A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (19 page)

The inside of this train compartment was not pitch-black. There was some minimal lighting, and it was enough as he got close to her for him to see something that scared him. Perhaps it was that she was not afraid of him, or maybe there was something about her posture that suggested she was in the police force. Whatever the reason, he quickly aborted his approach and turned around, walking back to his starting position near the train’s door.

He knew that police officers kept an eye on the various stations along this line during the blackout, so he worried that he would be detained when the train came to the next station if he was right that this woman was a cop. His behavior in going up to her and then abruptly turning back was suspicious. Even if he were caught, he could make some excuse, and this was not enough to prove he was the S-Bahn Murderer anyway, but at the very least the police would hold on to him while they investigated him. And perhaps they would then find something that convinced them that he was their man.

Ogorzow decided that he would risk jumping off the moving train instead of seeing what awaited him at the next station. He opened the door, looked out into the darkness, and instead of throwing a victim out of the train, he himself hopped out. He managed to land without seriously injuring himself and then ran toward the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station. He needed to disappear before this woman could raise the alarm at the next station and police swarmed the tracks looking for him.

The woman looked out and was able to tell in what direction he was heading. This had all happened too fast for her to do anything else. Without a gun, she would have had trouble safely stopping him from fleeing anyway. And it took time to get help from the male cop in the adjacent third-class section.

Paul Ogorzow’s intuition was right. He had almost attacked a female police officer and she alerted her colleagues at the next station. They did mobilize, but by the time police arrived to look for him, he was gone. If he had been unfortunate enough to have broken a leg or otherwise seriously injured himself during his jump from a moving train, they would probably have found him. Also, the very act of jumping out of a train in motion made him look guilty. If he were not the S-Bahn Murderer, he would have to be insane to do such a thing. This jump combined with his strange behavior in regards to the undercover policewoman would have almost certainly resulted in the police arresting him for the S-Bahn attacks if they had caught him.

Because he got away, the police then turned toward finding out as much as they could about this suspect from the policewoman who had encountered him on the train. Given the poor lighting in the compartment, the only details she could report were that the suspect wore a black jacket that looked like it belonged to some sort of uniform, that this jacket appeared to not have any buttons, and that he was wearing a hat of some sort. She thought he was probably around the same height as her. Even though the police had almost caught Ogorzow, they learned almost nothing of value from this incident. The details the policewoman recalled added little to what they already knew.

This incident provided a real-life example of how quickly things could happen in the train compartment and how long it would take a male policeman to come to the rescue of a woman in another compartment. It became apparent to Lüdtke that it was impossible to safely balance the need to draw out the killer with a woman alone and the need for a male policeman to be close enough at hand to intervene if an attack did occur. And so he stopped using female decoys to try to catch the killer.

Despite this close call, Ogorzow continued to hunt for women to attack on the S-Bahn trains. As dangerous as the S-Bahn was becoming for him with all the police attention on it, it still felt safer to him than the garden area. While he could take the time to sexually assault his victims in the garden area, he did enjoy the process of throwing women from the train. As scary as it had been for him to jump from a moving train and have to run away, it was not as bad as the time that he had been caught by two men in the garden area who came to the rescue of their loved one. Those two had beat him up and would have handed him over to police if he had not managed to get away and escape them in the darkness of the garden area.

The smart move might have been to find a new hunting ground entirely, but these were the two areas that he felt secure in and knew well. Police attention could get him to change his method of attack in small ways, like timing. But given his compulsion to attack and murder women, it was not enough to get him to stop.

A contemporary expert on serial killers, Düsseldorf detective Chief Superintendent Stephan Harbort, described this aspect of the hunt for the S-Bahn Murderer: “In order to catch the serial murderer, maybe even while in the act, all S-Bahn stations which were relevant to the investigation were being monitored by officials of the
Reichsbahn
and the homicide division . . . as well as all commuter traffic on selected days between 8
P.M.
and midnight. However, the murderer showed himself to be completely unfazed by all of these security measures.”
²

As a National Railroad employee, Paul Ogorzow had a uniform and a free pass to ride the S-Bahn as much as he wanted. In terms of enabling his attacks on the train, however, his work provided him with more than this. He heard official word from the police and the train company regarding the police investigation and the posting of officers along the train line. Moreover, his fellow train workers would gossip about this case, giving him even more information about what the police were up to.

Most importantly, his job provided him with the opportunity to ditch work, while on paper it would appear that he was there. This meant that when police were looking for an S-Bahn employee who could have committed these attacks, Ogorzow had what appeared to be a solid alibi for the times he committed crimes while he was supposed to be at work.

While the police caught on to the importance of this train route, they did not realize that one of these stations was more important than the others. In fact, the attacks took place along a route that passed through the S-Bahn station at Rummelsburg where Paul Ogorzow worked.

His tasks for this job included a large amount of outdoor work, such as checking on the tracks and on the signals. Thomas Krickstadt and Mike Straschewski, experts on the history of the S-Bahn, explained why Paul Ogorzow was able to leave work so often without being noticed: “The sum of the above mentioned [outdoor] tasks are the reason why Ogorzow often was not at the signal tower. Another reason for his not being noticed was that the signal tower was a bit outside of populated areas. A lot of weekend houses were nearby, so on weekdays the area was uninhabited.”
³

It was here near the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station that Ogorzow reported to work. When he was not out checking on and fixing things on the railroad tracks nearby, Ogorzow was supposed to be in a signal tower designated “Vnk.” The name was painted on the side of the tower and used in maps of the railroad facilities surrounding this station.

An S-Bahn expert explained, “‘Vnk’ was the official abbreviation for the name of the signal station. It meant ‘
Verbindung nach Küstrin
’ (‘Junction to Küstrin’) because the signal station was at a junction where a line to Küstrin (since 1945 a Polish city) led.”
⁴
During the time Ogorzow worked in this signal station Küstrin was part of Germany.

This same expert described how the train switching technology of the time worked: “In the 1930s there were two basic techniques in German signal towers. The older technology was purely mechanical with big levers. . . . In the new version, small levers have been used through which an electrical pulse is triggered electro-mechanically. Thus, the switches and signals were detected [through this machinery]. This technique was the one used in the Berlin signal tower ‘Vnk.’ The guard in ‘Vnk’ received his instructions by phone or by telegraph from the dispatcher.”
⁵

The building Paul Ogorzow worked in, Rummelsburg S-Bahn signal tower Vnk, was an ugly, redbrick building bordered by the train tracks on two sides. It had two stories aboveground and a basement below. The front of the building faced train tracks with two stories visible, while on the other side, it looked like a three-story structure with its basement at ground-floor level. Although it was only a few feet from the tracks on the front and back it was built on a steep drop-off so that the back was built into a retaining wall to keep the hillside from eroding away onto the train tracks. In other words, the front of the building appeared to have two stories, while the back looked like three stories as the basement level merged into the retaining wall.

Inside, there was a fireplace to heat it. There were two entrances on the front side, one at the same level as the train tracks and the other up a flight of metal stairs. The backside was bricked up, without any means of entering or exiting the building. It was a small building, the sort of place that could make one feel claustrophobic after a while. This tower was located in the far northwest corner of the various facilities at this station. It was an isolated outpost on the outskirts of the Rummelsburg station. Paul Ogorzow was often working alone, so he could sleep in the signal tower or come and go from it as he pleased.

Ogorzow’s job at this signal tower provided him with an alibi, while actually allowing him to generally come and go as he pleased. There were times that he needed to actually be in the tower, but much of the workday he was free to leave without anyone noticing.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Uniforms, Decoys in Drag, and Another Murder

Police Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke focused in on the attacker’s uniform. His men interviewed two women from the garden attacks who saw their assailant wearing a uniform, along with the women who had survived being attacked on the S-Bahn.

However, due to the darkness, the speed of the assaults, and the problems with eyewitness testimony generally, the police were not able to pinpoint who the attacker was from his uniform. For example, the two women who survived being thrown from the train said different things about what their attacker wore. One said that it was a blue uniform; the other said it was black. They both testified that he wore a hat pulled forward to partially conceal his facial features, but they could not agree on what kind of hat it was.

The police found this incredibly frustrating, as they desperately wanted to know more about their suspect. A basic fact like whether his uniform was blue or black could point the investigation in a totally different direction. The last thing the police wanted to do was interview thousands of people who had blue uniforms if the killer actually had a black uniform.

As much as the police wished it was otherwise, it was to be expected that there would be so little useful information that their witnesses could agree on. Eyewitness evidence can be problematic under the best of conditions, as people are nervous when they are victims of a violent crime, and the human mind generally does not retain as many useful details as we think it does. As such, it is not surprising that the police did not gain much useful information from those whom Paul Ogorzow attacked.

The police had a pool of five thousand active train workers whose uniforms could match their composite description. And this did not even include someone with a similar-looking uniform who did not work for the railroad, or someone who only impersonated a railroad employee, or a former railroad employee, for that matter. Checking out all these potential suspects and whether they had alibis for the times of the crimes would be a huge undertaking.

Besides, Nazi Germany was awash in different kinds of uniforms, many of them in dark colors that would look the same in blackout conditions.

If it was not an S-Bahn-related uniform, then the other main possibility the Kripo considered was that the uniform belonged to a member of the SS paramilitary organization. The SS had a number of uniform changes over the years, most notably going from all-black uniforms to a field-gray color.

If it was an SS uniform the assailant wore, then the accompanying hat was not part of it. Although it was dark, and witnesses had not seen much that could help the police, what they had noticed of the perpetrator’s headwear did not match an SS cap. The SS had a peaked cap with an eagle and an ominous-looking skull and crossbones insignia, known as a death’s head, on it.

The National Railroad hat Paul Ogorzow wore looked similar to many other German uniform caps during World War II. While they might look the same from a distance or in the dark, a major difference between these hats was the varying emblems used by different organizations. Ogorzow’s hat featured the eagle clutching a swastika, but with a slightly different version of the eagle that was specific to the National Railroad Company. In addition, his hat had a white circular badge with a large red dot in the middle affixed to a wraparound black band. Taken together, this created the black, white, and red color scheme that represented Germany at the time.

It would be hard for one of Ogorzow’s victims to see this in blackout conditions. Plus, after suffering a traumatic event, such as being attacked and then thrown off a moving train, it is understandable that one would not remember the exact details of what the eagle looked like on Ogorzow’s hat or that it had a white circle with a red dot on it. There were other details specific to a given kind of hat, such as the colors on the braiding, but since more noticeable branch-of-service indicators went unnoticed, these smaller details were not relevant to the investigation.

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.