthand reference to its location on Alexanderplatz. The side entrance they often used was on Dircksenstrasse 13/14.

  As for the RHSA, its official headquarters were in Berlin at Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8. The cross street was Wilhelmstrasse, the street on which many of Nazi Germany’s government buildings were located. The building is now in ruins and Prinz Albrecht Strasse has been renamed Niederkirchnerstrasse.

  It was here at Prinz Albrecht Strasse 8 that the Gestapo had their headquarters. One writer referred to it as “the most dreaded address in Nazi-occupied Europe,” owing to the well-known tendency of the Gestapo to use torture on their detainees and ultimately send many of them to their deaths.11

  It was in the midst of this complicated relationship at the top of German policing that Lüdtke reported to Nebe about the investigation into attacks on the S-Bahn. Nebe’s own office, as head of the Kripo, was located at Werderscher Markt 5/6. Nebe trusted Lüdtke and so gave him free rein over this important case.

  Lüdtke was well aware that his position was a precarious one because he lacked the connections of those around him who had joined the Nazi Party early on and formed long-lasting alliances with the party elite. And he’d lost his Kripo job once before, back in 1933, over his work with the political police against the Nazis before they’d gained power. That had not stopped him from getting his current job, but it did mean that he needed to be careful. If those above him, such as Nebe and Heydrich, thought he was not properly handling a high-profile case, he could easily be fired. Therefore, he had to do well at his job, and he could not afford to have a serial killer plague Berlin indefinitely.

  A June 1938 decree mandated that Kripo members join the SS, if they were not already in it, although it did not
require that they join the Nazi Party itself. This meant that Kripo detectives, including Lüdtke, were at the time of the S-Bahn murders members of the SS. They were given ranks in the SS roughly equivalent to their ranks in the Kripo, which caused a great deal of confusion. Many Kripo detectives had no active duties in the SS, so they were only technically members of the SS, while continuing to carry out criminal investigations. From the perspective of some in the SS, this was upsetting as it meant that while they had worked their way up in this organization, Kripo members were being granted ranks without having started at the bottom.12

  Lüdtke faced a very serious series of crimes against women on the S-Bahn that he needed to solve. And given his lack of job security, if he botched this case badly enough, he could find himself out of a job.

  He was married to the former Amalia Bautze, who was thirty-five years younger than him. She’d been born in Frankfurt, Germany, on December 25, 1921. Lüdtke had been married once before and had two daughters from that union: Gerda, who was born on February 20, 1912, and Edith, who was born on April 30, 1915.

  To relax after work, Lüdtke drank and smoked in moderation. Those were his only known vices.13 His home was in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood, at Wildenbruchstrasse 77.14

  Lüdtke had completed two winter semesters at Frankfurt University when he’d been working in Frankfurt as a policeman. He’d also taken classes at a police school. So, unlike many of his peers high up in the Kripo, he did not have a law degree, or even a university degree of any kind. Instead, much of what he’d learned came from his long years of experience as a policeman.

  He had a very distinctive physical appearance that was later described as rendering him unsuitable for surveillance work “as he has a rather outstanding physical appearance” including a “jutting jaw,” a “powerful build,” and “bushy eyebrows.”15 After the war, he was described as five feet eight inches tall, with a weight of 187 pounds. He had an oval-shaped face, brown eyes; he wore glasses; his hair was a mottled gray-white; he had a heavy build, all his teeth, and a heavy and lumbering posture.16 The overall impression that Lüdtke’s appearance created was that of an aging thug, but he was actually a rather intelligent man. The glasses helped to temper his image, as did his graying hair.

  Lüdtke faced a lot of pressure in this case, as the specter of a madman hunting the women of Berlin posed a threat to the workings of the Nazi system. The wartime economy depended on women working factory jobs, often requiring them to commute late at night or early in the morning. The regime could not afford to have them be too afraid to go to work.

  Ingeborg Heidenreich, who lived near the Karlshorst S-Bahn station at the time, explained how as a twenty-year-old woman in 1940, she was afraid to ride the train home from work. “It was so that you just didn’t trust yourself to go home alone. I also rode on the S-Bahn every day. At that time, I was working . . . and took the midnight train. I worked nights until ten and there was hardly anyone in the train. My mother thought it was important for me to take second class on the train—because of the cushions and so forth—and so no one was there. Of course I was always afraid.”17

  Ironically, she knew the killer, as he shopped at her father’s butcher shop and lived in the same neighborhood. Decades later, she still remembered him: “Ogorzow lived here with his wife and children. I didn’t know them well. I just thought of them as normal citizens—as a family man with two children, who was nice and loving to his family. That’s how I perceived him.”18 She had no clue that the mysterious killer she feared every time she rode the train was the same man she saw playing with his children and tending to his cherry trees.

  If she had ever found herself riding the S-Bahn late at night, she would have been happy to see her neighbor Paul Ogorzow. That way she could ride with a family man she knew from the neighborhood, and so feel safe from any predator who might strike on the train. She was lucky that never happened.

  Another woman who was afraid to ride the S-Bahn was then thirty-year-old Gerda Busch, who worked at a telegraph office. “People were also talking about this, so of course everyone was afraid to go home at night. Sometimes I would work till 9, 10, 12, sometimes 12:30. And then almost no one was riding on the train and everything was dark. No lights. Nothing. And people told me to always just ride in the first car of the train.”19

  Hitler spoke of this problem after Ogorzow had been caught: “Now we have the war, we have the blackout. Women workers make up the majority of the workforce. . . . To mention one example: the [blackout killer] made many women afraid to leave the factory at night for fear that something could happen to them. There is something monstrous: the man is fighting at the front while the woman cannot dare to go home!”20 Hitler was referring to Paul Ogorzow but did not use his name while doing so.21

  Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of propaganda, picked up on this issue long before Ogorzow was caught. He also realized that having a serial killer on the loose made the police, and thus the state, look weak. A totalitarian regime depends on fear to stay in power. As such, the last thing Goebbels wanted was for people to doubt that the state could apprehend them if they didn’t follow its rules. So he ordered Lüdtke to keep the fact that a serial killer plagued the S-Bahn out of the papers.

  Goebbels had the power to give this order to Lüdtke despite the fact that Goebbels was not part of his chain of command. He effectively controlled the mass media in Germany in his position as minister of propaganda. The dissemination of information to the public regarding a serial killer operating in Nazi Germany fell within his jurisdiction.

  Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, Germany. He married Magda Ritschel and eventually had six children. His right leg was deformed, for which he wore a metal brace and special shoe. Even with these items, he still had a noticeable limp. He was short and unattractive. Although he had a doctorate, he’d written his thesis on a little known nineteenth-century writer and playwright, and he himself was a frustrated novelist and playwright until he gained power in the Nazi Party.

  Among his other additional positions, he was the gauleiter of Berlin, which meant he was in charge of the Nazi Party for the political district of Berlin. In effect, this was the rough equivalent of being the leader of this area. In addition, he was the Reichsleiter (national leader) of the Nazi Party. The only higher position in the Nazi Party was held by Adolf Hitler—Führer. So when Goebbels told Lüdtke the limits on the Kripo’s ability to publicize this case, Lüdtke had to follow his directives.

  A major reason as to why Goebbels did not want news of this case spread was that he wanted to project an image of Nazi Germany, and its capital of Berlin, as a place free from such problems as the predations of a serial killer. As historian Dr. Jens Dobler explained, “In the Nazi society there weren’t supposed to be any more crimes, especially not rape-crimes. The news was blocked, which significantly aided the fact that no proper approach to cases could be established. Many details were first released after the war. You can definitely say that this block of the news had a big role in leading to the success of the S-Bahn Murderer.”22

  There was a strong utopian element to Nazi ideology, and now that they had their Third Reich, they believed that such crimes should not be happening. Or if they did, outsiders, such as gypsies, foreigners, or Jews, would the ones committing these crimes and the police would quickly capture the offenders. At this point, the police had no real idea who the killer was and whether he was an Aryan or not. And they certainly were not quick to catch him.

  There were also many in the Nazi leadership and in the Kripo who believed that crime had a strong basis in biology. While this theory incorporated the non-Aryans already hated by the Nazis, it also included Germans who came from a background of crime, who had committed a number of crimes over the years, and whose own ancestors had been criminals. Under a racial and biological theory of crime fighting, known as preventive crime fighting, the Kripo would monitor
and detain people it considered to be potential criminals.

  Arthur Nebe believed in these theories, as did his deputy, Paul Werner. Werner worked on the December 14, 1937, decree of the Reich Interior Ministry on this subject. Called “Preventive Crime Fighting by the Police,” it stated, “If a criminal or asocial person has ancestors who also led a criminal or asocial life. . . . the results of hereditary research have shown that the person’s behavior is hereditarily conditioned. Such a person must . . . be dealt with differently than a person who . . . comes from a respectable family. . . . The criminal is no longer regarded as an individual person, and his crimes are not regarded as individual crimes. Instead he is considered the descendant of a clan, and his crimes the crimes of a clan member.”23

  Nebe’s belief in preventive policing meant that many in the police force had strong preconceived notions regarding the background of a criminal, such as someone who would throw women from the train.

  Given the government’s interest in concealing the fact that they had a serial killer on the loose, who despite their theories about criminality they were unable to catch, there would be very limited press about this case.

  In practice, this meant that the regime would try to keep news of a serial killer under wraps. While the women of Berlin still learned of this case eventually, as gossip spread and they put together for themselves what these “isolated” attacks meant, Lüdtke still could not reach out to the public for the sort of help that he could have requested if he’d been allowed to make this series of attacks public.

  This blackout on press about a serial killer riding the rails in Berlin enabled Ogorzow’s attacks to continue. Perhaps even with a massive publicity blitz, he would have been able to keep killing women on the S-Bahn, but such press would have made things much harder for him, as for instance women likely would no longer have traveled alone in the second-class compartments. And perhaps tips would have come in from the public. Just as the blackout that kept Berlin dark at night to protect it from British bombers enabled Ogorzow to attack women in the dark and get away with it, so too did he benefit from the press blackout.