A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (8 page)

Given the two classes of available transport, second or third class, this system needed personnel to occasionally spot-check passengers in transit to make sure that their tickets matched the class they sat in. A pure honor system would not work for long, and it was not feasible to check every passenger on the train itself. This spot-check system was meant to make sure that people had not snuck onto the train without a ticket somehow, as well as that people did not pay third-class rates and then ride in second class. It was not meant to find people like Gerda Kargoll who rode too far on the train before retracing their trip to arrive at their desired station. But if someone stopped her, she could be subject to a fine nonetheless.

Ogorzow, who was wearing his railroad uniform, could tell that this woman was distressed about something. He walked up to her and cordially asked what was the matter.

Miss Kargoll explained her situation, as she took him to have some authority in such matters. In reality, as a signalman, tickets were not something that he had any business dealing with. Having him with her did make her feel safe, though, because if a ticket inspector did stop her, Ogorzow could partially back up her story, and his very presence as her traveling companion might deter an inspector from fining her, as a professional courtesy.

Ogorzow told Kargoll that she would be fine riding with him. He invited her to ride with him in the second-class compartment even though she had a third-class ticket. Since he had a
Reichsbahn
uniform, she felt that he had the authority to provide her with this free upgrade. And she did not question his helpfulness.

A typical Berlin S-Bahn train was divided into “quarter trains,” or four two-car units. Strangely, the S-Bahn had no first-class cars, only second-class, which made up a quarter of each train, and the rest of the train was third class.

This system was in place because the S-Bahn was not a stand-alone entity, but was run by the National Railroad Company, so it employed their terminology for classes. As an S-Bahn enthusiast recently explained: “There used to be four classes with the
Reichsbahn
but not all of their trains had all classes. I believe only the long-distance trains had first class. Fourth class was introduced in 1852 to make traveling for the poor more affordable. It was abolished in 1928.”
⁷

The second-class compartments on the Berlin S-Bahn had drastically fewer passengers than did the third-class compartments. It was for this reason that Ogorzow decided to attack women who rode in the second-class section.

Gerda Kargoll again fell asleep for a short while. When she woke, she asked Ogorzow what station they were approaching. He told her—it was Wuhlheide station. When the train stopped there, Ogorzow watched the doors closely, hoping that no one else boarded their compartment. Given the late hour and the fact that they were in second class, it was unlikely that anyone would join them.

No one did. The two of them were alone.

There was not much time between S-Bahn stations. Along this line, it could vary from three to five minutes. Once Ogorzow saw his opportunity, he needed to move fast in order to attack Kargoll before they reached the next station.

Just after 11:30
P.M.
, as soon as the train left Wuhlheide station, Ogorzow made his move. He quickly strode to where Kargoll was seated. She did not try to run or otherwise panic, as he was wearing a uniform and he had been sympathetic before when she had told him about having ridden the train too far. He’d even allowed her to ride in second class with him.

Without hesitating, he wrapped his large hands around her delicate neck. He started to manually strangle her using both his hands, hoping to knock her unconscious and then quickly rape her, before killing her. Ogorzow did not have any weapons with him, just his hands.

Kargoll fought him much harder than he’d expected. She was fighting not just to draw breath, but also to make her way from her seat to the sliding door on the side of the train that could be opened even between stations.

Somehow, drawing on adrenaline and the strength she had gained from working at a factory, Kargoll managed to make her way to the door before collapsing.

Strangulation is a terrible thing to experience. The New York Prosecutors Training Institute recently explained what this feels like: “Clinically a victim who is being strangled first experiences severe pain, followed by unconsciousness, and then brain death. The victim will lose consciousness by any one or more of the following: blocking of the carotid arteries (depriving the brain of oxygen), blocking of the jugular veins (preventing deoxygenated blood from exiting the brain), and/or closing off the airway, causing the victim to be unable to breathe. Only eleven pounds of pressure placed upon both carotid arteries for ten seconds is necessary to cause unconsciousness. If pressure is released immediately, consciousness will be regained within ten seconds. After 50 seconds of continuous oxygen deprivation the victim rarely recovers.”
⁸

While Kargoll was merely unconscious, Ogorzow mistakenly believed that he had killed her.

He opened up the door she had fought so hard to get to. He could do it one-handed; the doors were designed to be easy to open and close. The doors had two door panels, each with its own metal handle. All Ogorzow had to use was one of these handles, and both panels opened sideways, disappearing into the frame of the train carriage.

This attack had taken longer than he’d expected because his victim had fought against him. He wanted to get rid of what he thought was her dead body before he arrived at the next station.

With the wind rushing against him, he threw Kargoll’s unconscious body off the moving train. He was surprised to discover as he did so that he felt an incredible high as he touched her body and saw it fly into the night.

After throwing Gerda Kargoll off the train, Ogorzow tossed her belongings, including her purse with all its money still in it, right after her. He could live with himself as a sexual predator and a killer of women, but for some reason, he did not steal.

It was just before the train reached the station at Karlshorst. He closed the door before the train arrived at the platform. Through the use of a compressed air system, any open doors would automatically close before leaving a train station, but because the train was still in motion, Ogorzow had to manually shut the door by pulling on one of its handles. At the time, most of the handles were made of brass, but as the war progressed, cheaper metals were substituted.

If anyone had been standing out on the darkened platform, they would not have noticed anything amiss as the train pulled into the station.

Despite the fact that Ogorzow had not molested Kargoll, he experienced a sexual thrill from this attack. The forensic pathologist who would come to work on this case, Dr. Waldemar Weimann, later wrote that the combination of attacking this woman, having her body in his arms, and throwing her off a moving train “all called in Paul Ogorzow sensations produced by unprecedented violence. He then became addicted to it, attracted again and again to repeat that horrible situation.”
⁹

Unusually, in addition to being a forensic pathologist, Dr. Weimann was also a psychiatrist. This explains why he was comfortable making such an assessment about Ogorzow’s psychological state.

So while Ogorzow had decided to start killing his victims as a way to protect himself, he discovered that he enjoyed killing women. As he threw Kargoll’s seemingly lifeless body from the speeding train, he looked out into the black night. Adrenaline pumped through his veins. This had been the most singularly thrilling experience of his entire life. Killing, he realized, felt even better to him than did committing sexual assault.

Ogorzow was very aware of the S-Bahn timetable and the fact that there were only a few minutes between stations on this line. Given that he could not start his attack until the train left a station (the blacked-out windows prevented anyone from seeing anything from the platform, but he had to make sure no one could hear his attack either) and that he needed to dispose of his victim before reaching the next station, he had a very short amount of time in which to attack a woman, drag her to the door, and then throw her off the train, followed by all her belongings. There was not enough time to do more than touch his victims. He could not sexually assault them. And yet he continued to attack women on this mode of transportation despite the tight timeline it imposed on him, because the attack combined with his dragging the victim’s body and throwing her off the train, gave him a strong, sexual feeling of power and pleasure.

While Ogorzow had thought Gerda Kargoll was dead, she miraculously survived not only his strangling her, but also his throwing her from a train traveling around forty or fifty miles an hour.

She landed on a soft pile of sand by the side of the track. This was an amazing stroke of luck, as the vast majority of the ground alongside the train track was stony. Perhaps this sand had been put there once as a resource to help put out a fire, and it had since been forgotten about. The police were not certain why it was there, only that it had saved Miss Kargoll’s life.

She woke up on her own, on the embankment by the train tracks, where she slowly put together what had happened to her. She could see that she was lying in sand, and she was in pain from her injuries. Even with this sand to land in, it was still rough to be beaten up and then thrown from a moving train. She screamed for help, and eventually someone heard her cries and came to her rescue. The police were called, and they investigated this strange situation of a woman claiming to have been thrown from the S-Bahn.

Although he had yet to actually murder anyone on the train, this marked the beginning of Ogorzow’s activities as the S-Bahn Murderer. The term had not yet been coined, but this was only his first attack on the S-Bahn.

CHAPTER NINE

The Investigation Begins

The Berlin police were notified that a woman had been found by the train tracks on the morning of September 21, 1940. When they interviewed Gerda Kargoll, she remembered nothing between the start of being strangled and waking up by the side of the railroad tracks. The police wrote this off as most likely being a hoax or else a drunken accident, where she fell off a moving train in the dark and then made up a story to cover up her own role in her injury.

She had not been sexually assaulted, and she still had her belongings, so she had not been robbed. She had found her purse a short distance down the tracks, the distance the train had traveled in the time it took Ogorzow to throw it off.

Gerda Kargoll suffered from a concussion and multiple abrasions as a result of her fall. She was hospitalized for four and a half weeks. After her discharge, she continued to suffer terrible headaches as a result of the injuries to her head.

Without a robbery or a sexual assault, the police found it hard to believe that someone would, without warning, strangle her and then throw her from the train. A simpler explanation was that she was either mistaken or lying. It didn’t help matters that she had been drinking earlier that evening and had fallen asleep on the train two different times that night according to her own version of events.

The police had grown used to a higher number of accidents in Berlin than there had been prewar. This made them all the less likely to believe that someone had actually thrown Kargoll from the train, as opposed to it being an accident. The blackout produced accidents in the city on a regular basis, including many related to the train. During one month alone, December 1940, twenty-eight people died from blackout-related accidents on the train tracks in Berlin. Such accidents included people walking across the tracks and not seeing that a train was coming, as well as people falling off the platform in dark train stations. Automobile-related fatalities were also common, owing to the dimmed headlights on cars and the lack of streetlights.

Numerous criminals struck during the blackout, such as Paul Mathes, whom the Germans executed during the middle of Ogorzow’s killing spree. The German Police had caught Mathes stealing a large amount of coal, and they considered this “particularly heinous because it was carried out during a blackout.”
¹
He was sentenced to death on January 17, 1941 for this nonviolent crime. He was executed by guillotine.

When Kargoll was found in September 1940, Nazi Germany was at the height of its power. France had fallen to the Nazis three months before, and the UK was in a precarious position. They were afraid Hitler would invade, and the main way left for the British to fight was by sending out planes to bomb German targets. Daylight bombing allowed for some degree of accuracy, but it was extremely dangerous for the pilots, who ran a high risk of being shot down. So raids were conducted at night, making it virtually impossible to hit a specific target.

The nights in Berlin were a time of darkness and potential danger. Bombs could fall from the sky with only a short bit of notice that an attack was under way. Shrieking alarms would signal that people should flee to basement shelters, public air raid shelters, or anywhere they could quickly find cover.

For those riding the S-Bahn, what happened during an air raid depended on whether their train was heading to the outer sections or if it was on an inner-city line. Experts on the S-Bahn described how this worked: “A suburban train had to stop on the next station and all passengers had to leave the train there. Then the train had to rush to the next location on open track (away from any station) and the train personnel (engineer and conductor) had to take shelter under the train. After the air raid, all trains slowly returned to normal traffic, where the tracks were fine. . . . For the inner-city lines, old train drivers told the following: As soon as air formations were discovered miles away from Berlin, public enterprises were informed. Fifteen minutes later the public was informed with the air raid signal. So the train personnel had fifteen minutes to halt trains and to lead the passengers to the nearest shelters. Examples of big shelters in the city were at S-Bahn station Anhalter Bahnhof on the Schöneberger Straße or at S-Bahn station Friedrichstraße on the Reinhardtstraße.”
²