A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (24 page)

The day after the gas rationing started, the government announced that a host of consumer items, including shoes, would require rationing cards. This was shortly before Germany invaded Poland. When the full rationing went into effect on Monday, August 28, 1939, people in Berlin could see signs of the impending war everywhere around them. The city was congested with soldiers traveling through on their way east toward Poland.

One could still get food at restaurants by paying the bill, or buy a Christmas tree for the holidays, but most everything else required that one clip a small box on a ration card. These ration cards were issued by the German government.

As for shoes, the meager rations provided to Jews in Berlin did not include shoes. So that suggested that it was highly unlikely that a Jew would have a new pair of specialized shoes such as this suspect wore.

Lüdtke thought that these shoes would be the clue to solve this case. His detectives followed up on this print, going to shoe shops in the area and finding out the names of all the men who had bought this size and model. Out of this group, they were hoping to find the man who had left the shoeprint behind at the crime scene. They believed that this man was likely to be the S-Bahn Murderer.

Once they gathered these names, they eliminated those who were not in the Berlin area during the time of the crime. Since many men were not at home, having been sent to the far reaches of German-controlled territory as part of the war effort, this eliminated a large portion of the potential suspects.

Of those remaining, many lived in areas of Berlin that were far from the scene of the crime. However, the police did have one purchaser of these shoes who lived in the garden area, within walking distance of the murder scene.

A carpenter named W. Heimann had bought a pair of these shoes in the same size being sought by the police. And he lived three hundred feet from the crime scene, in the garden colony Gutland I.

The police checked to see if he had a criminal record and found that he had a prior conviction for a sex crime, albeit a relatively minor one of spying on a couple having sex. Still, that did mark him as a pervert in the eyes of the law, and so the police were optimistic that they might have found their man.

They picked Heimann up and interrogated him. He denied knowing anything about this crime or even being at the crime scene. Meanwhile, they searched his home and took the clothing items they found there and on his person to the forensics lab. The police hoped to find blood spatter on his clothes that matched the blood types of the various victims of the S-Bahn Murderer. They also hoped to find a uniform, perhaps from the National Railroad, that would be consistent with reports that the killer wore a dark uniform.

They found no such uniform and did not find any other incriminating evidence that would tie the suspect to the crimes. They did however compare the tread on Heimann’s shoes to that of the plaster mold made of a shoeprint at the Frieda Koziol crime scene. Although new shoes of this size and model would have matching treads on the bottom, as the shoes were worn, the treads would develop a new pattern based on how the wearer allocated his weight, little bits of gunk and stones that caught in there, scuffs, and other signs of wear and tear.

The National Institute of Justice recently explained that a shoe- print creates an impression that in turn can be checked for a pattern: “Impression evidence is created when two objects come in contact with enough force to cause an ‘impression.’ . . . Pattern evidence may be additional identifiable information found within an impression. For example, an examiner will compare shoeprint evidence with several shoe-sole patterns to identify a particular brand, model or size. If a shoe is recovered from a suspect that matches this initial pattern, the forensic examiner can look for unique characteristics that are common between the shoe and the shoeprint, such as tread wear, cuts or nicks.”
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The Kripo properly documented this three-dimensional impression evidence and looked at the pattern to determine the kind of shoe they were after. They collected the shoes of the suspect and carefully checked them against the photos and mold of the prints found at the scene. They had a match.

Although the suspect denied it, the police were now certain that he had been at the scene of the crime within the tight time frame dictated by the weather. And he had a record, which marked him in their eyes as a sexual deviant who might have escalated to more serious crimes against women.

However, he had no connection to the S-Bahn system, other than occasionally riding it, the same as almost everyone else in Berlin. He was a carpenter, so even in Nazi Germany, where uniforms were rife, he did not wear one to work. And he did not have outside activities, such as involvement with Nazi groups, that would provide him with a uniform. Of course, he could have stolen a uniform or created one himself, but the police could not find anything like that in their search of his residence.

Although he denied knowing anything about this crime at first, the police continued to question him. They held him for three days and interrogated him eight times before he admitted to being at the crime scene. This confession occurred when he was confronted with the shoe pattern evidence. He told the police that he had stumbled upon the body in the dark and then fled when he realized that this woman was dead.

This man was another kind of criminal who prowled Berlin during the blackout to hunt women, but he did not attack them. He was a Peeping Tom who took advantage of the darkness to sneak up on houses and peer through any uncovered portions of the windows. He also stole things at night, small things, such as the occasional purse or clock.

He’d already been arrested for such a crime before, and so he panicked when he found a dead body. He was afraid that as a sexual offender, who took advantage of the blackout, he could be facing very harsh penalties, including being shipped off to a concentration camp and/or being castrated.

He had an even bigger worry than that, though. He understood that the police were under pressure to solve this case, and he would make a good scapegoat because there was evidence tying him to a crime scene. He had a history as a sexual offender, and he had no faith at all in the judicial process of the special courts used by Nazi Germany to try such crimes. They moved fast, had little in the way of protections for defendants, and their death sentences were carried out swiftly.

It took a while for Lüdtke to believe him, but Heimann had solid alibis for the times of some of the S-Bahn Murderer’s crimes. Lüdtke and his detectives were disappointed that this promising clue had led to a dead end, but they did have the consolation prize of having caught a Peeping Tom.

If they had been tempted to pin the crimes on this man anyway, the biggest deterrent from doing so would have been the fact that the real killer was still out there. So even though it would have been simple to frame Heimann and thus reassure the public and their superiors that the matter was solved, it would have blown up in their faces if the crimes continued to occur. And serial killers rarely quit on their own, so it was unlikely that the killer would stop, even if he heard that someone else had been caught for his crimes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In Police Custody

About a week after this last murder, the police experienced their big break in the case, although they had no idea at the time how important this new lead would be. They had been questioning thousands of railroad employees in order to see if any of them were suspect in any way or could provide any information that might help in the investigation.

After having determined that a particular railroad worker they were interviewing was not a suspect, the Kripo detectives would conclude their interview with this now standard question: “Have you noticed anything suspicious about any of your coworkers?”

This particular worker replied that while he did not know the identity of the killer, he had seen a coworker ditch his job by climbing a fence. Then, much later, this coworker returned to the job before anyone in charge had noticed that he’d left his post. When he asked this man where he was going, he replied that he was going to see a woman. He did not know the man’s name, but he could describe him. He also told the police that the work site in question was the signal tower Vnk at the S-Bahn Rummelsburg station. These were enough details for the police to be able to follow up and determine the identity of this mystery railway employee.

This coworker turned out to be Paul Ogorzow, who had worked for years near the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station. The police looked at Ogorzow’s work record and saw that he had a certificate for good service issued by his superiors and that there were no complaints against him. And the vast majority of the criminal acts the police were investigating occurred during times that he was at work. They had talked with him before, as they had talked with most railway workers and people who lived near the garden area.

The police had cleared him on the basis that he was working at the time of some of the attacks. They noted three different times that he was on duty when attacks occurred, including one time he was manning a telegraph, a task the police thought it would be impossible for him to leave without getting in trouble with his superiors.

Ogorzow had not looked to the Kripo like whatever they imagined a serial killer would be like. He appeared to be a happily married family man, a loyal party member and Brownshirt, whose only interest outside his work and family was tending the fruit trees in his garden. His superiors gave him high marks for the quality of his work. There was some grumbling by his coworkers that he said offensive things about women at times, but nothing that suggested he hated women so much that he killed them.

Now the police took another, much closer look at him. When the detectives looked in detail at his work records, they realized that the activities that provided him with alibis for certain murders could not be corroborated.

During these times, Ogorzow was working alone, with duties that he could have temporarily abandoned without being caught by his employers. The police now knew that he would sometimes climb over a fence to ditch work. They also realized that he could simply walk to the S-Bahn station closest to his workplace and ride the rails from there.

This made him a potential suspect; although the police were far from certain that he was their man. This was simply another lead to be investigated—one of many generated by the extensive interviews with thousands of railroad personnel.

At six-forty-five in the morning on Saturday, July 12, 1941, Kripo Detective Georg Heuser went to Ogorzow’s apartment with two lower-ranked officers for backup. They picked up Ogorzow without incident and brought him back to their station for questioning.

This same day the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signed a formal agreement, the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, to fight together against Germany. This was a huge turning point in the war, as until Germany had attacked the Soviets three weeks ago, a nonaggression pact had been in place between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Lüdtke studied the file he had on Paul Ogorzow. It showed a married man with kids, a Nazi Party member in good standing, and a sergeant in the SA. He’d been employed by the railroad for a long time and worked his way up to his current position. Lüdtke thought that the description that they had, as conflicted and vague as it was owing to the blackout conditions, did not particularly match Ogorzow, other than that he was the right general size. Most noticeably, Ogorzow had a striking nose that no one had mentioned in their descriptions of the S-Bahn Murderer.

As for his criminal record, Ogorzow’s only entry did not suggest a sexual predator or murderer. It was for a break-in he’d committed with two others in 1932. He’d committed this crime in the town of Königs Wusterhausen, which was at the end of the line for one of the Berlin S-Bahn routes. He and his two accomplices had broken into an inn to steal things. He’d been unemployed at the time. For this crime, he was tried in the district court of the town of Nauen. The Nazis had not yet gained power, and the German government of the time was known as the Weimar Republic. Ogorzow’s trial took place under their laws, and this court sentenced him to nine months in prison.

However, with Hitler and the Nazi Party gaining power in early 1933, things changed for Ogorzow. On March 21, 1933, Adolf Hitler handed President Hindenburg two documents to sign. One was for a full pardon of party members such as Paul Ogorzow. As a result of this amnesty, Ogorzow was a free man. Others who were set free that day included numerous other Nazis who’d been convicted of violent crimes.

Often sexual predators will have past crimes in their record that indicate their progression from relatively small-time crimes such as harassing women to the much more serious crimes of raping and killing. While Ogorzow had such an escalation in his criminal activities, it was not reflected in the paperwork the detectives had in front of them, as he had not been caught for any of his prior crimes against women.

Moreover, Ogorzow did not fit the preconceived notions that the police had developed early on in their case. A family man was not thought of as a serial killer—instead the image police generally associated back then with such crimes was a single man. Also, the racial ideology of the Third Reich meant that many of the detectives had focused on the usual suspects of their warped belief system—Jews, who had yet to be deported from Berlin to concentration camps, and foreigners, who were used as forced labor.

But Lüdtke had kept an open mind and come to believe that his suspect had to be someone who worked at the railroad company. So seeing Ogorzow’s file did not result in Lüdtke letting him go. Instead, he had his men follow through on this possible break in the case.

When questioned by Detective Heuser, Ogorzow at first denied that he had ever left his workplace while he was supposed to be on the job. He also denied ever climbing the fence there. So for the moment, the police only had the word of one railroad employee against another.