A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (14 page)

Dr. Waldemar Weimann was also a psychiatrist, and as this case developed, he would provide the police with assistance in understanding the possible motive and thinking of the man who did these crimes. Weimann was born in Cologne, Germany, on November 3, 1893, which meant that he was forty-seven years old when Ogorzow killed Elfriede Franke on the S-Bahn.

He looked the part of a serious man of science. Dr. Weimann’s ears stuck out, and his thin, dark hair was receding. In later years, it would turn white. He had a large nose, a small chin, and dark eyes. While working, he wore a white lab coat, dress shirt, and tie.

In 1930, Dr. Weimann founded the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Berlin and became its first director. He also served as the chief medical examiner for Berlin. He later wrote of the murders committed by Paul Ogorzow, “From the myriad of large cases that I worked there, one stands out, which is one of the most interesting in criminal history.”
⁶

Dr. Weimann was arguably one of the best known and respected forensic pathologists in Nazi Germany. He’d dealt with high-profile cases before, including examining the body of the Nazi martyr SA
Sturmführer
Horst Wessel following his murder in February 1930. After his death, the Nazis made a song he wrote the lyrics to called “The Horst Wessel Song” their official party anthem and unofficially the co-national-anthem of Germany. The song is now banned for most uses in Germany and Austria.

At the morgue, Dr. Weimann learned that Elfriede Franke’s killer had hit his victim with a blunt instrument before throwing her from the train. However, Dr. Weimann was not able to determine exactly what the weapon was.

As Detective Zach had confided in Dr. Weimann, the police had immediately put together that the individual who killed this woman was most likely the same one who had previously thrown two other women from S-Bahn trains.

So Detective Zach visited Dr. Weimann in the morgue and brought with him the heavy piece of lead cable that the police had recovered from the S-Bahn second-class train compartment after the attack on Elizabeth Bendorf. This was the same cable that Ogorzow had also used on Julie Schuhmacher.

As Dr. Weimann recalled, the detective displayed the lead object and asked:

“Could it have been something like that?” asked Detective Zach and hands me a piece of heavy lead wire, about two thumbs thick and fifty centimeters long.

“Quite possibly,” I said.
⁷

The doctor could not be certain that the same type of weapon had been used in this latest attack, but it was at least consistent with the newer findings. In fact, it was a different sort of blunt metal object that had been used—an iron rebar rod, not a piece of lead-encased telephone cable.

The police had not yet connected the S-Bahn assaults with the earlier attacks in the garden area. Besides the different locations, the garden attacks involved a very different modus operandi than Ogorzow used on the train—choking and stabbing versus hitting with a blunt object and throwing from a train.

Then, as now, police considered the nature of a violent crime and grouped together victims who had been attacked in a similar way. Women harassed while walking home or stabbed or strangled at their home were not seen as being in the same category of criminal offenses as women hit with a blunt object while on the S-Bahn and then thrown from the train. Also, the garden attacks often had an obvious sexual assault component, while the attacks on the train did not.

These two different areas and kinds of attack were considered by the police to be separate matters. For the time being, Paul Ogorzow had this going in his favor.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Kripo

Now that someone had died, the S-Bahn attacks became a high-priority case, assigned to the office of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Kripo
in Berlin. This office was primarily concerned with capital offenses such as homicide.

Elfriede Franke was the first person killed on the S-Bahn by Paul Ogorzow. Before her, two women had been thrown out of the moving train with only minor injuries. Franke’s death changed the case and bolstered the credibility of the first two victims, so the police now felt certain that they were telling the truth and a stranger had thrown them from the train for no reason of which they were aware.

The head of this Kripo unit, Police Commissioner Wilhelm K. Lüdtke, took charge of the investigation on the same day as Franke’s murder, December 4, 1940. He was then fifty-four years old.

Lüdtke held his position despite his lack of Nazi convictions. He was not even a party member until April 1, 1940, which was unusual for someone at his high level in the police hierarchy. He did not join out of political belief, but for practical reasons.

He’d joined the party exactly eight years to the day after Paul Ogorzow had. As a result of Lüdtke joining so late, he had a high party number of 8,015,159. As a point of comparison, Ogorzow’s party number was almost seven million members lower at 1,109,672.

As of September 1939, the Kripo was part of the RHSA, which was short for the Reich Main Security Office (
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
). Heinrich Himmler, a very powerful Nazi official, was the chief of the German Police (
Chef der Deutschen Polizei
) and the head of the SS (
Reichsführer
-SS).

Theoretically, in regards to his running the German Police, Himmler should have reported to the Reich minister of the interior (Wilhelm Frick), but as a practical matter, his only real boss was Hitler himself. A once classified Allied document on the German Police explained: “As Commander in Chief of the SS, however, HIMMLER was directly responsible to HITLER alone, the Supreme Commander of the SS, and was, therefore, in a position to circumvent the authority of FRICK, the Minister of the Interior.”
¹

Under the dictatorship that was Nazi Germany, Hitler had absolute power and reported to no one. His decisions were final.

Himmler formed the RHSA by merging various police and security organizations into one entity directly under his control. In essence, he took the intelligence agency of the SS (
Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS
, or SD) and combined it with the Security Police (
Sicherheitspolizei
, or SiPo). The SiPo included the Criminal Police (Kripo) and the Gestapo. With the reorganization of German police forces into the RHSA, the SiPo no longer existed as an actual organization, but people continued to use the term informally to refer to those portions of the RHSA that used to belong to the SiPo.

A notable exception to the gathering of police forces into the RHSA was the Orpo, the ordinary police. Himmler ultimately controlled them as well, but through a different administrative structure. He had a trusted underling who ran the Orpo: chief of the
Ordnungspolizei
Kurt Dalüge. A historian described Dalüge as “a vast thug of a man nicknamed ‘Dummi-Dummi’ by his detractors.”
²

Himmler looked like a bookish bureaucrat, with his wire frame glasses, round face, and small mustache. He did not look particularly Aryan—Himmler had hazel eyes and receding brown hair. Moreover, he was terrible at sports and suffered from a variety of minor health problems.

Himmler was born in Munich on October 7, 1900, and had studied agriculture in college. He was a failed chicken farmer in the mid to late 1920s. He’d joined the Nazi Party early on, in 1923, with a low card number of 14,303. He later joined the SS (
Schutzstaffel
) with the extremely low number of 168. It was in this organization that he rapidly rose in rank. Later on, he became one of the key architects of the Holocaust, responsible for the murder of millions of people.

To run the RHSA, Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich as its director. Heydrich had run the Gestapo before this reorganization and been a part of the purge of SA leaders known as the Night of the Long Knives. He was a key architect of
Kristallnacht
, and later of the
Einsatzgruppen
(mobile killing squads on the Eastern Front) and the Holocaust.

Heydrich was a handsome young man, born on March 7, 1904, in Halle an der Saale, Germany. He had an oval-shaped face, with a high forehead and close-cropped blond hair. Unlike Himmler, he fit the Aryan ideal of being tall, skinny, athletic, good-looking, blue-eyed, and blond. He was also a ruthless believer in the Nazi cause and a mass murderer many times over. His nicknames included the Blond Beast, the Hangman, and the Butcher of Prague.

As director of the RHSA, Heydrich presided over seven administrative divisions, known in German as
Ämter
, which can be translated as “offices.” The first office (
Amt
I) dealt with personnel. The second division dealt with organization, administration, and law. So both of these can be understood as dealing with administrative matters for the RHSA.

Amt
III was responsible for “spheres of German life,” which included German culture, ethnic Germans inside conquered territory, and intelligence gathering within Germany. The domestic office of the SD (Inland-SD) formed the core of this new department.

A once classified Allied document on the German Police explained that this office “directs the principal functions of the SD inside Germany. . . . The main task of
Amt
III is the collection, by open and secret methods, of information concerning all events and tendencies liable to affect the maintenance of Nazi power at home and abroad. It supervises all ‘spheres of German life’ (
deutsche Lebensgebiete
)
and gathers intelligence for the control of all religious, cultural, and economic activities, but especially for the suppression of anti-Nazi elements.”
³

Amt
IV was the Gestapo, which this Allied document on the German police explained was “mainly concerned with investigating and crushing any opposition to the Nazi regime.”
⁴
There were few, if any, meaningful legal limits on their power. A favored method they used to detain people was to place them into protective custody. The prisoner would sign his own request to be placed into such custody. If he refused to sign it, the Gestapo would beat him until he did.

A subdepartment of this office (RSHA
Referat
IV B4), run by Adolf Eichmann, dealt with Jewish affairs and evacuation. Eichmann would eventually play a major role in the planning and execution of the Holocaust.

The Kripo formed
Amt
V. The Allied handbook on the German Police explained that this office, “which is also known as the
Reichskriminalpolizeiamt
(RKPA), is the national Headquarters of the
Reichskriminalpolizei
(
Kripo
,
Criminal Police), controlling the network of criminal police offices. . . . The RKPA developed out of the old
preußischen
Landeskriminalamt
(Prussian Criminal Police Headquarters), whose functions consisted only of the combatting of crime in the normal sense of the term. The RKPA, however, under the Nazi regime, has not only expanded the concept of ‘combating’ to include ‘prevention’ in the most ruthless sense; it also plays an important part in the investigation and prosecution of what are today called ‘political crimes,’ but would formerly have been regarded at the most as venial offences. The line dividing cases of interest to the
Gestapo
and those within the field of the
Kripo
has in many instances become rather vague.”
⁵

A history of the Third Reich elaborated on this blurring of lines between the Gestapo and the Kripo: “The Gestapo was clearly the dominant partner vis-à-vis the police in general, while the twelve thousand or so criminal investigators, under Arthur Nebe, began to be indistinguishable from their political colleagues.”
⁶

The remaining two offices dealt primarily with matters outside of Germany itself.
Amt
VI handled “espionage, sabotage and subversion in occupied and enemy countries.”
⁷
The foreign intelligence agency of the SD (
Ausland-SD
) formed the basis of this office.

Amt
VII, added in 1940, mostly handled propaganda, specifically, “
Amt
VII deals mainly with occupied and satellite countries and is concerned with the preparation of political warfare material and the conduct of ideological supervision, especially in the academic field.”
⁸

Dr. Jens Dobler, an expert on the Berlin police during the Nazi era, discussed the potential overlap between the Gestapo and Kripo forces under this reorganization. “The Gestapo security service and the criminal investigations department (Kripo) were joined together into the Reich’s Department of Security. This definitely did not lead to a bettering of the work methods. Conversely, sometimes both the Gestapo and the Kripo were handling the same cases simultaneously. Many Kripo officers who were made into members of the Gestapo attempted to get back to the supposedly ‘un-political’ Kripo, but, of course, the Kripo were exactly as political—supposed ‘criminals,’ or minorities were deported by the Kripo into concentration camps.”
⁹

For Police Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke this meant that he needed to be wary of potential Gestapo interference in his case. In addition, his ultimate superiors were more concerned about making the Nazi state look good than they were with stopping a killer of women. He was fortunate that the head of the Kripo did care about the case, but there were more powerful men whose priorities lay elsewhere.