Berlin at War (12 page)

unease in the gathering gloom. Berliners had been forced to adapt to

many novelties in those first months of the war – rationing had been

introduced and the threat of air attack was ever present – but it was

the blackout that gave every one of them a jolting, chilling reminder,

night after night, that Germany was at war.

As if such concerns were not enough, Berliners soon found a new

peril stalking the night-time streets of their city. In the autumn of

1940, a woman’s body was discovered in her home in the eastern

suburb of Friedrichsfelde. The victim, a twenty-year-old mother of

two named Gerda Ditter, had been strangled and stabbed in the neck.

Her home, a small wooden building in an area of allotments, shacks

and summer houses, showed no signs of robbery or forced entry.

There were no witnesses.34

To make matters worse, the murder appeared to be part of a pattern.

Three other women had been stabbed in the same district over the

previous year. None of them had been robbed or sexually assaulted

and all had survived – but the coincidence of location and method

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berlin at war

suggested that a single suspect might be responsible for all four crimes.

In addition, two further assaults had taken place nearby; one woman

had been dazzled by a man with a torch, before being beaten uncon-

scious; and a second had been throttled and then thrown from a moving

train. All the offences had been committed under cover of darkness,

with the attacker exploiting the blackout to facilitate both his approach

and his subsequent escape. As a result, no useful description of the

suspect was available, other than the fact that he was male, of slight

build and of average height.35

A month later – on the night of 4 November 1940 – the suspect

struck again. This time, a thirty-year-old woman was attacked on a

train travelling between the stations of Hirschgarten and Köpenick in

the south-east of Berlin, not far from the location of the previous

attacks. As before, the victim had been hit over the head in the near

darkness of the blacked-out carriage and thrown from the moving

train. Fortunately for investigators, however, she had survived and was

able to tell police that her assailant had been wearing the uniform of

German Railways. In addition, the weapon used in the attack – a length

of lead piping – was found in a nearby rail carriage.

Another month later, and two more cases confirmed to the detec-

tives of the Berlin serious crime bureau, the
Kriminalpolizei
– or Kripo

– that they were dealing with a vicious serial killer. In the early morning

of 4 December, a woman was found unconscious by the roadside,

close to the railway lines in Karlshorst. Nineteen-year-old Irmgard

Frese’s skull had been fractured with a blunt instrument, and she had

been raped. She died later that day in hospital without regaining

consciousness.

That same day, just as news of this latest victim was circulating at

Kripo headquarters, investigators received reports of the discovery of

a second body, barely 500 metres away from the first. Elfriede Franke

– a twenty-six-year-old nurse – was found close to the railway line at

Rummelsburg. She had been thrown from a train and had suffered a

fractured skull.

Accidental deaths on the railways during the blackout in Berlin were

a rather common occurrence. In December 1940, as the
Kriminalpolizei

investigation was getting under way, there were twenty-eight deaths

registered on the capital’s railways, twenty-five of which were directly

attributed to the blackout.36 They were caused by people unwittingly

a deadly necessity

43

stepping off platforms in the darkness, or being hit by speeding trains

while crossing unlit tracks and sidings. Typical of such cases was that

of one Gerda May, who slipped on the darkened platform at Bellevue

that December and fell into the path of an oncoming train. Her

mangled body, like those murdered in Karlshorst and Rummelsburg,

was found next to the tracks.37 It could be argued, therefore, that the

officers of the Kripo were not only hampered by the fact that their

suspect was operating under cover of darkness. They also found it

difficult to sift accidental deaths, or even suicides on the railways, from

those that might feasibly be considered as murders. The blackout, it

seemed, was obstructing them at every turn.

For this reason, perhaps, the killer’s next victim was initially misin-

terpreted as a suicide. Three weeks after the double murder, on 22

December, another female corpse was found, also close to the railway

tracks and also with a fractured skull. Investigations determined that

the victim, thirty-year-old Elisabeth Büngener, had a history of

serious illness and had been diagnosed with depression. Moreover,

her body had been found at Rahnsdorf, fully eight miles east of

Karlshorst and Rummelsburg, where the other victims had been

found. Accordingly, the initial Kripo report concluded with the suspi-

cion that the cause of death was suicide – that the victim had died

jumping from the S-Bahn train.38

This was no suicide, however, and, within a couple of weeks, two

additional victims demonstrated as much. First, on 29 December, the

body of forty-six-year-old Gertrud Siewert was found close to the

railway at Karlshorst. Like the others, she had a fractured skull and

appeared to have been thrown from a train. A week later, on 5 January

1941, the body of twenty-eight-year-old Hedwig Ebauer was found in

similar circumstances near Wuhlheide. Both cases, the Kripo concluded,

fitted the profile of the previous four murders and the earlier assaults,

and were assumed to have been the work of a man already known

to all Berlin as ‘the S-Bahn Murderer’.

The realisation that a serial killer was stalking the darkened streets

of the capital caused considerable alarm in Berlin. With the majority of

the city’s menfolk away serving in the armed forces and many women

now drafted in to work long hours in factories and businesses, it

was easy to see how a form of mass hysteria might have resulted.

Well aware of the public’s concerns, the authorities were forced to

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berlin at war

tread a fine line between providing adequate information and

provoking panic. As one senior police officer warned at the time: ‘We

should not exaggerate the whole thing, [and] drive the people of Berlin

crazy.’39 So, though the popular press covered the murders, at least in

their essentials, it is worth noting that the more serious
Deutsche

Allgemeine Zeitung
did not. Its Berlin edition failed to make any mention of the murders in December 1940, in spite of the fact that four women

had been killed in that month. The
Völkischer Beobachter
, meanwhile,

mentioned only one case – that of Gertrud Siewert – and averred that

it was most likely to have been an accident.40 It is not clear whether

there had been orders from on high to this end, but it stands to reason

that there would have been a policy of not reporting news stories that

would reflect badly on German society.

In truth, a certain dose of hysteria was already in evidence, not

least in the Kripo investigation, which had begun to reflect the racial

and political prejudices of the time. One officer, for instance, suggested

that the suspect might be a Jew, explaining himself with the contention

that large numbers of Jews were then working on German Railways.41

Others, it seemed, speculated on whether the killer might be a British

agent.

More plausibly, the Kripo had to consider whether their suspect

could be a foreign labourer. By the autumn of 1940, after the successful

Blitzkrieg
in the west, Berlin was awash with foreign workers, shipped

in – usually against their will – to meet the manpower demands of

the city’s industrial and commercial sectors. Coincidentally, that foreign

presence was particularly noticeable on the stretch of railway where

the murders and assaults occurred. Not only were Italian, French

and Polish labourers a common sight in the factories of the area –

especi ally working for German Railways – but at nearby Wuhlheide,

there was an
Arbeitserziehungslager
, a form of concentration camp for

foreign workers who had committed crimes. It did not take an enor-

mous leap of imagination to conclude that one of those countless

labourers might be the culprit. The Kripo acted accordingly. Nearby

foreign labourers’ camps were placed under a nightly curfew, requests

for information in numerous languages were distributed, and identity

checks were made on the foreign personnel working for the railway.42

In addition, the authorities took some practical steps both to protect

women travelling on the S-Bahn and to catch their killer. A reward of

a deadly necessity

45

10,000 Reichsmarks was offered for information leading to an arrest.

Fingertip searches of the various crime scenes were carried out and a

number of large-scale, night-time sweeps of the area were undertaken.

The police presence on the railway was also increased. Officers patrolled

the stations and platforms and even volunteered to accompany woman

travelling alone at night. Meanwhile, investigators examined the shift

patterns of over five thousand railway employees to see which ones

coincided with the times of the murders.

Kripo methods were more imaginative still. Male officers in drag

were first placed on the trains to pose as ‘bait’, riding the S-Bahn at

night so as to draw the murderer into an attack. When this failed, their

female colleagues were asked to fill the role as well. Though they were

not armed, they were at least equipped with reinforced headwear to

protect them from attack.43

These measures were not entirely unsuccessful. They did not lead

directly to an arrest, but it seems they might have given the murderer

a fright. One night that winter, a female Kripo officer, acting as ‘bait’,

was travelling alone in a second-class carriage on the S-Bahn when

she was approached by a man matching the description of the killer.

Following a brief exchange, however, the man became alarmed and

bolted out of the train as it was approaching a station. After evading

the police pickets on the platform, he disappeared into the darkness.

In another incident, a police patrol discovered a man hiding in a train

carriage in a siding at Erkner, at the end of the line that ran through

Karlshorst and Rummelsburg. When he was approached by police

officers, he ran off.

Perhaps because of these heightened measures, the killer – who

had struck five times in barely a month – became much more sporadic

in his attacks. The next assault took place fully five weeks after the

last of the murderous spree that had filled December and early January.

On the night of 11 February, a woman’s body was found by the rail

tracks near Rummelsburg. Johanna Voigt was thirty-nine and had

suffered horrific head injuries before being thrown from a train.

As if to confirm this new-found caution, the killer made his next

– and final – attack five months later, in early July 1941. He also changed

his
modus operandi
. Switching away from making his assaults on the

trains, he reverted to his earlier tactic of attacking women in the alleys

and allotments in Friedrichsfelde – the same place where he had killed

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berlin at war

his first victim, Gerda Ditter, nine months earlier. There, in the early

morning of 3 July 1941, the body of thirty-five-year-old divorcee Frieda

Koziol was discovered. She had died from a fractured skull inflicted

by a single blow with a blunt instrument. The Kripo investigators

concluded that she had been hit from behind and then sexually

assaulted. She had had no chance to defend herself.44

At this point, the detective work of the Kripo at last began to bear

fruit. For one thing, the latest crime scene had given investigators a

crucial piece of evidence: an impression of a rubber-soled shoe,

presumably from the suspect. In addition, as a result of the painstaking

analysis of the shift patterns of railway employees, eight suspects were

brought in for interrogation. One of these was a twenty-nine-year-old

assistant signalman, Paul Ogorzow, who had been employed on the

S-Bahn between Rummelsburg and Karlshorst since 1938. Upon initial

interview, Ogorzow had impressed his interrogators. Confident and

coherent, he was described as ‘assiduous and industrious’ and ‘happily

married with two children’. A Nazi Party and SA member to boot,

Ogorzow appeared to be such a solid, upstanding member of German

society that the primary interrogation concluded: ‘After these obser-

vations, further enquiries regarding Ogorzow are suspended.’45

However, in the ongoing investigation Ogorzow’s name kept coming

up. He was labelled by colleagues as an outspoken misogynist. And,