A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (13 page)

They thoroughly searched it, and although they did not find bloody fingerprints, they did find a weapon. As this was second class, there were cushions on the seat, unlike the hard wooden benches of third class. Behind one of these seat cushions they found the bloody object that Bendorf had been hit with.

It was a two-inch-thick, twenty-inch-long piece of lead-encased telephone cable, with numbers on one side. Here was a workable clue, because unlike say a piece of iron rebar that could have come from any construction site, this was a very specific kind of cable that was only used in Berlin by the phone company. And the numbers on it were unique ones, stamped by machinery.

The police worked hard to research the origins of this mundane but now important object. They learned that about a year and a half ago, telephony cable had been laid alongside parts of the S-Bahn railroad track.

The police contacted the phone company, Deutschen Telephonwerken, and learned that numbers were stamped on the side of the cable to indicate how many meters from the start of the cable each piece was. With this knowledge, the police discovered that this particular piece had been sliced off somewhere by the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station. The police looked into the workers who laid this cable and systematically eliminated them as suspects based primarily on their alibis for the times of the attacks.

The Kripo detectives concluded that there were two likely ways the attacker could have obtained this cable. First, it could have been tossed aside by a worker while he was installing the telephone line, and the assailant later found it by the side of the track. This suggested that the assailant was someone familiar with the railroad, as the general public did not normally walk by these rails. However, it was not a sure thing, as someone could have hopped a fence into this area. Second, workers collected scrap pieces of cable and stored them in a warehouse that was open only to Reichsbahn employees. Every bit of scrap metal had value in the wartime economy. Consequently, all kinds of scrap was being collected and stored here. This possibility pointed toward a railroad employee as the culprit.

This early clue pointed the investigation in the right direction, but there were thousands of people who worked for the railroad, and the police were not even sure that the perpetrator would have needed to be a railway worker to obtain this weapon.

It would take tremendous amounts of manpower and other resources to comb through all the people who worked for the railroad, and so far that was not justified. There had been only two attacks on the S-Bahn to date and both women survived. Only as Ogorzow’s criminal attacks continued, and the body count added up, would the police expend the resources necessary to look at all the railroad workers in Berlin.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Death on the Train

It was now December and Ogorzow had yet to actually kill anyone on the S-Bahn.

He’d tried twice, and each time at first mistakenly thought he’d succeeded. But somehow these two women had survived both the brutal attacks and being thrown from a moving train.

Ogorzow had killed, though, just not on the train. He’d strangled and stabbed Mrs. Gertrude Ditter. Since this occurred in the privacy of her home with only her small children present, sleeping nearby, he was able to wait long enough to make sure that she was actually dead.

On the S-Bahn, he was operating on a very strict timetable, with little time to attack his victims and dispose of their bodies. He couldn’t risk having someone he’d attacked still inside the compartment when it entered a train station. While not many people rode the second-class compartment late at night, there was always a chance that someone would board this part of the train at the next station.

As December 3, 1940, turned into December 4, Ogorzow rode the S-Bahn, looking for a new victim. It had been a month since he’d thrown Elizabeth Bendorf from the train. The thrill had not lasted that long, but he’d fought his desire to strike again so that he could see what the repercussions were to his last attack. He worried about getting caught, and so he took his time between attacks at this stage to make sure it was safe before he struck again.

Ogorzow carried with him a new blunt, heavy object to use as a weapon, an iron rod about fifteen inches long. It weighed a few pounds, and as with his old weapon, he’d found it during his work at the railroad company. It was the sort of thing that is still found at construction sites around the world. These days this sort of rod is usually made of steel, though, not cast iron. Kids often pick up such reinforcing bars, known as rebar, and play-fight with them. Ogorzow carried his concealed inside the left sleeve of his jacket uniform.

At the Karlshorst station, Ogorzow saw that there was already a female passenger sitting in the second-class train compartment. She was alone. He boarded the train, and it was just the two of them in this section as the train started to move.

With every assault Ogorzow committed on the S-Bahn, he became more confident in his actions. This translated into less and less hesitation before his attacks, as well as the increasing use of overwhelming force at the start of each attack. This evolution in Ogorzow’s assaults was the result of a combination of overcoming any internal barriers to using violence, such as societal norms and fear of being caught, and learning from past mistakes to become a more efficient criminal. Whereas before he first made small talk or waited a station or two before taking action, now he struck right away, as soon as the train was under way.

Like with many things in life, the more he did these attacks, the more comfortable he became with them. As with his early days as a Brownshirt, when he first took part in pitched street battles against Communists and other rivals to the Nazis, he grew desensitized to using violence. After the Nazis had seized power, when Ogorzow and his fellow Storm Troopers beat up German Jews and destroyed their property as part of
Kristallnacht
, he shed any inhibitions he may have had against attacking innocent civilians who wanted no part of his violence.

Ogorzow didn’t want to risk losing this opportunity, in the event that the female passenger left at the next station or someone else entered the train’s second-class section. And he knew that his time was limited. Once he attacked, he felt that he needed to throw his victim from the train before it reached the next station.

The passenger was Elfriede Franke, a twenty-six-year-old nurse wearing her uniform. The attack was as vicious as it was sudden. Ogorzow pulled the iron rod out of his jacket sleeve and went over to Franke. Without saying anything, he hit her hard over the head with it.

He’d learned from his last attack. When he’d hit Elizabeth Bendorf a month ago, he had not used enough force to achieve his goal of incapacitating her. Instead, she had managed to fight back against him, despite multiple blows to her head. This time he made sure that he did not make the same mistake.

The blow came down so hard on Elfriede Franke that it shattered her skull and damaged her brain. She fell down onto the train’s floor. She was dead.

Even with the speed and effectiveness of his attack, there still was not much time for Ogorzow to enjoy this moment. He never had much time with his victims on the train, as the interval between stations was so short. He would have liked to have more time, but this was a drawback he accepted as the cost of using the S-Bahn for his attacks.

He set down his weapon and walked over to the compartment door to open it. Unlike with his last attack, this time when he turned around and returned to his victim there were no surprises.

He had dragged his last victim by her feet to the open door. There’s no reason to believe that he did things any differently this time. Staring out into the darkness of blacked out Berlin with the cold winter wind rushing over him, he felt excited.

He experienced a kind of cocaine-like high—a feeling of being all-powerful—as he threw Elfriede Franke’s body into the night. Although this moment felt amazing to him, he needed to return to the real world, starting with the mundane task of pulling the handle to close the door when he was done.

As wonderful as he felt, there still was an element of frustration. He was not able to commit a rape on the train, as there was never enough time. Even here, where he had acted right away and killed his victim with a single blow, he still was not able to sexually assault her corpse. Over the course of his many attacks, when it came to sexually assaulting a woman, he did not seem to care one way or the other if she was alive, dying, or recently deceased.

He never left a victim on the train to be there when it arrived at the next station. The first time the reason for this was his fear of being caught. Since then, he’d learned that he also enjoyed dumping the bodies out of the train, so it now served two purposes—protecting him and the pleasure of the act itself.

He’d tried to kill on the S-Bahn twice before and failed. But now, in the early hours of Wednesday, December 4, 1940, Paul Ogorzow had committed his first successful S-Bahn murder.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Examining the Body

Just three hours after Ogorzow murdered Elfriede Franke, the police stood around her dead body. They were next to the train tracks between the Karlshorst and Rummelsburg S-Bahn stations. It was still nighttime, and the heavy-duty lamps the detectives used to light up the crime scene provided the only visible illumination in a city otherwise cloaked in darkness. The light gleamed off the gold bracelet still on the victim’s wrist. Her pocketbook was nearby. There had been no robbery. The only thing stolen from her was her life.

Although the blackout was still in effect, the police were able to use their discretion in lighting up this scene. If they heard an air raid warning, they would instantly spring into action and cut all the lights they were using.

Dr. Waldemar Weimann, the well-known forensic pathologist, thought it was an air raid siren when a driver for the Kripo woke him in the middle of the night to come to this crime scene. Once he arrived, the Kripo asked him to examine the body where it was found along the railroad tracks. He was able to estimate the rough time of death, but the detective on the scene wanted more information from Dr. Weimann than he was able to provide.

After looking over Elfriede Franke’s corpse, Dr. Weimann wrote in his memoirs that he was asked about the cause of death as follows:

“Death by a blow or just by the fall?” asked Detective Zach, who was standing beside me at the accident site.

“Do you have maybe an X-ray machine with you?” I replied angrily.

“After all, I would be grateful if I could have your finding today,” said Zach. . . . [Zach] seemed to detect my reluctance [to do a postmortem that quickly]. He pulled me aside and said, ‘This is the third case of this kind . . . on this route.’”
¹

This was the first time Dr. Weimann had heard anything about this situation. Zach explained to him that two women had been thrown from the S-Bahn before and had remarkably managed to survive, one by landing in sand and the other living to talk to police despite sustaining major damage to her body.

There was more. The detective told the doctor that the first victim had strangulation marks on her neck, while the second said she’d been hit on the head. As an expert in forensic medicine, the doctor was curious what other evidence the police had beyond the second woman’s word that a man had hit her. Detective Zach said that in addition to injuries related to being thrown from a train, a doctor was able to find evidence of a blow from a tool of some sort.

As Dr. Weimann recalled, he then asked, “Who was this medical examiner?”
²

The response was a surprise: “Well, you yourself, doctor.”
³

In thinking back, it made sense to him. Dr. Weimann wrote, “First, I was angry, I remembered those ominous radiographs. They had been sent to me one day out of the Reich Criminal Police Office ‘with a request for expert opinion.’ Otherwise unspecified were the Who, When, Where, How and Why—the golden ‘W’s of the coroner. I had to the best of my expertise and knowledge expressed the judgment of: ‘Flawless skull and skull base rupture by impact on a flat surface. In addition, localized fractures, possibly by impact with a blunt object.’”
⁴

Dr. Weimann was a curious man, and the first question that popped into his mind after realizing that he’d already consulted on the related attack, under mysterious circumstances, was “Why the secrecy?”
⁵

Detective Zach told him that it was because Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of propaganda, wanted this kept quiet. For Dr. Weimann, this answer made perfect sense and required no follow-up questions. He was well aware that Nazi Germany was a country in which the flow of information was tightly controlled by the government.

The doctor was thinking about what could motivate a man to throw women off the train, given that he was not stealing anything from them. He asked about it being a sexual offense, but the detective told him that the first two victims said that nothing of that sort had happened. Besides, they could see for themselves that Elfriede Franke still had all her clothes on and they were not disturbed any more than one would expect from such a terrible fall. There was nothing to suggest that any of these women had been molested.

Dr. Weimann left the crime scene to accompany the body as it was driven to the morgue.

What neither Dr. Weimann nor the police realized at the time was that the doctor had already examined a third woman, Gertrude Ditter, killed by the same perpetrator who attacked Elizabeth Bendorf and Elfriede Franke. They would not make that connection for a while to come, as Mrs. Ditter was found in her home in the garden area and had been killed with a knife, as opposed to being hit on the head and thrown off an S-Bahn train.