A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (23 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A Dangerous Gambit

The very fact that Wilhelm Lüdtke was expending tremendous amounts of police resources on this case—with thousands of interviews, police staking out the train system, and so on—had resulted not in catching the killer, but in driving Ogorzow to wait to commit more attacks until he believed it was safe to do so again. This was a massive undertaking made all the more difficult by the limitations placed on Lüdtke’s ability to reach out to the public for help in this matter.

Wilhelm Lüdtke held a secret meeting with his top detectives and shared his belief that the killer knew all about their work to catch him on the trains, which suggested that the killer worked for the railroad. This looked like an inside job. Until now, Lüdtke had coordinated his activities with the railroad company. He explained that the police would have to “continue the investigation even more intensively than before” while trying to conceal key details from railroad personnel.
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With all the police activity on the S-Bahn line that Ogorzow used and also, to a lesser extent, in the garden area near the train where he also victimized women, Ogorzow had stopped his criminal activities. Since he’d killed Johanna Voigt on February 11, 1941, he had not attacked any more women in the first half of 1941.

While there was a large police presence, Ogorzow decided to try to suppress his desire to kill women and wait the authorities out. There were hundreds of policemen spending an inordinate amount of time patrolling the trains and otherwise trying to catch him. Under any conditions, a state can only afford to use so many of its resources trying to catch one criminal. Each policeman riding the S-Bahn waiting for something to happen was one more cop that could have been tasked with something else.

And these were not normal times. The strain of this use of police resources was tougher with the many demands of the war, criminals taking advantage of the blackout conditions and bombings, and the Third Reich using police resources against their perceived enemies and those who did not fit into their white supremacist vision for Germany.

Ogorzow knew that this could not last forever. Eventually the police would ratchet down the resources they dedicated to catching him. This meant that he only needed to control himself until then. Time was on his side.

He continued to report to work, spend time with his wife and children, tend his cherry trees, and volunteer to accompany women who were too afraid to ride the S-Bahn alone. It was difficult, but the days turned into weeks. Weeks became months.

Lüdtke later wrote that as he “had very little evidence that could be used to convict the perpetrator, he had to try to catch him in the act” of attempting to attack a woman.
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While the massive police presence on the trains did not result in the police catching the killer, he believed that it had “achieved a preventive effect” since the attacks had stopped.
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This was not a workable solution though. Lüdtke could not afford to indefinitely use all these policemen to prevent a single killer from striking again.

Police Commissioner Lüdtke now decided to take a bold move to try to flush out the killer. He felt confident that the killer was a train employee with a high-level of awareness of police activity, and he engaged in a dangerous gambit based on that belief.

He had his officers spread word in June that, as of July 1, 1941, “police monitoring [of the train and garden areas] will cease as it is obviously futile.”
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Germany had just broken its treaty with the Soviet Union in a surprise invasion that started on June 22. With more than four million military men now fighting their way east as part of Operation Barbarossa, it seemed believable that the German Police needed to reallocate their resources. Having police out in force to protect the women riding this S-Bahn line and walking though this garden area was not something that could be sustained long-term, and recent events had made everyone in Berlin aware that Germany had use of men elsewhere.

On the date of this invasion, Lüdtke turned fifty-five years old. He could not afford to wait until his next birthday to catch this killer. He wanted the perpetrator of these crimes to return to the S-Bahn, in the belief that it would be safe to do so. And then the trap would slam shut, as the police still present on this rail line would catch the killer in the act. The police would not be gone, but would be deployed in new and less conspicuous ways.

Lüdtke was using hundreds of policemen to keep one part of the S-Bahn and one small area of land safe for women to travel alone at night. It was way too great a strain on resources already spread thin by the demands of a police state and the need for men in the German military. This entire investigation was a huge drain as well on the homicide division—they had been concentrating their attention on this single criminal and doing all they could to try to catch him.

The risk of this new plan was substantial. The intentional spreading of this rumor could be seen as giving the killer a green light to return to his old ways of hunting and killing women. And, of course, the risk would be borne by the women of Berlin and not by Lüdtke himself. If this went wrong, and the killer started attacking women again, they would be the ones to suffer.

The rumor reached Ogorzow’s ears. He believed it and had no idea the Kripo had purposefully spread the story. He now felt free to attack again, although he believed that the garden area would be safer than the train line. Even with the false information that Lüdtke had put out, Ogorzow believed there to still be some police presence on the S-Bahn, if perhaps diminished.

He now returned to the S-Bahn, but not to kill there. This time he would kill on his old hunting ground of the garden area near the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station. It had been five months since his last attack.

During the early hours of July 3, 1941, Ogorzow left his work at the train company signal station. He was having an affair at this time with a woman whose husband was away in the German military. After leaving work, he stopped by her house in the hopes of having sex with her, but she was not home. He then returned to the S-Bahn and took the train to the Rummelsburg station. Despite the late hour eleven people besides Ogorzow got off the train at this station.

As Ogorzow looked out in the dim light that dispersed from open train doors, he saw ten women and one man exiting the train and walking on the platform. He watched the lone man and observed that he was walking with one of the women. The other nine women were alone. Ogorzow lingered behind as they passed through the ticket inspection area and exited the station.

Once out of the station, these people took different paths home. Ogorzow needed to think quickly here—he had to determine a target and follow her. He had no interest in the couple; he only attacked women whom he believed to be alone. Even when selecting lone women to attack, he was careful to pick petite women, as he did not want to risk a struggle with a larger, stronger woman who might be able to fight him off.

Of the nine potential victims, one walked down a path in the dark that Ogorzow thought would be the best place from which to attack. Her name was Mrs. Frieda Koziol, and she was thirty-five years old. None of the other women headed in this direction. Since he had followed her from the train, Ogorzow felt confident that she was alone. Unlike with a woman he randomly found walking around, he did not have to worry that there was anyone she knew following behind her.

Now that he had selected a target, Ogorzow increased his speed to catch up to her. He had needed to walk slowly before so he could see where everyone went and make his decision. He was wearing his work uniform, which often inspired women to trust him, and he tried to talk to Mrs. Koziol, asking if he could accompany her.

She rejected this offer. She did not stop to converse with Ogorzow. Instead, she kept walking. Despite his wearing a uniform, Mrs. Koziol was not about to chat with a man she did not know in an isolated and dark place late at night.

Ogorzow had his iron bar with him. He gripped it and raised it up in the air, then without warning slammed it down on the back of Mrs. Koziol’s head, behind her ear.

She fell to the ground, and he then hit her in the head with the iron bar over and over again. He used so much violence that her skull caved in. He then stopped hitting her and ripped the clothing off the lower part of her body and tore her shirt. The only things she now had on below her waist were her knee-high boots. In a photo of the crime scene, a mass of pubic hair can be seen.

As she lay there dying, Ogorzow raped her. She may even have already been dead. Ogorzow was not sure. He left her body where it was, naked below the waist. She was lying on her back on a dirt path with small plants all along her right side.

Afterward, Ogorzow disposed of the iron rod by throwing it near the train tracks leading into the Rummelsburg station. He did not bother trying to hide Mrs. Koziol’s body. He’d never tried burying or otherwise concealing the bodies of his victims, beyond throwing the ones on the train off of it.

Mrs. Koziol’s body was found around four-thirty in the morning on July 3. The police quickly moved to pursue all leads related to this new murder.

Although she was divorced, Mrs. Koziol’s ex-husband was not a suspect for long. The police were interested in him, as they always look at a victim’s current and former romantic partners. He lived near the crime scene, in the garden plot area, with his girlfriend. That proximity to where his ex-wife was attacked intrigued police, but Mr. Koziol had an alibi, which the police decided was a valid one.

They determined that whoever had attacked Mrs. Koziol had also raped her, based in part on the semen recovered from her body.

The police came to view this as the work of the S-Bahn Murderer. Lüdtke felt like this attack made it even more likely that he was right about the earlier killing of a woman in this area—Mrs. Gerda Ditter—being the work of the same man who attacked women on the S-Bahn.

The commissioner had blood on his hands. If he had not made a show of lifting the police monitoring of the S-Bahn and the adjacent garden area, Ogorzow would probably not have attacked Miss Koziol. Lüdtke tried to justify this later on by writing, “The course showed that this consideration was correct but unfortunately the way the criminal responded was highly unlikely and it was not foreseen.”
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Commissioner Lüdtke was right that the killer was aware of the police activity and changed his own actions based on it, but Lüdtke should have given more consideration to the possibility that his ploy would result in the killer striking again. And in a way that resulted not in him being caught, but in a woman dying.

Later in life, Lüdtke explained this decision by pointing out that he’d expected to catch the perpetrator in the act of trying to assault a woman, even though it did not work out that way. His main rationalization was that by allowing the killer to feel free to attack, a new avenue of investigation was opened up, based on this most recent crime. He wrote in an article, “It is so very unfortunate that yet another human life fell victim to this criminal, yet the harshness of this fateful event can possibly be alleviated by the fact that this new murder led to new ways to investigate these crimes.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A Red Herring

Near the corpse of Frieda Koziol, the police found clear shoeprint impressions in the dirt.

They tried to track the prints, but lost the trail about fifty meters from the body. They concluded that the trail disappeared because the person in question had been running, which made it harder for the police to track him.

Wilhelm Lüdtke believed that these shoeprints belonged to the killer. The body had not been there long. As best the police could extrapolate from the scene, whoever had left the prints had bent down on both knees by the body and had then gotten up and run away from the scene. The footprints barely showed this person’s heels, which indicated that he began to run after kneeling by the body.

Weather conditions resulted in a tight time frame for the creation of these prints. They could not have been old prints that somehow, miraculously, happened to be in a place that fit the narrative of someone standing by this body, inspecting it, and leaving it. It had rained around midnight that night, and the crime itself had occurred one or two hours later. So the rain would have destroyed any footprints created before then.

The police took photographs of the prints next to an L-shaped wooden ruler to document their size and features. In addition, they made a plaster mold of one of the shoe prints. They could tell that the sole was a rubber one with a very distinctive tread pattern. One side of the sole had rubber tread in a solid line, while the other had it in small box-like figures. The front of the sole had a shape like a collapsed tower, while the inside pattern had small boxes on top of solid lines.

From this mold, they later determined that whoever had made these prints had been wearing a shoe manufactured by a company called Salamander. The brand name was
Fußarzt
, which means “podiatrist.” The size was a men’s thirty-nine and a half.
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This was a specialized shoe, with extra thick rubber soles, and German businesses kept extensive records, especially with a complicated system of rationing in place.

Rationing had started in Germany on August 26, 1939, with gasoline. This rationing was another reason why the S-Bahn was so important a form of transportation in Berlin. During World War II, with civilians having very limited access to fuel in Berlin, such public transportation helped alleviate the disaster that gas rationing would be in a large city without such a system.