A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

by Scott Andrew Selby

  The possibility must be considered that not all crimes committed by this criminal have been made known to the police. All fellow Germans who may have already made useful observations or may continue to do so on the aforementioned S-Bahn line, or who know a man similar to the afore-described individual, are being asked to immediately report to the criminal investigations department in Berlin, Alexanderplatz, Dircksenstraße 13/14—room 902, phone number 51 00 23, extensions 699 or 738—or with any other police department.1

  While this article did give specifics on what was known about the perpetrator of these crimes and included speculation that his uniform was, in fact, a railroad uniform, it was light on the gruesome details of his crimes. It also omitted specifics such as the names of his victims or even how many of them there had been. Still, this was a rare bit of press that Lüdtke hoped would result in useful leads that would enable him to solve this case.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Volunteer Duty

  On Tuesday, January 28, 1941, Lüdtke distributed a document to the police working for him to catch the S-Bahn Murderer. It let them know that his attempts to get approval from Goebbels for a radio announcement related to this case had failed. As a consolation, he stated that approval had been granted to use the resources of local party organizations as needed to try to catch this killer.

  Manfred Woge, a now elderly resident of the garden area near the S-Bahn tracks where Paul Ogorzow attacked women, recalled that even as a ten-year-old boy he knew that there was a killer of women hunting in the garden area. “There was a general uneasiness among the people here—especially, of course, among women. Everywhere there were rumors about what actually was happening—where the man was coming from, where he was always headed. This area was full of trees—everything was shadowy . . . dark . . . narrow alleys . . . little lighting . . . blackouts because of the war. A person could really hide himself very easily.”1

  Although news of a serial killer on the loose, attacking women on a train, would dominate the news in a society with a free press, here there was only minimal coverage that Lüdtke managed to obtain despite Goebbels’s express orders not to publicize the case, except in very limited ways.

  Rumors, however, had spread, down to the level of even ten-year-old boys like Manfred Woge.

  Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke pushed hard with Joseph Goebbels to be allowed to do more to involve and protect the public. The killings appeared to be escalating, as the perpetrator had gone from around a month and a half between murders to a week. The police were well aware that acceleration was common with such offenders, and they found it worrisome. Unless they caught this offender soon, he would kill again.

  While Joseph Goebbels got in the way of this investigation by limiting press coverage of it, he did try to protect the women of Berlin through another office he held in the Third Reich. In his capacity as gauleiter of Berlin, Goebbels organized a program for unaccompanied women to be able to travel with a trusted man during their nighttime commute.

  Not just any man would be used for this job; the call for volunteers was not made to the public at large. It was not even made broadly to Aryan men without criminal records. The only people that Goebbels trusted to protect women traveling alone at night were party members and Brownshirts (as SA members were informally called). Goebbels’s decree on this matter referred to this volunteer task as a service of honor.

  Ironically, Paul Ogorzow volunteered for this program of traveling with women on the train and then walking them home. His activities in the SA qualified him as a trusted German in the eyes of the authorities, and so he was eligible to be a part of this endeavor. Because records were kept for this program, Ogorzow could not attack these women and get away with it. As Lüdtke later wrote, Ogorzow accompanied women, “of course without harassing them in the slightest way.”2

  Although he could not safely use this program as a way to find victims to attack, it did provide him with certain benefits. Being a part of this volunteer duty would help him blend into the background of the case and look like someone the police should trust. A second benefit was that by being part of this group, he might be privy to information from the police and gossip with his fellow volunteers about the investigation into his crimes.

  On Tuesday, February 11, 1941, Ogorzow spent the early evening accompanying women who would otherwise have been riding the S-Bahn alone. Unlike all the other volunteers, he had no fear that the S-Bahn Murderer might attack while he rode the train protecting a lone woman. It must have been a bizarre feeling for him to be a part of a program protecting women from himself.

  He would go out at night on a volunteer shift and have to pretend that he was keeping an eye out for the killer. Riding the train and walking a woman home from the S-Bahn station in the dark of the blackout, he would need to look around to make sure it was safe. If he seemed too casual and not at all concerned, as if he were protecting a woman from a threat that did not exist, he risked her saying something to the police or the organizers of this service. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to become suspicious of him.

  The women that he walked home at night had no clue that they were accompanied by the very killer they feared.

  Just in case he did have the opportunity to use it, he often carried his iron bar with him. He wouldn’t use it on one of the women he was assigned to protect, though. He was well aware that if he were to do so, then the police would quickly catch him.

  If he came across an opportunity that night to attack a woman who was not assigned to him, then he could use his hidden iron bar without this same fear of being caught. So while was he was serving volunteer duty protecting women, he brought with him this weapon that he’d used to kill before. It must have been frustrating for him to feel the weight of the iron bar while alone with a woman and yet know that he could not safely use it to attack her.

  Odds were that he would be arrested within a day of such an attack. Someone would find the body and alert the police. The police would then look into the woman’s movements and find that that she had used this volunteer program and been assigned to Mr. Paul Ogorzow. Although he was a party member in good standing, a family man, and an employee with a good work record, he would have a tough time convincing the police that he was not the killer. And even if the police believed it possible that he’d delivered the woman safely to her desired destination and someone else had killed her, they would still look at Paul Ogorzow very closely and maybe find evidence tying him to his other crimes.

  As strong as the desire was in Ogorzow to attack and kill women, he was able to control it. So he never attacked when he thought it was too dangerous, no matter how much he may have wanted to do so.

  His volunteer shift ended without incident at ten on the night of February 11. Afterward, he was waiting on the platform of the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station, which was the same station that Lüdtke had earlier deduced to be a central location for the killer, when a woman came up to him.

  Thirty-nine-year-old Mrs. Johanna Voigt was a mother of three and was three months pregnant. She was worried about the S-Bahn Murderer, so when she looked around the platform and saw Paul Ogorzow, she walked over and asked him if he would be willing to accompany her on the train to the Karlshorst station. This was a spontaneous request by Mrs. Voigt and not part of the organized accompaniment program. She either trusted Ogorzow because of his uniform, or did not understand that she needed to check in with someone to be a part of the volunteer program authorized by Goebbels.

  So no one knew that she was with Ogorzow. Unlike the women he’d accompanied earlier that night as a volunteer, if something happened to Mrs. Voigt, he would not be a suspect.

  From Ogorzow’s perspective, a wasted night suddenly had potential. And he was ready to take advantage of this opportunity. He told Mrs. Voigt that he would ride the train with her to Karlshorst, which was only one station away.

  Once the train arrived, they entere
d the empty second-class compartment together. As the train left, Ogorzow pulled the iron bar he’d used in prior attacks out from his jacket sleeve. He needed to attack now, as Mrs. Voigt was only riding the train to the next station. Ogorzow slammed the iron rod down hard on Mrs. Voigt’s head. He didn’t want to take any chances that she might still be able to function despite this blow, and so he quickly hit her again and again.

  Sometime during this attack, she lost consciousness. Paul Ogorzow now opened the train door and dragged her body to it. With the train still in motion, and the wind blowing past him into the compartment, he threw Mrs. Voigt’s body off the train.

  Although Mrs. Voigt had been alive when Ogorzow threw her from the train, she did not survive long afterward. By the time she was found she was dead. Dr. Weimann concluded that she’d died as a result of a combination of the blows to her head from a blunt object and injuries resulting from being thrown from a moving train. Of course, her three-month-old fetus did not survive either. This was the second pregnant woman that Ogorzow had killed on the train.

  While the police did not find any clues on Mrs. Voigt’s body, Kripo commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke did notice the absence of something. As he later wrote, “It was striking that in several cases the ticket of the victim was missing. It was concluded that the offender, in order to approach his victims quietly, may have been known as a ticket inspector.”3

  The police were thinking that the killer might be a ticket inspector or merely be pretending to be one. They believed that the S-Bahn Murderer might have used this as an excuse to approach women on the train without scaring them. These missing tickets could have been evidence of that, or it could be that some of his victims had boarded the train without tickets, or that their tickets had been lost in the struggle on the train and the ensuing tumult when their attacker threw them and then their belongings off the moving train.

  In the case of Mrs. Voigt, the police were wrong. Paul Ogorzow had not approached her. She had approached him, and it had nothing to do with her ticket. Although Lüdtke’s theory made sense given the absence of a ticket in some of the cases, he was mostly wrong. Paul Ogorzow had not needed to pretend to be a ticket inspector when approaching women on the train. Instead, he had used his uniform to reassure them while they were alone and then suddenly attacked them.

  He had discussed tickets with Gerda Kargoll when she accidentally traveled past her destination. Also, he had invited her and later Elizabeth Bendorf to ride in a second-class compartment even though they had tickets for third class. But he had not impersonated a ticket inspector in either case.

  All the police work to date and the creation of a volunteer service to accompany women home had not been enough to prevent Mrs. Voigt’s violent death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Push to Catch the Killer

  With the murder of another woman on the S-Bahn (Mrs. Voigt), the pressure on the police to catch the S-Bahn Murderer increased. Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich all wanted this case closed. And so Arthur Nebe, as head of the Kripo, was well aware that it was a priority to stop these killings. And he in turn pushed Lüdtke to stop this killer before he threw another woman from the train.

  As part of this effort, the police regularly visited the Rummelsburg and Karlshorst S-Bahn stations in the hopes of finding the killer there. They also rode the rails, often while wearing the uniforms of regular S-Bahn staff.

  Given that the police had little to go on to catch their killer, other than a general description that could fit a huge percentage of the male population and the possibility that he worked for the railroad company, Lüdtke thought that their best hope lay in catching the killer in the act. As this was an important case, he was able to use a large amount of manpower to pursue the S-Bahn Murderer.

  In addition to deploying men to train stations, Lüdtke orchestrated massive roundups of train riders at key times. Ogorzow had established a recent pattern of attacking women during the early morning hours of Sunday on a single S-Bahn route. So around six in the morning on a Sunday, Lüdtke had his detectives and large numbers of uniformed police round up everyone riding the train and waiting on the platforms on this route. This took hundreds of policemen, as all eight stations that Lüdtke focused on needed to be checked simultaneously. The S-Bahn was halted at the platform and the police went through and checked for any signs of foul play and anyone that they found to be suspicious. They also looked for men carrying weapons, especially the heavy blunt instruments that their suspect favored.

  Nothing of substance resulted from this search, other than a bunch of inconvenienced train passengers and tired policemen. Lüdtke tried a second time the following Sunday, and then again a third time, on another Sunday. Each time took a few hundred police officers and shut down a huge part of this subway line. The police found only minor offenders who did not interest the Kripo investigators. Despite these carefully planned searches of train riders, Lüdtke failed to locate his killer among the Sunday morning riders on this stretch of the S-Bahn.

  In addition, Lüdtke obtained permission from higher-ups to place a newspaper article that gave more details on this case and the latest attack of February 11, on Mrs. Voigt. On February 14, Valentine’s Day, 1941, the German newspaper Der Westen ran an article about the S-Bahn Murderer:

  WOMEN THROWN OUT OF S-BAHN TRAINS

  Four Dead to Date—

  Who Knows the Criminal?—

  13,000 Mark Reward

  As was made known by the press at the beginning of January, since late-autumn 1940, there has been an unknown man causing trouble on the S-Bahn line between Rummelsburg and Erkner, mostly near the Karlshorst area; he has attacked lone women and thrown them out of moving trains. Four of these women have died from their injuries. Mostly, women have been endangered who were riding alone in the second class. To date, the criminal has committed the crimes in the late evening or early morning, as well as on Sunday mornings.

  On the 11th of February, 1941, shortly after 10 P.M., the body of . . . Mrs. Johanna Voigt of Berlin-Friedrichshagen, Friedrichs Straße 37, was found about in the middle of the Rummelsburg-Erkner line between Rummelsburg and Karlshorst, lying right next to the S-Bahn tracks. On this same line, about 300 meters from the place of her discovery and about 50 meters from one another, a woman’s hat and an empty market bag, as well as a bundle of lingerie, and a wash cloth wrapped in cellophane were found. Near the body, there was a glove; the other was missing.

  The woman was most likely also thrown out of a moving S-Bahn train. According to the external circumstances, the incident must be related to the aforementioned ones, which have occurred on this line since last autumn and resulted in death for lone women.

  The motives out of which the criminal is acting are not yet known. Despite an emphatic manhunt, he has not yet been identified. However, because he must be rendered harmless—in order to prevent future events—all German people are being asked to help in his capture. Every piece of information, even things which seem unimportant, could be decisive in solving this crime. All news which leads to the identification or capture of the criminal will be rewarded with 13,000 RM. The reward is only for people from the public and not for officials whose job it is to solve punishable deeds. The deployment of the money will follow the conclusion of the legal process.

  Women traveling alone, namely those who use the second class, are being urgently asked to continue being careful. Description of the criminal: 1.60 to 1.67 meters tall, middle-physique, shoulders and head tending forward, sloppy (slouchy) gait, wrinkled face. Clothing: dark coat, and presumably a railway employee’s cap. There is also the possibility that the criminal was wearing a railway-employee uniform or a similar uniform.

  Answers to the following questions are of special importance:

  a. Who knows a person who fits the above description? (It might be that the criminal is now wearing civilian clothing)

  b. Which pe
ople are illegally wearing railway or similar uniforms (dismissed/laid-off railway employees etc.)?

  c. Who saw the above-described man on the line [meaning Rummelsburg-Erkner]– in particular, when and where?

  d. Who has been harassed in the last few months by a man on the named railway line who did not report this to the police?

  Written or verbal news, which will be handled completely confidentially if desired, is being accepted by the criminal commissioner’s office M I, 2 in the police headquarters, Alexanderplatz, entrance Dircksenstraße 13/14, room 902, phone number 51 00 23, extensions 699 and 738. However, also all other police headquarters are able to accept notifications with reference to these announcements.1

  As highlighted by this article, the already very substantial reward of ten thousand reichsmarks had gone up to thirteen thousand reichsmarks. This was in addition to the thousand-reichsmark reward still unclaimed for leading the police to Mrs. Gertrude Ditter’s killer.

  With the high amount of money on offer, it’s not surprising that the police received a large number of tips from the public, despite the many limits the police faced in publicizing these rewards. In all, the police received about fifteen hundred tips. Investigating these possible leads would use a tremendous amount of manpower.

  Ironically, the police publicizing the fact that the killer struck in the second-class compartments may have worked in Ogorzow’s favor. The more aware the public was of the dangers of riding in second-class during the blackout, the fewer people would do so. While this would protect those travelers who changed their plans from traveling second class to riding in third class, it meant that second-class compartments would be even emptier. Ogorzow only struck when second class was empty of everyone other than his female victim and himself.