A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (25 page)

Although the forensic science of the time was primitive compared to what we have now, there still was a great deal of evidence that could be gathered by examining Ogorzow’s belongings. Though the police found nothing of interest in his home, they did confiscate his clothing and submitted it to their lab for inspection.

The police sent to the lab a combination of the clothes Ogorzow had been wearing when they brought him in and items they took during the search of his home. They later put together a list of these items as follows:

ITEMIZATION. THE SECURED PIECES OF CLOTHING OF THE ACCUSED, PAUL OGORZOW:

1. a pair of ripped, blue pants,
   
2. a dark work-coat,
   
3. two terry-cloth towels, dirty,
   
4. a light-gray suit, complete (pants, vest and jacket),
   
5. a uniform-coat of the German State Railways,
   
6. a pair of uniform-pants of the German State Railways,
   
7. a uniform jacket of the Imperial German Forces with a white collar,
   
8. two uniform-caps,
   
9. a blue visor cap,
   
10. a pair of blue sports pants,
    
11. a silk sports shirt,
    
12. a pair of socks.
    ¹
    

In gathering these items, the police concentrated on things that Ogorzow could have been wearing during his various attacks on women, as well as anything he might have used to clean himself up afterward. As the police were not certain of exactly what uniform he’d been wearing, they took anything that was a uniform or resembled one. The towels were taken as well, as they were still dirty, and so if he’d wiped off blood or other evidence on them, it might still remain. If the towels had been laundered, they would not have bothered with them, as their forensic technology could not pick up usable evidence from washed items. Even today, that would be difficult to impossible, depending on what one was looking for. The most one could hope for in such a scenario would be fibers that might match something or a suspicious stain.

The uniforms, even if washed, would be potentially useful for determining if they looked familiar to any of the reports from witnesses in this case.

During his interrogation, the police refused to believe Ogorzow when he claimed that he had never abandoned his work post. As long as he was believed to have been at work at all the times he was supposed to be there, then he had an alibi for the time of many of the S-Bahn Murderer’s crimes. He didn’t need solid alibis for the times of all the crimes. It would be enough if his alibis held up for some of the crimes, as the police believed that one man had committed all of these attacks on the S-Bahn and in the garden area.

When confronted repeatedly by his coworker’s statement that he’d seen Ogorzow ditch work, Ogorzow eventually admitted to leaving work by climbing the fence, but claimed that he had done so in order to secretly meet with a woman who lived nearby. According to Ogorzow, they had been carrying on an affair and he had lied to the police because he did not want to get in trouble for leaving work; nor did he want anyone to know of this sexual relationship, as they were both married. Her husband was away in the military.

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.