A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

by Scott Andrew Selby

  They referred to Paul Ogorzow as the “Karlshorst S-Bahn Murderer” because some of his crimes took place near the Karlshorst S-Bahn station and he lived near there. In time, though, the garden attacks faded from the popular imagination in comparison to the more dramatic attacks that took place on the train itself. As such, he became known as simply the S-Bahn Murderer.

  In addition to the fleeting attention brought to this case in the news media, it occurred to the Nazi higher-ups that there was value in promoting additional awareness of the Kripo’s effective work in catching a killer.

  Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler that a series of detective novels based on the successes of the German Police could help boost faith in the capabilities of the Reich. Himmler, in his position as chief of German Police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, approved of this project.

  The first book in this crime fiction series was to be based on the Paul Ogorzow case. Nebe in turn agreed to this proposal as this case made him look good and he was a consummate lover of detective novels. The head of the Reich Chamber of Writers, Wilhelm Ihde, wrote Death Rode the Train (Der Tod fuhr im Zug) under the pen name of Axel Alt. It cost 1 reichsmark and featured a font on the cover that made the title look like a moving train. This pulp fiction version of the case was a huge best seller—the first printing of five hundred thousand copies quickly sold out.

  A professor of German studies recently wrote that this “novel is representative of the dominant tendency of the period to celebrate the work of the criminal police while avoiding any portrayal of the totalitarian apparatus that surrounded criminal politics in the Third Reich.”2

  It was a work of fiction that built on the actual police file in this case. The author changed Ogorzow’s name to “Omanzow,” but the German reading public knew exactly whom he was writing about, as these crimes, once solved, had been heavily publicized.

  Wilhelm Lüdtke spent the rest of the war in Berlin with the Kripo.3 He’d already served in the German army in World War I and he was fifty-five years old by the time he closed the S-Bahn Murderer case.

  In April 1943, Lüdtke received a promotion to the rank of Kriminalrat (detective superintendent) and received additional training at a police school in Prague. He continued to run the homicide division in the Berlin Kripo, however. On February 1, 1944, he was promoted to become the Kripo personnel chief in Berlin, which involved additional responsibilities but did not require him to give up his position running the Berlin homicide division.

  While he was not drafted into military service, Lüdtke was a member of the SS (number 52239) and was issued an SS uniform. He had the mid-level SS officer rank of Hauptsturmführer. But he was not assigned to a special SS unit, nor had he volunteered to join the SS. In 1938, everyone in the Kripo who was not already a member of the SS had been required to join it.

  Although many detectives in the Kripo could stay in plain clothes, for his new duties, Lüdtke often wore a uniform. It was the same uniform worn by Kripo detectives in occupied territory, as they were not allowed to be in plain clothes there. They wore an SS uniform in field gray.

  For Wilhelm Lüdtke, the SS unit he was assigned to was the Security Police in Berlin. In practice, this meant little in addition to his normal Kripo duties.

  He was in Berlin until the bitter end. While others, like Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, fled when Hitler killed himself and the Russians came pouring in, Lüdtke stayed. When asked after the war about his work experience, in the denazification questionnaire called a Fragebogen, he wrote that he worked for the Berlin Kripo until “Zusammenbruch,” which meant the “collapse.”4

  Berlin surrendered to the Soviets on May 2, 1945. It was chaos as the Red Army moved in and took control of the city. While many other Germans destroyed their uniforms and papers, Lüdtke continued to wear his. If it had been a uniform specific to the Criminal Police, he might have been fine. Instead, he was wearing an SS uniform.

  On May 8, 1945, the Soviet secret police arrested him. He fell into the automatic arrest category as a member of the SS. They held him for less than two months, releasing him on July 2, 1945, as they felt that his duties as a Criminal Police officer did not merit incarceration.

  Wilhelm Lüdtke stayed in Berlin, in the American sector, but was not able to rejoin the German Criminal Police. It took time for him to go through the denazification process, as he had been arrested by the Soviets while in an SS uniform. He collected witnesses to explain that his SS rank of Hauptsturmführer had been automatic and that while many Kripo officers in Berlin had been able to avoid wearing a uniform, there had been times that he believed it to be part of his duties to wear his uniform. The fact that this uniform belonged to the SS was a problem for Lüdtke. He went through a lengthy process before being able to persuade the authorities that he had not been a member of the SS in any meaningful way, but that it had been an automatic part of his job with the Kripo.

  In addition, he was reaching retirement age, having been born in 1886. He’d been a policeman for thirty-five years, and even once he was denazified, he would be too old to rejoin the force, even if they would otherwise be willing to take him back.

  While he did have a modest pension, he took supplemental work as a private detective for coffee import and export firms in Berlin and Hamburg from 1945 to 1951. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) described this work as follows: “[Lüdtke] is gainfully employed as an investigator by a group of coffee merchants interested in the suppression of smuggling operations involving the unauthorized import of coffee from [East Germany] to Western Berlin. He also works in an inofficial capacity for the Zollfahndungsdienst (customs investigation unit) of the Berlin Senate.”5

  In April 1951, the CIA recruited him for full-time work; before then he’d done some part-time work for them on a case-by-case basis. He’d received no punishment as part of his denazification process, so the CIA was not concerned that he had been a member of the SS, although they did research his background thoroughly. They periodically had concerns about the Soviets having held him for two months, but his account of how that happened made sense. At one point, the CIA subjected Lüdtke to a lie detector test that asked if he’d told the truth about that arrest and if he had been recruited by the Soviets as an agent. He passed.

  The CIA noted in Lüdtke’s file that this had been an “automatic arrest for the Soviets, since subject was apprehended in SS uniform. At the time, the German police branch of which he was a member had been assimilated into the SS, and such uniforms and rank designations were a matter of course.”6

  He worked for the CIA as an undercover asset in Berlin as part of three different Cold War operations against the Soviets and the Polish Communists. He did this out of a combination of hatred of Communism and financial hardship. Lüdtke found it hard to live on his pension. He used this fact for his cover story to his friends and neighbors, who knew him as a retired policeman earning extra money on the side as a free-lance part-time private investigator.

  In addition to paying him a tax-free salary, the CIA also promised him that if the Soviets and/or East Germans invaded Berlin, if possible they would evacuate him and his wife.

  For his first job with them, the CIA gave him the cryptonym of CAUTERY-4. He was being run by the CIA’s REDCAP program to encourage Communists to defect to the west. The CIA provided him with fake credentials for the “Economic Assessment Unit” under the name of “Ernst Hartmann.”7

  REDCAP eventually reassigned him from Operation Cautery to Polish operations, specifically Operation Besmirch. His cryptonym then became BESMIRCH-2.

  For the Polish operations, Lüdtke received a new cover. He was now doing research for newspapers and had all the right credentials, including a counterfeit investigator’s pass. The CIA described his mission for BESMIRCH as follows: “Mission: [Wilhelm Lüdtke] knows that his activities are directed toward the establi
shment of a support mechanism which could mount and support clandestine operations in Poland. Subject knows that we are interested in obtaining intelligence reports on the transit railroad traffic from East Germany to Poland and the USSR. [He] is also aware of our interest in the barge traffic to Poland and illegal border crossers in the East German/Polish border area of Guben to Gorlitz.”8

  When Project BESMIRCHED ended, the CIA still valued Lüdtke as an agent, so they assigned him to Project BECRIPPLE. He now had the codename of BECRIPPLE-2.9 CIA records summarized this operation as follows: “BECRIPPLE Project (1954–60) provided Polish operations run from Berlin and other Stations/Bases with support assets such as a secure safehouse . . . ; garage for a German plated vehicle; an agent/cutout for obtaining credit investigations on persons of operational interest; an agent for monitoring local Polish emigre activity; an agent for obtaining clandestine photographs of West Berlin Polish installations and other support facilities.”10

  The CIA valued Lüdtke based on his extensive police experience and his knowledge of how German bureaucracies work. While they thought his appearance was too noticeable for more than very short-term surveillance work, they complimented his work as an interrogator, legman, and spotter. The CIA noted that he “is a good interrogator and an adept handler of people.”11 This was the same skill set that had enabled him to get Paul Ogorzow to confess.

  The CIA terminated his services on July 10, 1957. They paid him a severance bonus and gave him a way to reach them that would be good for one year in case the Soviets came after him during that time. The reasons cited in his file for his dismissal were “over-use, compromise, and ill health.”12 “Compromise” in the intelligence community has a different meaning than in everyday life. They meant that his cover may have been blown, and other intelligence services, such as those of the Soviet, East German, and Polish governments may have known he was spying for the Americans. As for his ill health, he was now in his seventies so it was normal for him to have trouble with the various activities being a spy entailed. The last page in his CIA file is a short letter to the chief of the CIA Berlin base notifying him that Wilhelm Lüdtke died from cancer in August 1957 and was buried in Berlin.

  Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kripo, was assigned in 1941 to be in charge of one of the mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) that followed the Nazi advance into Soviet territory. It was common for police officials to be assigned to Einsatzgruppen, which carried out massacres of Jews, Gypsies, Soviet political commissars, and others the Nazi regime wanted eliminated. These groups slaughtered well over a million men, women, and children.

  Nebe was in charge of Einsatzgruppe B from its inception in June 1941 until November 1941. There are conflicting reports regarding the extent to which he tried to minimize the murders committed by his group, as well as his personal reaction to various massacres.

  Nebe played a key role in the development of the use of hermetically sealed vans to gas people to death. Until then, the Third Reich had mostly used firearms to slaughter people. Gunning down civilians, including women and children, was bad for the morale of troops, and gas was a way to efficiently kill large numbers of people without needing large numbers of soldiers to shoot them. Those placed in the back of the vans would die as a result of carbon monoxide being pumped in.

  If Nebe had survived the war, there were other war crimes he could have been charged with, including selecting fifty prisoners out of those captured from the Great Escape (the famed breakout from the Stalag Luft III POW camp) for execution. The head of the Gestapo ordered him to pick which prisoners were to be killed.

  These were just the major crimes with which he was involved. There were other very troubling events that would have been investigated if he had lived to be tried at Nuremberg by the Allies.

  Nebe was executed just before the end of the war for his role in the July 20, 1944, bombing plot to kill Hitler. Nebe’s job as part of this plot, called Operation Valkyrie, was to neutralize his enemy/boss Heinrich Himmler, but he never received the signal to do so. When Hitler survived the bombing, Nebe thought the Gestapo was on to him, so he ran away on July 24. He was mistaken, as they had no idea he’d been a part of this plot to assassinate Hitler.

  He hid on an island in the outskirts of Berlin until his ex-mistress, Police Commissioner Heidi Hobbin, turned him in to the Gestapo. She did this out of jealousy of his relationship with another woman.13

  On March 21, 1945, he was executed in the same Berlin prison as Ogorzow. While Ogorzow was killed by guillotine, Nebe was hung using piano wire, as Hitler reportedly wanted those who had tried to kill him hung like cattle.

  Nebe’s old boss Reinhard Heydrich did not survive the war either. If he had, the Allies would have tried him for his many war crimes. In addition to being director of the Reich Main Security Office, he was appointed the deputy protector of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941. In essence, this new job meant that he was the dictator of this majority Czech territory and responsible for brutally suppressing any and all resistance to Nazi rule.

  On May 27, 1942, Heydrich was riding to work when Czech and Slovak resistance fighters dramatically attacked him. An assassin stood in front of his Mercedes convertible and tried to open fire on him with a submachine gun. The convertible was open, and if the gun hadn’t jammed, this might have spelled the end of Heydrich. Instead of fleeing, Heydrich had his driver stay so he could shoot back. Given this additional opportunity to attack, another assassin threw a grenade at Heydrich. This grenade mortally wounded Heydrich, and he died after a surgery to remove grenade fragments from his body.

  Heydrich’s old boss, Heinrich Himmler, survived the war, but just barely. The man who until the fall of the Third Reich a month before had been in charge of the German Police and the SS was reduced to trying to pretend to be a normal soldier making his way home. He was picked up at a British checkpoint, and only two days later did his captors realize his true identity. He’d shaved off his famous mustache and removed his trademark glasses. When a doctor tried to search inside his mouth for any concealed poison pill, Himmler bit down on a cyanide capsule, which caused his death.

  Another high-ranking Nazi official who played a key role in the investigation into the S-Bahn Murderer, Joseph Goebbels, also took his own life. Near the end of the war, he was living in the Berlin Reich Chancellery bunker along with his wife Magda, their children, Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun Hitler, head of the party chancellery Martin Bormann, and other Nazi personnel.

  As the Soviets fought their way into the government center of Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed himself on April 30. His very recent wife, Eva Braun Hitler, killed herself as well.

  On May 1, Joseph and Magda Goebbels arranged for the murder of their six children. (Magda Goebbels’s grown son from a previous marriage was not there.) There are conflicting versions of exactly who administered what to them, but it is clear that both parents agreed to kill their offspring. They were aged from four to twelve years old when they died in the bunker.

  Unlike Himmler, Goebbels did not try to go into hiding. He and his wife walked out of the bunker to the chancellery garden and killed themselves on the night of May 1. Others in the bunker area tried to break out of the Soviet encirclement that evening, and some, including Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, made it out of Berlin. Goebbels did not take the chance of doing so and being caught, as he feared what the Soviets would do to him. German forces in Berlin surrendered to the Soviets the next morning.

  One of Lüdtke’s main detectives on the S-Bahn case was Georg Heuser. The two of them would jointly write an article on the murders for the Journal of Criminology in 1942. Heuser, like Arthur Nebe and many Kripo detectives, served in one of the mobile killing squads on the Eastern Front after the Ogorzow case. At first, he was in the operational subunit Sonderkommando 1b of Einsatzgruppe A, but he went on to a variety of different positions, including head of the Gestapo in German-occupied Minsk.14

 
Ironically, this meant that one of the lead detectives in the Ogorzow case would kill more innocent civilians on a particularly brutal day than Ogorzow did during his entire crime spree.

  Heuser survived the end of the war by getting rid of his SS uniform and wearing civilian clothes. By that time, he’d had the same rank as his old boss Lüdtke, Hauptsturmführer. Lüdtke, though, had been foolish enough to keep wearing his uniform.

  After the war, Heuser worked a number of odd jobs before he managed to become a policeman in West Germany, rising to the rank of police chief of the West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Heuser lied about what he had done during the war, and a typo, in which his last name was misspelled with an “ä,” helped him in that regard. He’d concealed his past, but it eventually caught up with him. He’d committed alleged war crimes in Slovakia in 1944–45, but he was never tried for those. Instead, he was in trouble for the murders he’d committed when he’d been based in Minsk (the capital of Belarus).

  He was arrested for war crimes on July 23, 1959, specifically the murder of more than eleven thousand men, women, and children. Most of these people were murdered for being Jewish. The charges were that Heuser had issued orders for these mass murders as well as taken direct part in some of them personally.

  He was tried in 1962, as part of a large war crimes case, along with other defendants who had committed war crimes in Belarus. In a particularly chilling bit of testimony, he recalled one mass shooting of Jews “in early May 1942 in Minsk. I went to the pit. A shock came over me. Someone shouted, ‘There is one still living.’ I shot at him. Then I shot more like an automaton.”15

  The court convicted Heuser and sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment. However, he was released early on December 12, 1969. He died in January 1989 in Koblenz, Germany.