A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

by Scott Andrew Selby

  With these two attacks in quick succession, Lüdtke had seen the possibility of a connection between the attacks on the train, the very recent attack on Irmgard Freese near a train station, and the attacks on women in the garden area.

  He had also made another key connection. Lüdtke had been on the scene at Mrs. Ditter’s death, so he explained that case to Dr. Weimann as well. Geographically, it was in the same garden area as the attacks on women detailed in his map, but the pattern was different, as it took place inside the victim’s home and not on the dark trails of the garden colony.

  Mrs. Ditter’s case had grown cold, but connecting it with the other attacks could give the police a new take on their investigation.

  Dr. Weimann was not yet convinced that this was the same man, especially when they looked at the map and took into account the activity on the S-Bahn and where the lead telephone cable originally came from. It all seemed too spread apart to him.

  Now Lüdtke shared the one small detail that would change Dr. Weimann’s mind: “One fact makes me suspicious,” the commissioner said, “Since the first woman was thrown from the train, [the police] have not heard of any more attacks in the garden area.”8

  This all made sense to Dr. Weimann. He knew how sexual attackers escalated over time, so it made sense to him that an offender would start by flashing a light on women walking in the dark and eventually graduate to rape and murder.

  Now that Wilhelm Lüdtke had confirmation from an expert that he was onto something, he put his detectives to work learning more about the garden attacks and Mrs. Ditter’s murder. Assuming that the same attacker was behind these crimes and the S-Bahn attacks, the police now believed that the train killings had some kind of sexual motive behind them.

  Dr. Weimann was concerned that if this was the work of one man, then the short interval between the recent attacks suggested that the high the killer felt from attacking women was wearing off more rapidly, so he needed to kill more often. In this respect, Dr. Weimann viewed a serial killer in much the same way as a drug addict, as someone who needs more and more of a given stimulus in order to experience the same high he did when he started this activity.

  One of the first things the police did on December 4, after having found two bodies, was to put up posters in S-Bahn stations with details of the murder of Elfriede Franke. The posters called for anyone with information to talk to the police. They did not mention the other murders. The police were treating this call for information as something limited to a single, discrete crime.

  The police were torn because they wanted to ask the public for information, which might provide useful leads, but they did not want to alarm people with the news that a serial killer was on the loose. Nor did they want to advertise that the Nazi state was unable to protect the women of Berlin while their men were out fighting on the front.

  Paul Ogorzow read the poster, which included a generous reward offer of ten thousand reichsmarks. This was a large amount of money. For comparison, a single reichsmark would buy five third-class S-Bahn tickets good for one-way trips in the city center fare zone. Another way to understand how much money this was is to consider the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Ditter had bought their garden house for a mere one hundred and fifty reichsmarks.

  After seeing this poster, Ogorzow worried that the police were going to all this effort to try to catch him. He was well aware that ten thousand reichsmarks was a lot of money. Although he had no accomplices and he had not confided in anyone about his crimes, it still concerned him that someone might have noticed something about him worth reporting to the police. In addition, the reward meant that the police considered catching him a high priority and would not skimp on resources when trying to solve the murder and the attempted murders that he’d committed on the train.

  He was relieved, though, to find that the police had a vague description of him that lacked any specific detail that would single him out from the masses of other men in Berlin it could describe. From the information contained in the reward posters, they did not appear close to catching him. So while these posters and the high reward they announced worried him, this was not enough to frighten him into giving him up his murderous ways.

  Meanwhile, Lüdtke ordered that a new kind of suspect be pursued. He had his men look through crime reports for incidents where a man aged somewhere between his mid-twenties and his forties (there was no need in Nazi Germany to focus on the white part) violently attacked women in Berlin and sexually assaulted them. His theory was that this criminal would have started with assaults, then progressed to rapes, and only now escalated to murders.

  The only crimes that this approach discovered were two sets that he was already considering—the man who had committed a number of attacks on women in the garden areas of a Berlin suburb and the man throwing women from the S-Bahn. Both men were in the same age range, wore a uniform during their attacks, and were known to use blunt objects to hit their victims on the head.

  The garden attacker took advantage of the blackout to approach women alone in the dark and often assaulted them from behind so they could not later identify him. Only two of the garden victims were able to give a description of their assailant—they both said that he was wearing a uniform that appeared to be consistent with a railroad uniform. Although the garden attacker mostly choked his victims or hit them with a blunt instrument, he had occasionally used a knife, which the police did not see in the S-Bahn cases.

  The rail tracks between two S-Bahn stations—Rummelsburg and the similarly named, adjacent stop of Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg—bordered the south of the garden area. The Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg station, however, was not accessible to the public. It had been opened in March 1902, but only for the use of railroad personnel. There was a large workshop nearby it run by the Reichsbahn, and so they occasionally used this station. This stop would only be made available to passengers on the S-Bahn starting on January 5, 1948.9

  All the garden attacks took place within walking distance of these stations, and these stations were also along the route that the S-Bahn Murderer used for his attacks, which further suggested to the police that there could be a connection between the attacks.

  However, the police were far from certain about this connection. Lüdtke still had some doubts that same man would engage in attacks on both the train and on the ground at almost the same time. These back-to-back criminal offenses struck him as highly unusual.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Wrong Kind of Suspect

  Thinking about who might be carrying out these attacks did not take place in an ahistorical vacuum. Instead, the police were influenced by the beliefs of the Nazi Party. The racist ideology of Nazism suggested that the perpetrator was likely to be a non-Aryan.

  Jews, of course, were the great scapegoats of the Third Reich, and so there was some speculation that it could be a man of Jewish heritage behind these attacks. There were still German Jews in Berlin. They had not yet been sent to concentration camps to be murdered.

  Despite the racist depictions of Jewish people in the omnipresent Nazi propaganda, it was not yet possible simply to look at a man and tell if he was Jewish. But Jews could be identified by their paperwork, and later the German government forced them to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing.

  If someone of Jewish descent were committing these crimes, then the victims would likely have noticed that their attacker was particularly skinny. Jews received much worse food rations than non-Jews and so were unlikely to fit the limited description that the police had of the man committing murders on the S-Bahn.

  There was another major problem in considering Jewish suspects. In Berlin, there was a curfew of 8 P.M. for Jews. It had started in September 1939, so if someone Jewish was committing these crimes, he was doing so while violating the curfew. This seemed unlikely, especially as the police presence on and around the S-Bahn had increased in the wake of the attacks, making it v
irtually impossible for someone Jewish not to get arrested for a curfew violation. Ironically, the very restrictions placed on Jewish people protected them from being likely suspects in these crimes.

  Jewish people were forced to work in menial jobs in Berlin, including jobs related to the S-Bahn. As a book on Jews in Nazi Berlin explained, “In May 1939 all Jewish men in Germany between 18 and 55 and all women between 18 and 50 were ordered to register for labor deployment with the appropriate department of their respective Jewish Communities. Eyewitness reports confirm that Jews were consistently deployed in work alien to their own profession. Doctors, lawyers, writers, and academics were often forced to perform the dirtiest tasks: trash collection, toilet cleaning for the Reich Railways, clearing snow in winter, cleaning jobs in the chemical and textile industries, and so forth. Or they were relegated to physically exhausting tasks such as quarrying and construction work or to strenuous and monotonous jobs in the metal and electrical industries.”1

  So one avenue of investigation was to look at any Jewish people who worked for the railway, which at this point in time would mean a low-level menial laborer, such as a cleaner. However, the police did not find anyone within this labor pool that they believed to be a viable suspect.

  If the Kripo were merely looking for a scapegoat, all they needed to do was pick up a German Jew and frame him for it. Perhaps one who worked cleaning toilets at S-Bahn stations. But it was important to Lüdtke to catch the actual killer. Besides, the perpetrator of these crimes would probably kill again, and that would make the police look bad if they already had someone in custody for the crimes.

  The idea also took root that the attacker could be a foreign spy trying to sabotage the Reich. Gossip spread among the police that the perpetrator was working for the British to undermine morale in Berlin. It was true that women were growing afraid to ride the S-Bahn to and from their factory jobs, and these factory jobs were essential to the German war effort. Also, this theory was built on the idea that men who’d left Berlin as part of the military would grow upset when they learned of the attacks and would wish to return home, where they could protect their female loved ones. As such, these crimes would hurt morale among soldiers from Berlin.

  Other police officers leaned toward the theory that the attacker was a foreign laborer. Even though it did not explain how the perpetrator spoke perfect German or had a uniform, this angle was carefully investigated. One possibility was that the attacker knew German, despite being a foreigner, or knew a little German and so could fake his way through the language for limited interactions. In many, though not all, of the attacks, the perpetrator did not speak at all. As for the uniform, in this scenario, perhaps a foreign laborer had stolen one or made a fake uniform that looked real enough in the dark.

  Citizens of conquered countries, such as Poland, were forced to work in factories in Berlin. The German authorities investigating the S-Bahn killings paid particular attention to slave laborers from Eastern Europe, as they believed them to be racially inferior to Aryans. And so the police looked into whether anyone from the labor camps could have been unaccounted for during the time of the attacks. They also took a careful look at any non-Jew not of Aryan descent working for the railroad.

  This suspicion toward foreigners posed a problem for the authorities. Foreign laborers formed an essential part of Germany’s war effort, and a growing fear of them on the part of Berliners could potentially disrupt the important work they did. Although Germany fought this war in the name of creating more living space for pure Aryans, it ironically decided to import large numbers of foreign laborers into Germany to do the work that the war required. German men were already mobilized to fight, and women were increasingly doing factory work as well.

  The technology of the time required large amounts of manual labor to move earth and work machines. There was a wide spectrum of foreign laborers who did such tasks, ranging from those imprisoned in camps, who were worked to death, to those who came from countries allied with Germany and had many more freedoms.

  The investigation was necessarily limited to those workers who were not imprisoned and who had access to the trains. Many laborers had curfews and were not allowed to ride on public transportation such as the S-Bahn. Others lived in barracks or similar group accommodations that enabled the authorities to keep track of their comings and goings.

  These racially motivated approaches to solving these crimes did not lead anywhere. While these lines of detection did waste police resources, they did not stop the investigation from going forward, and Lüdtke stayed focused on other ways to try to catch the killer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Rummelsburg S-Bahn Station

  While the police investigated the garden assaults to see if they were connected with the attacks on the S-Bahn, they also took another look at the October 4, 1940, murder of Mrs. Gertrude “Gerda” Ditter.

  Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke realized that if the garden attacker and the train killer were the same person, he might also have killed Mrs. Ditter. And since this murder had occurred between the first two attacks on the S-Bahn, before the third one, which marked the first actual murder on the train, then Mrs. Ditter would have been the perpetrator’s first homicide.

  The murder took place inside of a house, which varied from the garden attacker’s usual pattern of assaulting women outdoors. So the police were not even certain that the garden attacker and the killer of Mrs. Ditter were one and the same, let alone that this same man was the S-Bahn Murderer. Even so, they decided to take a second look at her case.

  They had no witnesses to the attack on Mrs. Ditter, but they did have survivors of attacks in the garden area. Lüdtke put the information he had about the garden area attacks together with what he knew about the S-Bahn attacks. The eyewitness descriptions of the attacker roughly matched up, but these were so vague that they fit a huge number of the men in Berlin. Given the darkness of the blackout, the descriptions provided to the police did little to help. The witnesses didn’t notice any distinctive marks, such as tattoos or scars.

  While Ogorzow had neither of these, he did have an improperly set broken nose that resulted in an oversized right nostril. No one had noticed this yet, at least no one who had lived to describe her attacker. His ears stuck out a bit, and his hair was thin, but these details too went unnoticed in the confusion of the attacks and the darkness of the blackout.

  All the police had to go on in terms of a physical description from the garden attacks was an age range of thirty to forty, but even that had to be considered rough, as it was hard to tell someone’s age in the dark. So his age could have easily been twenty-five or forty-five for all the police knew. As to height, the police had descriptions of around five feet four inches to five feet six inches.

  A major difference between the description of the attacker in the garden area and the description by the S-Bahn victims was that on the S-Bahn the perpetrator always had on a uniform, while only two of the many victims in the garden area reported that their harasser was wearing a uniform. And these were two of the most low-level incidents, where Ogorzow had flashed a light at women to startle them during the blackout and yelled crude things. All the other attacks in the garden area so far had involved a man who appeared to be wearing civilian clothing. Again, given the darkness, Ogorzow could have been wearing his uniform during many of these attacks and his victims did not notice it.

  So while it was a breakthrough that Lüdtke made a connection between these two different areas of attack, the S-Bahn and the garden area, including the killing of Mrs. Ditter, for now it added little actionable intelligence to his operation to catch this killer.

  The fact that none of the attacks happened on the U-Bahn provided the police with a possible clue as to the attacker’s identity. Different companies ran the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn. So this might mean that the killer had a connection to the company that ran the S-Bahn, the National Railroad. Of course, the p
olice could not be certain of this. There could be other reasons why the killer chose to use the S-Bahn for these attacks.

  The police were able to narrow down the killer’s hunting ground even more because it was only along one part of a single S-Bahn route. He preyed on women in otherwise empty second-class carriages between the Rummelsburg and Friedrichshagen stations. Back then, this line was called Schlesische Bahn. Two experts on the S-Bahn explained that it had this name “as it was the suburban line near the main line to the former part of Germany called Schlesien. From 1930 on all lines had internal ‘names,’ that were not shown to the public. For example after reconstruction of the route to Erkner it got the internal name ‘train group E.’”1 The Schlesische Bahn is still in use today. After the reunification of Germany, it was named S3.

  Lüdtke realized this was the route for him to monitor. He posted at least one officer at all times on each of eight stations along this line. He started with Rummelsburg followed by Karlshorst, Wuhlheide, Köpenick, Hirschgarten, and Friedrichshagen. He then went a bit beyond the killer’s normal route to include two additional stations past Friedrichshagen. These were Rahnsdorf and Wilhelmshagen. (These eight stations did not include Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg as that station was not then open to the public.)

  The detectives that Lüdtke placed on the train stations wore railroad uniforms so people would assume that the company that ran the S-Bahn employed them and they were not police officers. Detectives also worked ticket booths at S-Bahn stations while wearing Reichsbahn uniforms. While checking people’s tickets, they would try to observe if there was anything suspicious about a passenger that suggested he might be their suspect.

  However, this got the police nowhere. Without a decent description of the suspect, they could not hope to find him just by looking at train riders.