A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (4 page)

Miss Jablinski was nineteen years old and was walking home from her war related work. She was tired and ready to call it a day. She’d taken the train and now was walking alone in the dark through the garden colony. There were trees and small plots filled with fruits, herbs, and vegetables. Before the war, there had been more flowers and decorative plants, but with rationing, it made sense to grow things that didn’t look as pretty but could be eaten.

The garden colony was empty at this time of night. The main commuter train line in Berlin, the S-Bahn, stopped here. While hundreds of thousands of people rode this rapid transit train every day, generally just a few people, if any, got off the S-Bahn here at this time, and they quickly dissipated, each going his or her own way on the myriad paths that branched away from the train station.

While walking in the garden area, Miss Jablinski could hear the footsteps of someone walking behind her. She looked back over her shoulder and saw nothing. It was too dark and this person was too far behind her on the path.

There had already been rumors of attacks in this area, so when she heard the footsteps quicken, as if the person was trying to catch up to her, she started to panic.

As the adrenaline pumped through her body, her fight-or-flight response kicked in. She could try hiding in the dark, but if the person following her had a flashlight, he might find her. Fighting seemed a poor option as she did not have a weapon. So she ran as fast as she could.

Ogorzow broke out into a run as well. They were now engaged in a high-stakes footrace, the end of which was Jablinski’s home. If she made it there in time to get inside, she would be safe. If he caught up to her first, he would attack.

She lived nearby, so she did not risk stopping by a random garden house in the hope that someone would be home and would come out to help her at this ungodly hour if she banged on the door. The blackout meant that even if someone was at home and awake with the lights on, she wouldn’t be able to see that from the path. The person’s blackout curtains would prevent any light from spilling out and revealing that someone was home.

Behind her, Ogorzow broke out into a run as well. He was stronger and faster and managed to gain ground on her quickly.

Ogorzow won this high-stakes footrace. When he caught up to Miss Jablinski, he didn’t yell at her or hit her over the head. Without saying a word, he stabbed her in the neck. Then again, and again, and again. Eerily, just as in his attack on Miss Budzinski, he was silent during the entire event.

Although she was shocked at first, she gathered her wits about her and screamed as loud as she could. In response, Paul Ogorzow stopped his attack. He paused a moment and then ran away. As much as he desperately wanted to continue stabbing Hertha Jablinski, he was deeply afraid of being caught.

Now, on her own, Miss Jablinski managed to get help and stop the bleeding. She was lucky that he had not cut an artery or she almost certainly would have bled to death on this garden path. At the hospital, surgeons stitched up her wounds, but they would leave scars behind once they healed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Do Not Cry Yet

Once again, Paul Ogorzow was worried about getting caught. Although it was dark, his most recent victim, Hertha Jablinski, had gotten a decent look at him. She wasn’t able to tell the police much about his facial features, but he didn’t know that at the time.

Only when the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months did Ogorzow feel secure that the police had not learned enough from Jablinski to be able to find him. It was difficult for him to control his urges to assault women during this time, but he was able to do so.

Even though he was not attempting to kill women then, he continued to prowl in the garden area at night. Sometimes he went out just to find women to yell at and scare with his flashlight. He would go out on foot or ride his bicycle. He also continued to physically attack women during this time, but not with a level of violence that the police considered to be attempted murder.

The police were aware that a man was harassing and attacking women in the garden allotments, but as there had been no murders and few clues, it was not a high-priority case.

Eight months after his attack on Hertha Jablinski, Ogorzow finally felt secure enough to try again for a full-fledged assault on a woman who was making her way through the garden allotment area during the blackout conditions.

At half past one on the morning of July 27, 1940, Mrs. Gertrud Nieswandt was walking through the garden area. She was twenty-five years old and was going to her parents’ house. As she made her way in the darkness, Mrs. Nieswandt heard someone walking behind her. She quickened her pace but did not break into a run. Perhaps she was not aware that a man was using the darkness and isolation of this area to attack women. There had been nothing in the news about these attacks; the only information that spread was rumors among the people who lived here. Mrs. Nieswandt, though, lived elsewhere.

Behind her, Ogorzow was slowly gaining ground. He had learned from his attack on Hertha Jablinski that if he broke into a loud run, it would spook his intended victim. So he picked up his pace, in a carefully calculated move to try to catch up to her before she reached her destination, whatever that might be, without scaring her into yelling out that a man was chasing her.

Although it was late, and they encountered no one else on this path, Mrs. Nieswandt could not be certain that the footsteps behind her meant that someone was stalking her. There were other people who worked late hours and needed to walk home from the train station.

By the time Ogorzow caught up to her, she had almost reached safety. They were now standing together in front of the porch of her parents’ house.

At this point, it was clear to her that something was very wrong. She did not know this man who was standing near her. If she had known that a man had been seriously hurting women in this area, she would have likely yelled out the moment she realized that he was near her. Instead it was a confusing moment, in which she may have thought this man was merely going to try to ask her out. With so many men away in the military, it was not uncommon for those men still in Berlin to try to take advantage of the fact that there were many lonely women in the city.

Given that at this moment Ogorzow could tell that this woman was not panicking, he tried to keep things calm by saying something relatively innocuous.

He asked her, “Are you going in here?”
¹

She answered him almost automatically with an “Of course.”

Mrs. Nieswandt had no interest in having a conversation with a man she didn’t know in front of her parents’ house in the middle of the night. She wanted him to go away, but she did not feel threatened enough by what he’d said and done so far to actually scream out for help.

She thought a simple threat would be enough to get rid of this man, and so she said, “Leave, or else I will yell.”

Ogorzow was worried about his victims screaming for help. In the past, when they screamed, he ran away. Not only did this mean he had to stop his criminal actions mid-attack, but as he ran away, he also felt fear that he would be caught. He needed to strike now, fast, before this woman actually did scream out and call attention to them.

Paul Ogorzow replied, “Do not cry yet.” At the same time as he was saying this, he hit Mrs. Nieswandt, hard. As a result, she fell to the ground. Once she was down, he bent over and used his pocketknife to stab her in the neck. His knife landed less than half an inch away from her carotid artery. If he had hit that artery, she would have quickly bled out and died. There was still blood flowing from her neck, but nothing like there would have been if his strike had landed in a slightly different place.

He intended for this first stab to incapacitate his victim and prevent her from screaming for help. He raised his arm up with his now bloody knife in it. This time, his intention was not to stop her from crying out, but to fulfill his own desire to hurt her in a sexualized way. He plunged his knife into her about two inches from her genital region.

As he pulled his knife out, he realized that Mrs. Nieswandt was screaming. Despite his stabbing her neck, he’d done nothing to prevent her from yelling, other than the shock of being knocked to the ground and under attack.

Ogorzow was worried that family members or friends would come out of the house that Mrs. Nieswandt had been heading into before he attacked her or neighbors would stream out of their houses and capture him. He ran as fast as he could to get away before that happened.

Mrs. Nieswandt survived this attack and reported it to the police. They added the details of what happened to her to the growing list of offenses committed by an unknown man in this area.

CHAPTER FIVE

A Blow to the Head

On the evening of August 21, 1940, about three weeks after his attack on Gertrud Nieswandt, Paul Ogorzow lay in wait for a new victim to come along. This time he would combine his flashlight harassment with a physical attack.

On this night, the forty-year-old Mrs. Julie Schuhmacher was returning home after a long day at her war-related work. At 10:50
P.M.
, she was walking in the garden area near the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station when a flashlight suddenly blinded her. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, and it hurt to have a burst of light in them. She was blinded. The fact that the light came out of nowhere made it worse, as it felt like a malicious act and not something that had happened by accident.

She cried out for the unknown person who did this to stop. There was no verbal response from her harasser, Paul Ogorzow. Instead, he took advantage of her temporary blindness and confusion to emerge from hiding and attack her. He’d learned from his prior attacks that he needed to quickly render her unable to fight back, yell out, or get away.

He hit her on the head with a heavy blunt object. It was a lead cable that he’d found at work and carried around in his jacket sleeve to use as a weapon. Unlike an attack with a knife or his fists, a hit to the head with this object was enough to knock his intended victim out. Mrs. Schuhmacher fell to the ground unconscious.

And now that she was knocked out, Ogorzow raped her.

He had escalated from physical assaults to sexual assault. With each serious attack in the garden area, he became more comfortable with using violence against women.

Hitting his victim over the head with a blunt lead object had worked as well as he’d hoped. It had knocked Mrs. Schuhmacher out with a single blow. He kept the lead cable with him when he left the scene of the crime. He planned to use it again.

Mrs. Schuhmacher awoke afterward, with her attacker long gone. Given the light that was flashed in her eyes and the hit to her head, along with the fact that she was unconscious during the actual sexual assault, she was not able to provide the police with much in the way of useful information.

A forensic exam in the hospital found semen in her genital region, and she informed the police that she had not recently had consensual sex, so the police were now aware that they had a rapist in the garden area.

Of the four major attacks in this garden area that preceded Ogorzow’s first attack on the commuter train system, this was the only one that involved an actual sexual assault. The preceding three attacks did not have this component, the police later theorized, because the victims had been able to scream out for help or escape before he had the opportunity to do more harm to them. Or perhaps the reason was that he needed the experience of hurting women badly with weapons and his fists before he was ready to commit rape.

These four attacks (Lina Budzinski, Hertha Jablinski, Gertrud Nieswandt, and Julie Schuhmacher) stood out for the amount of violence involved in them. The police classified these crimes as attempted murders.

The police eventually documented more than two dozen other, less violent attacks by Ogorzow that took place around this same time in the garden area between the S-Bahn stop and his home. There could have been even more than that, as some victims did not go to the police, and Ogorzow himself lost track of his criminal activities there.

CHAPTER SIX

A Family and Party Man

After his attacks, Paul Ogorzow went home to his family. Unlike the stereotype of a serial killer, Ogorzow wasn’t a loner.

He lived with his wife Gertrude, their son, and their daughter in an apartment at Dorotheastrasse 24, which was a ten-minute walk from the Karlshorst S-Bahn station. They’d been married for three years and appeared to neighbors to have a normal family life. Ogorzow’s wife was two and a half years older than him, having been born on March 16, 1910, with the maiden name of Ziegelmann.

Most of his attacks took place while he was supposed to have been at work, so his family thought nothing of his having been gone during that time. If he were late coming home, having just attacked a woman, he would lie by saying that he had been working overtime.

When questioned later on, his neighbors recalled seeing him spending time playing with his young children and tending to his fruit and vegetable garden. He especially appeared to love the cherry trees that grew there.

The broken nose that Ogorzow had suffered in his youth, which had been improperly set, caused him to suffer from chronic nasal infections. These infections in turn caused him bad headaches at times. He’d also contracted gonorrhea on three occasions and had problems with the treatments for this sexually transmitted disease. The only visible element of these health problems was that his nose looked disfigured.

His wife later told police that Ogorzow was constantly jealous, suspecting (without any basis in reality) that she was cheating on him, and beating her on the pretext of her supposed adultery. He would sneak home early to try to catch her in the act of cheating on him. But he never did.

She remained faithful to him during their entire marriage. It turned out that her lack of commitment was all in his mind. This can be seen as a case of projection, as Ogorzow himself cheated on his wife numerous times, not even counting the violent sex crimes that he committed.