When brought in by the police, this woman admitted to the affair. Ogorzow now had a credible explanation for ditching work and lying to the police about it, but he still had two problems. One was his demonstrated ability to leave work without being caught, which meant that he could no longer use his job as a meaningful alibi. If it had been just this, the police would have let him go. Lacking an alibi was not enough, even in Nazi Germany, for the Kripo to close the case. Besides, with thousands of railroad workers interviewed, there were bound to be some who did not have alibis for key times.
The second, and much more pressing problem for Ogorzow, was that the police lab found blood on his uniform. While the police were interviewing him, they had sent his uniform for a rush examination by the lab.
A microscope was needed to see this blood, so Ogorzow had not been aware that it had stained his uniform—both his jacket and his pants. A particularly incriminating, and disgusting, detail was that a large amount of blood was found in and around the crotch area of his pants, especially the zipper region. He’d already cleaned up anything that he could see himself, but there was enough blood remaining for the examiner to determine that it was of human origin, although not enough to run tests to establish blood type.
Again, Ogorzow tried to explain away the evidence against him. He had yet another plausible story: his wife had been very sick three days before, and in caring for her, he had gotten blood on his work clothing. The police then questioned his wife, who had no opportunity to consult with her husband. She confirmed that she had been sick, that she had bled on him, and that all this had happened on the same date that Ogorzow claimed it had.
As DNA testing did not yet exist, and there was not enough blood evidence to see if it was the same blood type as his wife’s, the police now had no way to disprove Ogorzow’s version of how it came to be there, given his wife’s corroboration of his story.
Because Ogorzow did not know that blood type was a nonissue, he also provided a second explanation for any blood that did not match his wife’s. He claimed that he’d injured his finger recently and wiped it on his clothes.
The problem for Ogorzow was that the forensics lab believed the bloodstain on his jacket to be the result of a struggle. The blood spatter on the jacket, in particular, did not fit a narrative of either wiping a bloody finger or helping his injured wife. Neither situation would explain why the blood found on his jacket appeared to be in a pattern consistent with him having violently attacked someone.
So the police viewed Ogorzow as a strong suspect. If it were not for this bloodstain pattern analysis, they would have probably let him go. Instead they detained him for on ongoing process over a period of days. The police were holding on to Ogorzow until they either were convinced he was their man or until they cleared him of involvement in this gruesome case.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Interrogation
The police did not give up, and next they asked Ogorzow about the route that he took to get from work to his home. Until this line of inquiry, Ogorzow had answered questions quickly. He now took his time to answer, seeming to suspect a trap.
If he had been in the United States, this is the time when he might have invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence and his Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer, but this was Nazi Germany, and as a practical matter, he had no such rights. He felt compelled to answer the questions being posed to him.
The police carefully got Ogorzow to admit that he took the S-Bahn home and then often walked through the garden area on the way to his apartment building. They then pointed out that a number of women had been harassed by a man wearing a railroad uniform along that route during the time that he would have been going to or from work.
The police were also interested in the bicycle that he often rode to and from the S-Bahn. This bicycle had a powerful dynamo light on it. Dynamo lights produce current from the usage of the bike itself. They were particularly practical during the wartime conditions in Germany, as they did not require that the user purchase batteries; instead the bicycle rider made his own power just by riding the bike around.
Ogorzow tried to deny that he had anything to do with the harassments in the garden area, but under intense questioning regarding the light on his bike and the women he would pass on his way home, he eventually admitted to the most low-level incidents along this route, ones where he had said something inappropriate, used a flashlight or his bike light to scare someone, or at most, grabbed a woman.
The police now felt increasingly confident that they had their man.
While the police investigated him, Ogorzow stayed in their custody. He was locked up at night and still held out hope that he would be able to survive this investigation and convince the police that they were on the wrong track. It was a frustrating and scary process for him, though. He had to go through a cycle of being interrogated and then being locked up and waiting to be interrogated again. As the time passed, it wore on him. And the police were using this time to investigate him further and so prepare to better interrogate him.
One day, during daylight hours, they took him from the station to the garden area. The Kripo demanded that Ogorzow show them the exact locations of the minor crimes to which he had confessed. Ogorzow was confused about where each crime had taken place. He had committed so many crimes in this area, when one included all the flashlight attacks as well as the more serious offenses, that he had trouble keeping the different scenes straight in his head.
While he thought that he was admitting to very minor charges, the police were getting details out of him that placed him near serious attacks. He mistakenly admitted to an attack on a woman at the location of a felony assault—a local underpass of the railway Kaulsdorfer. He’d become confused and thought he was taking the police to a place where he had merely scared a woman by shining his flashlight on her.
Over the course of three hours, Ogorzow showed the investigators four locations that had been the settings for minor incidents, as well as mistakenly showing them a total of two locations where he had committed violent attacks that the police classified as attempted murders.
The police now had a connection between Ogorzow and two of the scenes where violent attacks occurred. He would have a hard time arguing that he’d engaged in minor harassments in the same exact place where such attacks had transpired. So the police were slowly and thoroughly building a case against him.
Next the police wanted to have two of the women who’d been assaulted in the garden area identify Ogorzow as the man who’d attacked them. The police had a long list of women who’d been attacked in the area, but they settled on these two as the best ones to possibly identify their attacker.
The police did not arrange a physical lineup of men in railroad uniforms who resembled Ogorzow in terms of height and build. Nor did they put together a collection of photos of such men, with one of Ogorzow added into the mix. The identification process they used did not reach that level of reliability.
Instead the police brought two women who had survived Ogorzow’s garden attacks to confront him directly in the same area. The police pointed him out, while asking the women if this was the man who attacked them. Even with this highly suggestive process, while one woman said that she was certain Ogorzow was her attacker, the other one said that she could not tell.
For the one that did recognize him, the police had done the identification in a very dramatic way. This witness was Mrs. Gertrud Nieswandt, whom Ogorzow had stabbed in the neck in front of her parents’ garden home.
The police started with Mrs. Nieswandt facing Ogorzow’s back and then commanded Ogorzow to turn around. He had no idea why he was supposed to turn around, as the police did not tell him that someone was waiting to identify him. When he turned and was face-to-face with Nieswandt, she yelled that he was the one who had attacked her. She then spontaneously showed Ogorzow the long scar on her neck that he had made with a knife.
>
The police had taken Mrs. Nieswandt back to the area where the attack occurred in the garden allotments, and pointed out a single suspect, so there must have been a strong psychological desire in her to pick out this person as the one who had committed the crime.
In this case, he actually was the one who had attacked her, so it is entirely possible that Mrs. Nieswandt did genuinely recognize him, although that begs the question of why she had not been able to provide a more accurate description before this. His broken nose, for instance, was a very noticeable trait that none of the witnesses had ever mentioned. It’s possible that she had subconsciously noticed details that her conscious mind did not have the ability to remember. In which case, the shock of seeing this person could have revived those subconscious impressions. Or perhaps she did not recognize him at all, but merely thought she did based on how this was set up.
If the police wanted a more meaningful identification, they should have done a lineup of similar-looking men wearing the same kind of clothes. Even that can be problematic, though, and these days, the preferred method of eyewitness identification is to use a sequential lineup or sequential photographs.
However, if the point of this process was not to make sure that the eyewitness had identified the right man, but to spook someone that the police were already confident was their man, then it was played just right.
Ogorzow behaved as if Mrs. Nieswandt identifying him as her attacker did not concern him at all, but it was just an act. He could see that he was in serious trouble.
On the way back to the station afterward, Ogorzow asked to speak to the man in charge of the Serious Crimes Unit. Commissioner Lüdtke agreed to this request and handled the interrogation himself. Ogorzow made this request because he was scared, and he mistakenly assumed that a high-level official like Lüdtke would help him out because of Ogorzow’s status as a party and SA member.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Confession
Ogorzow and Lüdtke sat together in an interrogation room. Even in Nazi Germany, Lüdtke still wanted a confession from Ogorzow in order to give prosecutors enough to convict him of the S-Bahn murders. Right now, he had enough evidence to arguably make a decent case for some of the garden attacks, but he had no real evidence tying Ogorzow to the S-Bahn attacks.
Lüdtke needed Ogorzow to confess. In order to do this, Lüdtke used a few props. He had the skulls of five of Ogorzow’s victims sitting on a table. Dr. Weimann had previously cleaned them, so they were bleached white. Each skull had a decent sized hole in it from where it had been struck by a heavy blunt object.
Lüdtke kept the room darkened, but turned on a bright light so it illuminated this macabre exhibit.
Ogorzow and Lüdtke spent some time sitting there in silence. Suddenly, Ogorzow pleaded with him, saying, “You gotta help me!”1
Ogorzow explained that he was asking this as a loyal party member and SA Oberscharführer (senior squad leader). Given the violence Ogorzow had taken part in as a member of the SA, when he and his fellow brown-shirted thugs beat Jews and smashed up Jewish places of business and worship, he desperately hoped that his loyalty to the party might be enough to excuse his killings.
Lüdtke manipulated Ogorzow’s pleas as a way to obtain a confession. Just as modern-day police may pretend to sympathize with a suspect so as to elicit the suspect’s version of events, so did Lüdtke take advantage of this opening that Ogorzow had given him.
He told Ogorzow that before they could discuss what could be done to help him, Lüdtke needed to know what exactly he had done. Of course, Lüdtke had no intention of helping Ogorzow. His crimes were horrific, and the justice system in Nazi Germany would not let the murder of Aryan German women go unpunished merely because the perpetrator was a party member and Brownshirt.
For Lüdtke, his career was potentially on the line. His superiors knew that he had a likely suspect in custody, and his performance was being monitored.
Lüdtke bore primary responsibility for the investigation into the S-Bahn Murderer. He had demanded and employed large numbers of men and women on this case. Even with all these resources, and the large rewards, he had yet to solve this crime. He’d had an embarrassing moment when he’d believed the case to be solved with his arrest of the man whose shoes matched the shoeprints found by the body of Frieda Koziol. After all the excitement that had generated, it had been a huge letdown for all involved when the arrested man turned out to be not the killer, but just a carpenter who took advantage of the blackout to peep on women.
The pressure on Lüdtke to close this case came not just from those above him, like Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kripo, and his boss, director of the Reich Main Security Office Reinhard Heydrich, but also from the public. Lüdtke later wrote, “Rarely has the work of the Berlin criminal police, particularly homicide, been of such strong public interest in Berlin, as in the handling of the S-Bahn murders. There were often bitter words one heard from the public, especially those of East Berlin, which was most threatened by the actions of the S-Bahn Murderer, which grew worse, the longer they were kept waiting on the clearance of these crimes. This was understandable given the severity and the accumulation of crimes.”2
While some in positions of power in the Third Reich could screw up at work and not worry about repercussions because of their longtime loyalty to the Nazi Party and connections within the party and government, Lüdtke had to succeed on his own merits. So the pressure was on for him to make sure that Ogorzow had indeed committed these crimes and to get an airtight confession from him to close the case.
For Paul Ogorzow, his life was on the line. He knew that he was fighting to keep his head on his shoulders. If he did not manage to find the right words to get out of this, he understood that the German government would quickly try, convict, sentence, and execute him. And just like the poor souls in the French Revolution, he would die under a blade falling in a guillotine.
He still had hope that he might figure out a way to not only save his life, but also mitigate the damage this arrest would cause him. If he denied everything, maybe he would be able to walk out of the police station a free man. He could return to his wife and kids and cherry trees. Or if there was too much evidence against him, perhaps as a party member, Lüdtke would cut him a break and let him go, or arrange for him to be convicted of a lesser offense.
Paul Ogorzow would never take full responsibility for his attacks on women. Even as he was pushed into a corner and made to feel like he needed to admit certain details of what he’d done, he continued to hold out hope that there was a way he could survive this.
Lüdtke stuck to the line that if Ogorzow wanted his help, then Ogorzow would need to tell him in detail exactly what he’d done. Ogorzow was torn because he did believe that Lüdtke had it in his power to help him and that he might do so on the basis of Ogorzow’s loyalty to the party and rank in the SA, but he did not want to further incriminate himself.
Lüdtke used all the evidence at his disposal to try to convince Ogorzow that the Kripo already had more than enough to connect him to these crimes. Lüdtke was hoping that this argument, combined with his suggestion that he would help Ogorzow once he admitted what he’d done, would result in a confession.
Paul Ogorzow fell for this, but with a twist of his own. Ogorzow admitted to the attacks. However, he had yet another trick up his sleeve. He decided to confess to the attacks in a manner that contradicted the evidence. Ogorzow hoped to say enough to get Lüdtke to help him, but also have a way out if there was no help and the state tried to use this confession against him. He could see from the skulls that it was obvious that he had used a blunt instrument to damage the heads of some of his victims; he would lie and say he had used something else.
So Ogorzow falsely claimed that he used a knife in one of the attacks, in which he’d actually used a heavy blunt instrument. He lied about the rest of his attacks by saying that he’d punched his victims w
ith his bare hands. A confession has to match up with the facts of the case. One in which Ogorzow’s claims are contradicted by the evidence would be problematic, at the very least. Like a game of cat and mouse, a back-and-forth occurred wherein Lüdtke kept trying to get a proper confession out of Ogorzow, and Ogorzow attempted to weasel his way out of trouble.
When Lüdtke pressed his suspect on the method of death, Ogorzow said it could have been strangulation or punching with his fist or stabbing.
Only by carefully and thoroughly going over the evidence, including the skulls, did Lüdtke finally get Ogorzow to admit the truth. Lüdtke used the skulls to explain that it was impossible that fists or a knife caused the holes in them.
At this point, Ogorzow was physically reacting to the dire situation he was in. The blood had gone out of his face and he was shaking. He no longer had the energy to tell an obvious lie with the evidence of the truth right in front of him. It did not occur to Ogorzow to try to tell a new lie, that this damage must have been caused by injuries related to falling from the train. It was beyond his expertise to tell if these injuries could have been caused in that way, although unbeknownst to him, Dr. Weimann had already ruled that out based on his examinations of where the bodies were found and the nature of the injuries to these skulls.
When Lüdtke asked Ogorzow directly, “What did you beat these women to death with?” Ogorzow finally answered him truthfully. “With a lead cable.”3 In Lüdtke’s opinion, this was the moment that Ogorzow broke. Lüdtke described Ogorzow looking “ashen” and “trembling” when he answered this question.4 Afterward, he freely admitted to all of his murders, in both the garden area and on the S-Bahn. He even wrote up an account of his crimes in his own words.
A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin Page 19