If a member of the SS were riding the S-Bahn and throwing German women off the train, toward what he believed to be their deaths, then Lüdtke could be in for a hard time. It was one thing for him to question civilians working for the state railroad company, and quite another to cast aspersions on members of the SS.
Going after the SS would be a major problem for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that the director of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, reported directly to the head of the SS (Reichsführer-SS) Heinrich Himmler. Heydrich and Himmler were close; Heydrich was widely considered one of Himmler’s most trusted aides.
Lüdtke realized that the best approach for now would be to put the SS issue on the side and focus in on the railroad. He flooded the S-Bahn late at night with decoys, using men in drag that in the darkness of the blackout a killer could mistake for lone women. Other police would travel in the adjacent compartment as backup, so that if they heard a struggle, they could rush in to assist. The idea was that these men would not need immediate backup in the same way that a female police officer would, the big difference being that these men would be carrying guns, while the female police Lüdtke had used before did not.
Young, skinny men who might pass for women in the dark were called to this highly unusual duty. A photo taken at the time showed a group of these policemen dressed as women. They looked ridiculous. All of them wore tall leather boots that ended just below the knees. They had on leather gloves, maybe to fit in with the winter clothes worn by real women, or perhaps to conceal their manly hands and spare them the indignity of putting on nail polish. Common accessories included knotted head scarves, wide-brimmed hats, and brooches. One policeman had a fur stole around his neck, while the others had silk scarves. These were attempts to conceal their large Adam’s apples.
They were all clean-shaven and wore a dark, possibly red lipstick. Some might pass as women in a poorly lit environment. Others would appear to be men if there were any light to expose them at all. Unfortunately for these cross-dressing policemen, there was some light on the S-Bahn trains even during the blackout, although the platforms themselves were shrouded in darkness.
Male agents dressed as women were an unusual occurrence in Nazi Germany, a country whose government persecuted those it identified as homosexual.
Their target, Ogorzow, knew of these police actions, so he did not fall for them. As mentioned previously, he had two main sources of information about the police investigation—one, as a railroad employee he heard gossip about activities on the train, and two, as an active member of the paramilitary SA, he had friends in the police force who mentioned this use of decoys.
The police primarily rode the rails late at night, as most of Ogorzow’s prior attacks had been around midnight. Ogorzow simply adapted to this fact and began attacking during the early morning hours, while it was still dark.
Early on Sunday, December 22, 1940, Ogorzow searched on the S-Bahn for a woman traveling alone that he could attack. Sometime before seven in the morning, he found her. The sun would not rise that day until 9:15 A.M., so there was little light out.1
Thirty-year-old Mrs. Elisabeth Büngener was riding the S-Bahn to see her husband. He was a military recruit in a town near Berlin called Fürstenwalde. Christmas was only days away and she wanted to see him before the holiday.
Germans celebrated Christmas Eve the way Americans did Christmas morning. So for her, it was only two days until the holiday during which she normally would exchange presents and eat a large meal with her relatives.
In the second-class compartment of the train, the only passengers were Ogorzow and Büngener as the train pulled out of the station at Friedrichshagen. If someone else had happened to travel second-class as well, Mrs. Büngener would have been safe. But with just the two of them in this section of the train, Ogorzow felt comfortable attacking her.
He stuck to his modus operandi on the train—he hit her on the head with a blunt object, and while she was out of it, he pulled the train door open, felt the wind blow on his face, and then dragged her body to the door. She was still alive.
He then felt the rush that came with throwing a woman off the S-Bahn while it was in motion. She tumbled off into the night between the Friedrichshagen and Rahnsdorf stations. He threw her things off after her, as he always did. The train was still in motion, so these items landed a good distance from her.
This marked his first attack in the early morning hours of a Sunday. It was a time to which he would soon return. It was still dark in the early morning, so he could take advantage of the blackout while avoiding the heavy police presence that evening now brought to this part of the S-Bahn. Moreover, the trains tended to be relatively empty early on Sundays as many people had that day off from work and were still asleep at home. Fewer people on the train meant there was more of a chance that Ogorzow would be able to find a woman traveling alone.
Five hours later, around noon, workers for the railroad stumbled across Mrs. Büngener. By then, she had died from her injuries. The workers had to be careful as she was lying near the third rail, which had 750 volts of direct current flowing through it to power the S-Bahn trains. As such, it posed a serious electroshock hazard. These workers contacted the police immediately.
At first, the police thought that this was a suicide, given that such events were common right before Christmas, and the victim had on her person a piece of paper that declared her psychologically unfit to work. This note was an attestation from a doctor.
Upon examination of the area around her body, however, investigators found her belongings approximately one thousand feet down the railway. It was not possible for her to throw herself off the train to commit suicide and then somehow throw her belongings afterward. Someone had to have tossed them out of the moving train.
If Mrs. Büngener had committed suicide and someone had been in the same train compartment, the police wondered why they would throw her stuff away, rather than leave it on the train or keep it. There was tobacco, which was a valuable commodity during this time of wartime rationing and shortages. There was also money.
Paul Ogorzow never stole from his victims. Perhaps he felt bad about what he had done and wanted nothing to do with their bodies once he had finished attacking and sexually assaulting them. He had a good working-class job, but he was not so well off that the money in his victim’s handbags would have meant nothing to him. If he had taken their money and valuables, it would have had the added benefit, from his perspective, of possibly leading the police astray as to his motive. They might have then believed that someone was throwing women from the train not out of a sexualized compulsion, but for the far more mundane reason of wanting to rob them. The violence might then be seen as an attempt to avoid having a witness that could go to the police.
So if he had stolen from his victims, not only would Ogorzow have been able to spend his victims’ money and smoke their tobacco, but the police might have been wasting time looking into muggers and purse snatchers instead of a more productive path of investigation.
Unlike some other serial killers, Paul Ogorzow never kept souvenirs or trophies of his kills. He never took anything from them, even something of no economic value, such as a torn bit of clothing or lock of hair. He did not take anything from the scene of his crimes either, like a bit of dirt or foliage from one of his garden area attacks. Nor did he revisit crime scenes to relive the memories of his attacks. He returned to the same general area to hunt again, but he did not return to the exact locations of his past crimes.
It would have been better for the police if he had taken souvenirs. If he had taken, say, an item of clothing from each victim, it would not have confused the police as to motive, but it would have given them something concrete to search for when they finally did have a suspect. Distinctive souvenirs mean that the police will someday have an easy case if they find this collection in the possession of the killer.
Given the discovery of the victim’s tossed out belongings, it was clear to the police on the scene that this was no suicide, despite the doctor’s note about Mrs. Büngener’s mental state.
This meant that it was a case for the Kripo, which quickly linked it to the other women attacked on the S-Bahn.
Lüdtke came down to the scene and examined the body as best he could without moving it. His initial thought was that the attacker had choked Mrs. Büngener by grabbing her neck and then thrown her still-living body off the train. While her body remained lying on the side of the tracks, it was hard to tell what injuries she had sustained from the attack on the train and what damage had come from the fall off the train.
Dr. Weimann arrived at the scene after Lüdtke. Weimann took a look at Mrs. Büngener’s body and was able to determine that she had been hit in the head. Lüdtke’s initial thought that she had been choked was wrong. Dr. Weimann determined that she died from injuries to her skull and internal damage to her body caused by the fall from the train. All of this suggested to both men that this was the work of the S-Bahn Murderer, as the man who attacked women on the train had come to be called.
Furthermore, the police speculated that the change in this criminal’s time of attack from late at night to the early morning suggested that he was aware of the hours that the police monitored the trains. Lüdtke mentioned that the S-Bahn night shift had ended at six that morning. This fact, he reasoned, might explain the timing of this attack.
Regardless of the reason for this change in the killer’s pattern, it meant the police needed to stretch their resources even thinner to cover this time on the train as well as the late night shifts they had focused on until now.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Attacks Continue
Wilhelm Lüdtke had the two women who survived attacks on the S-Bahn look through photos of thousands of S-Bahn workers. These were Gerda Kargoll and Elizabeth Bendorf. They did not recognize anyone. He also ordered his officers to monitor the S-Bahn and use decoys not just at night, but also in the early morning hours. This used a great deal of manpower, but he felt that he had to do this given that the latest attack had occurred in the morning.
During the early morning hours of Sunday, December 29, 1940, Paul Ogorzow again took to the S-Bahn to hunt for a victim. He had the same iron bar hidden inside his uniform’s jacket sleeve so he was ready to strike when he had the opportunity. Near the Karlshorst S-Bahn station, he had his chance when it was just a female passenger and him traveling in the second-class train compartment. Her name was Mrs. Gertrud Siewert and she was forty-six years old.
Ogorzow released his iron rod from where he was concealing it inside his jacket sleeve. He then walked over to Mrs. Siewert, raised the iron rod up high, and brought it down hard on her head. He was now careful to conduct his attacks in such a way that his victim had no idea what was coming until she felt the blow to her head, or at most saw it coming a split second beforehand. Either way, she was unable to defend herself. And by now Ogorzow had become skilled at hitting women in the head with blunt metal objects, so one hit would be enough to stun if not kill them. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect.
With this hit to Mrs. Siewert’s head, she went limp. Ogorzow thought she was dead. As in other attacks, he did not take the time to actually check if she had a pulse, was breathing, or had any other sign of life.
He opened the train door and dragged her body over. The dim illumination on the train meant that only a small amount of light bled out into the night. With this bit of backlighting, Ogorzow savored this moment as he felt his victim’s body and then hurled it out onto the side of the railroad tracks.
He had thrown Mrs. Siewert off the moving train around six-twenty in the morning. It was about three hours before sunrise. Although Ogorzow believed he had been handling a corpse, Mrs. Siewert was still alive. She’d survived Ogorzow’s blow to her head. She even survived the fall from the train, but just barely.
That morning, Mrs. Siewert was found alive on the side of the train tracks between the Karlshorst and Rummelsburg stations. The police also located her belongings strewn along the railway. As in prior S-Bahn attacks, they’d been thrown out after her.
The authorities rushed her to the hospital for medical attention. She arrived there alive but died later that day. While the fall from the train caused serious injuries to her bones, Dr. Weimann ruled that the initial blow to the head was the cause of her death. This was the third murder on the S-Bahn. Including the attempted murders, Mrs. Siewert was the fifth woman to be attacked and thrown from the train so far. It was also the second time that the killer had struck on a Sunday morning.
Paul Ogorzow felt the overwhelming urge to kill again soon. It is common that serial killers accelerate like this and have less and less time between attacks. It was only a week later, on Sunday, January 5, 1941, that he returned to riding the S-Bahn looking for a woman traveling alone.
During the early morning hours, he found twenty-seven-year-old Mrs. Hedwig Ebauer. She was five months pregnant, although Ogorzow would later claim that he had not noticed this detail in the darkened conditions on board the train. This time Ogorzow did not have a weapon with him, such as the lead cable or iron bar he’d used in previous attacks. He used his hands to choke her with a strong grip around her neck. Mrs. Ebauer fought back though. She damaged her hands with her punches to Ogorzow. He reacted by punching and kicking her. Despite her struggling against him, Ogorzow succeeded in choking her into unconsciousness.
He opened the train door and felt the rush of cold winter wind as he looked out into the darkness of a blacked out Berlin. He then dragged Mrs. Ebauer’s inanimate body to this opening and threw her from the train while it was in motion between stations.
That morning Mrs. Ebauer was found, still alive, by the side of the train tracks near the Wuhlheide S-Bahn station. Like Ogorzow’s prior victim, she arrived at the hospital alive but died there that same day. She never regained consciousness. Her death was determined to be the result of head injuries sustained during her fall from the train, and not from Ogorzow’s attack on her while they were on board. That she had not died from the actual attack on the train, unlike some of Ogorzow’s victims, was probably the result of his not hitting her with a weapon but instead using his hands and feet to attack her.
This was Ogorzow’s third attack in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Based on their knowledge of the train system, when and where Ebauer was found, and the fact that the killer appeared to exclusively attack in the second-class section, the police were able to determine in which train compartment she had probably been attacked. They came to the conclusion that the assault had likely occurred in train compartment number 6439.
For a moment, it seemed like this could be a promising lead. Perhaps there would be evidence in this compartment that would lead the police to the killer. Once the detectives made this determination, they quickly tried to track down this train compartment.
When the detectives located the compartment and entered it for an inspection, they were bitterly disappointed. It had been cleaned since the attack. This meant that any evidence the killer might have left behind had been destroyed.
The body count on the S-Bahn was adding up. Including his latest victim, Hedwig Ebauer, Paul Ogorzow had now attacked six women while riding the S-Bahn, killing four of them. This figure did not include those women he had attacked on the ground.
By now, many Berliners had heard rumors that a killer of women rode the S-Bahn during the blackout hours. Even without Lüdtke making a public announcement that a serial killer prowled the trains, word leaked out eventually.
Lüdtke pushed hard to be allowed to publicize this case in order to obtain tips that might enable him to find the murderer. He wanted to make a radio announcement of the case and its associated reward, to reach out to the people of Berlin. Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels refused his
request.
Goebbels used films, radio programs, speeches, posters, newspapers, magazines, and more to spread the messages that he considered to be in the Nazi Party’s best interest. Stories that he believed made the Reich look bad, such as that the German Police could not stop a serial killer from murdering women in the heart of the Reich, went nowhere.
While Lüdtke did not get from Goebbels the kind of press exposure for this case that he wanted, he did get something. Goebbels approved the use of up to two thousand flyers announcing a reward. Lüdtke wanted permission to print more information sheets, as this seemed a small number to him. In response to this request, Goebbels told Lüdtke no.
Somehow, Lüdtke eventually managed to get an article on this case placed in a Berlin newspaper called Das 12 Uhr Blatt (the 12 O’Clock Journal). On January 7, 1941, this paper ran an article with the headline “Attacks on the S-Bahn” and the subtitle “Who knows the criminal?” The article explained the case as follows:
For some time, a man has been making trouble on the S-Bahn line between Rummelsburg and Erkner—he has tried in different ways to attack women who use the S-Bahn and throw them out of the trains. Repeatedly, he has abused women with rough physical violence. Mainly, women have been endangered who were riding alone in the second class. Up to now, the criminal has not stolen anything from the victims.
He is described as follows: 1.6–1.65 meters tall, medium-strength physique, drooping shoulders, a forward-inclined head, and a sloppy gait. He was wearing a dark coat—maybe a shunter’s coat, as used by the railway—and a cap belonging to a railroad employee, which he wore pulled down.
A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin Page 15