A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (10 page)

The murder weapon was not found on the scene at all. It was a knife that Ogorzow had brought to the scene of the crime and taken with him when he left. So there was no weapon for the police to examine.

Dr. Dolgner, based nearby in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, examined the body before it was moved. He declared Mrs. Ditter officially dead. His preliminary examination revealed the cause of death to be a stab wound on her left carotid artery.

The Kripo arranged for Mrs. Ditter’s body to be delivered to Dr. Waldemar Weimann so that he could conduct an autopsy.

Dr. Weimann dictated a transcript of his findings. He observed signs of asphyxiation, including hemorrhaging marks in the eyes. He did a thorough check of Mrs. Ditter’s fingers, hands, arms, and legs and found no signs of defensive wounds. This lack of defensive wounds, in an attack that involved a knife, suggested that the victim knew her killer. The totality of evidence suggested to Dr. Weimann that Mrs. Ditter invited her attacker into her home and he then strangled her with his hands before he attacked her with a knife. So that by the time the knife was part of the attack, she was not able to defend herself.

Given the lack of defensive wounds, the Kripo had someone they very much wanted to question. Then, as now, the first suspect when a woman was murdered was often her husband. He was in the German army, which had him stationed in Potsdam at the time of the murder. The distance between there and Berlin was only about thirty miles, but the husband was not free to come and go from his barracks.

The police worked very fast to locate him, however, and find out precisely where he had been during this crime. They arrived at Arthur Ditter’s barracks just hours after his wife’s body was discovered. The police were locking him into a timeline and a history of his relationship with his wife before her body was even cold.

The police interrogated him and then typed up a very detailed five-page statement with all the information that he had provided them about his now deceased wife, Gerda, and his whereabouts for all times between when she was last seen alive and when her body was discovered by Konrad Braun. Arthur Ditter signed this document, as did Kripo Detective Zach.

Mr. Ditter gave the police his work and educational history in addition to background on his relationship with his wife. They’d met as kids at school, and their mothers in turn had also been school friends. When Gertrude turned sixteen, their relationship became a romantic one. Gertrude’s mother did not approve of this relationship, as she wanted her daughter to marry a government official and believed that Arthur’s prospects in life were not great. A big part of this, according to Arthur’s mother, was that Arthur was not a German citizen.

The complicated change in control of territory in Europe in the early twentieth century resulted in Arthur’s father being considered a Czech citizen. This was a huge problem for Gertrude’s mother.

Arthur’s mother, confusingly named Gertrud Ditter, the same name as his deceased wife except without the “e” at the end of her first name, explained this citizenship issue to the Kripo detectives: “Because my husband was born an Austrian; his home town fell in 1919 to the former Czechoslovakia and, through this, my husband became a Czech citizen. Gerda’s mother did not want her daughter to marry a Czech man. My husband and I wrote to the Führer that he was born German and, therewith, Arthur became a citizen.”
⁵

By the Führer, she meant Adolf Hitler. Presumably someone in his office handled this matter and it never rose to Hitler’s personal attention. Many Germans wrote to Hitler personally, expecting that he could handle matters for them. In this case, it worked.

The young couple married in November 1938 and had two children, a daughter named Helga and a son named Wolfgang. When Ogorzow murdered Mrs. Ditter, Helga was around four months old and Wolfgang was a bit over a year and a half old.

Mr. and Mrs. Ditter had purchased their garden house in Kolonie Gutland II for one hundred and fifty reichsmarks. The associated fees for this place, what Germans call rent and Americans call maintenance fees, were sixteen reichsmarks a year. This was very little money—Mr. Ditter made much more than this in a single week.

As Mr. Ditter explained, it was his wife’s decision to continue to live in this garden house: “I gave my wages almost exclusively to my wife so that she could keep herself busy. I kept almost nothing for myself because I neither drink nor smoke. Recently, when I was employed as a track shifter, I was giving my wife about forty-five reichsmarks a week. She was frugal and was able to make do with this amount of money. However, she almost always told others that she didn’t have any money. That was a habit of hers. But she always had groceries in storage. I always got along well with my wife. There were never serious arguments. It only happened two times in our marriage that we bickered—because I blamed her for not being tidy enough or watching the children enough. My wife waved it off and said she couldn’t manage the work—it was too much. I always wanted to move into a real apartment. My wife was against this, though. She wanted to save that rent money.”
⁶

If they had moved to a proper apartment, instead of the small colony house, perhaps Gertrude Ditter would not have suffered this terrible fate.

The German army had drafted Mr. Ditter into military service. He told the detectives that this meant he had no free time during which he could have visited his wife in Berlin: “During my military service, I haven’t had a single vacation. I was only allowed to leave once by myself, and that was to go to the dentist. Later, other comrades drove me to the dentist. The last time I was there was at the end of September 1940. Otherwise, I haven’t left the barracks except for performing military duties. Also, I was not in Berlin in the last few days. During my time as a soldier, I have only been in Berlin once, and that was to the parade for the Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano. But that was still at the end of the last month. I didn’t get to see any relatives at that time.”
⁷

Arthur Ditter informed the Kripo of all of his recent activities: “Yesterday, I was working until about 5
P.M.
I was shooting. After returning from shooting, I ate lunch and then received the command to report by the gunnery sergeant. The sergeant told me secretively that my wife had died and that I had vacation until Sunday evening at 10
P.M.
The day before yesterday, on Thursday the third of October 1940, I had service in the barracks. We had shooting. At 5
P.M.
, we were finished with shooting—that means we had to clean the guns until 6
P.M.
After this, I had to write a resume. The company leader made me do this. Then, I had to tidy my things, clean my uniform, boots, etc., and I went to bed at about 8:30 or 8:45
P.M.
At 9:00
P.M.
is curfew. Surely I did not leave the barracks on these days or in the evening. My comrades from barrack room 94a can attest to this.”
⁸

The police were able to verify the information that he gave them, and so Arthur Ditter was quickly cleared as a suspect.

Mr. Ditter did provide detectives with some additional information. He didn’t know who would do this to his wife, but he mentioned a dispute with his neighbor, Hermann Herlitz of garden house number 32. This was over the pigeons that Mrs. Ditter kept at their property. She also had hens and rabbits, but the pigeons were the basis of this dispute. While Mr. Herlitz, like many of the people who lived in this colony area back then, also had animals, it was the noise of the pigeons that upset him.

Mr. Ditter alleged that Mr. Herlitz picked similar fights with a large number of neighbors over petty, neighborly disputes. There was nothing to indicate that Mr. Herlitz had used violence in any of these altercations though.

The police still investigated him and interviewed mutual neighbors of his and the Ditters’, but that line of investigation went nowhere. They also talked to Mr. Herlitz’s girlfriend of five years, Auguste Bohm, and she explained the dispute over the pigeons. This turned out to not be much of a dispute, as besides a few harsh words over it by Mr. Herlitz, nothing had happened. As for Auguste Bohm, she expressed her displeasure at Gertrude Ditter’s pigeons by not greeting Mrs. Ditter when she saw her in the streets.

Auguste Bohm provided an alibi for Herlitz. Bohm said to the police, “When Herlitz came home as usual on this Thursday evening, shortly before 6
P.M.,
he first ate something and then got feed for our animals. He was not away for more than an hour. When he came back, it was still light outside. After this, he didn’t leave our property. We went to bed really early, as is usual in recent times. It was probably about 8
P.M.
Herlitz hardly left our bedroom during the night—I would have noticed. When he gets up in the night, I almost always hear it. The next morning, he went to work as usual. Even then he couldn’t have gone to Ditter’s garden house because he went in the direction of path 5a towards Triftweg.”
⁹

They talked to Mr. Herlitz on October 6 and did not find out anything incriminating. A neighborly dispute over pigeons seemed an unlikely motive for such a brutal attack.

However, the police uncovered evidence suggesting that there may have been issues of fidelity in the Ditter relationship. They found a letter in the couple’s home written by a woman, a G. Weinberg from Fürstenwalde, that they were curious about. Arthur Ditter told them a bizarre and implausible story to explain this letter.

His explanation tied in to the job he’d held just before the army drafted him. In a very strange coincidence, he worked for the Reichsbahn at the train-switching yard at Rummelsburg. This location would be ground zero for the S-Bahn murders, and it was here that Paul Ogorzow worked as an auxiliary signalman. Later on, the police did not generate any evidence that he and Ditter knew each other or that this was anything more than the sort of strange coincidence that sometimes pops up in the course of such an investigation. Of course, at the time the police were questioning Mr. Ditter, they had no idea who Paul Ogorzow was.

The story Mr. Ditter told about this letter was an odd one: “About fourteen days before my draft into the military, or maybe three weeks, I was working at the switching yard at Rummelsburg. A younger woman came out of a train compartment in the second class and asked if there were mailboxes nearby. My coworker ‘Stark’. . . . told me: ‘You can put the letter in the mailbox.’ The previously mentioned woman gave me the letter and asked me to put it in the mailbox. I brought this letter with me, put it in my jacket pocket, and then didn’t think about it again. Some days later, my wife found it in my things, ripped it open, and read it. Since doing that, we didn’t dare to send it. I wanted to put it in another envelope and send it, but my wife told me not to. So, that’s why the letter is in my apartment.”
¹⁰

This version of events could be true. If so, it suggests that Ditter’s wife did not trust him in regards to other women. If it was a lie, then perhaps Mr. Ditter had cheated on his wife and did not want the Kripo to know of this. Even with an airtight alibi, in Nazi Germany, it was not a good idea to draw the attention of the authorities. If the police believed that he had been cheating on his spouse, they might decide to the pin the murder on him and claim that he’d hired someone to do it for him. He had no way of knowing that these particular detectives had no interest in finding a scapegoat. They wanted to capture the actual killer.

More damning, though, was a document the police found that Mr. Ditter had written to his wife. It was titled, “My Confession.” When asked about it, Arthur Ditter said, “I wrote this note years ago. We were not even engaged with each other yet. It’s not important at all. I just was trying to get her to become more attached to me. At that time, my wife went out once in a while to the movies with a certain Fritz Gann, who lives in our garden colony. . . . However, I don’t think in the slightest that Fritz Gann had anything going on with my wife or that he has to do with the death of my wife.”
¹¹

The police were curious about this strange note. After having first asked Mr. Ditter about it, and written down his explanation, they confronted him with the actual document. In response, Mr. Ditter told them, “I wrote this note because my wife asked me to after the first time we had sex. My wife dictated the text, but only the beginning, and I wrote the end by myself. The subtitle, ‘If Gerda Barth swears to me that she will no longer lie to me and go out with other men, give out her address, or do any other nonsense’—is so that she wouldn’t go to the movies with Gann anymore and then keep it a secret from me.”
¹²

Mr. Ditter’s explanation did not fully clear this matter up. Both the backstory and the note itself were quite odd. However, the police accepted Mr. Ditter’s account of how he came to write this unusual letter given that he had a solid alibi for the night of the murder. This note did suggest, however, that there were issues of fidelity in the Ditters’ marriage and that perhaps Mrs. Ditter had cheated while her husband was away. Unknown to the police at this time, Mrs. Ditter had given out her address to a strange man (Paul Ogorzow) she met while waiting for the S-Bahn, and that was what had led to her death.

However, there was nothing at the scene or in the investigation thus far to tie this murder to the S-Bahn. While Mrs. Ditter had ridden the train, so did most everyone in Berlin. There was no way for the detectives to know that she had met her assailant there days before.

The police were aware of other crimes against women that had been committed in this area during the blackout. As Berlin historian Dr. Laurenz Demps later explained, this “brutal murder . . . was something new for them—even though there had been multiple rape attempts and instances of rape in this garden area.”
¹³