A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

by Scott Andrew Selby

  Another German blackout propaganda poster also featured a skeleton in the sky. In this one a plane flew on a clear starry night. The skeleton is some kind of supernatural force, death incarnate, that spits out a bomb onto a building with a lit window and no blackout curtain. The text reads, “Light. Your Death!”13

  The Nazis did not simply provide propaganda and rules—they of course also enforced the blackout using the tools of their totalitarian state. In addition to the usual authorities, such as police, there were those specifically responsible for checking that the blackout conditions were being respected, such as local air raid wardens.

  Herbert Vogt, who lived in Berlin during this period, later wrote about how Germany enforced the blackout conditions: “In shops, offices, and private homes, the windows had to be covered with black curtains so that not a ray of light showed from the outside. Many people constructed rigid contraptions to bolt on to the window frame, which considerably simplified the nightly ritual of ‘putting up the blackout.’ Those who were careless or late risked the humiliating experience of [an air raid] warden’s stentorian voice roaring for the whole street to hear the word that quickly became a catch phrase: ‘Put that light out.’ In case there was no response, any pedestrian was allowed to throw a stone in the window, or many times a policeman would pull out his pistol and shoot the light out. Repeat offenders had to pay a fine or, in some cases, were arrested.”14

  Local air raid wardens would walk around at night, and if they spotted any light emerging from a building, they would post a warning to notify the resident to fix this problem and to embarrass him as part of this process. One such posting said in big, bold letters, “This house is badly darkened!”15 It went on to explain that this endangered not only those living here, but also their neighbors. Once the problem was fixed, the notice could be removed.

  Not everyone used blackout curtains. Many people in Berlin covered their windows with paper so that no light could escape at night, even though that meant they didn’t get any light coming through their windows during the day either. For them, this was easier and cheaper than installing special curtains that had to be drawn every evening.

  Within days of the start of the blackout, the Nazis passed a law dictating strict punishments for those who took advantage of the darkened conditions to commit crimes. On September 5, 1939, the Third Reich issued a “Decree Against Public Enemies,” the name of which literally translated would have been “Regulation Against Folk Pests” (Volksschädlingsverordnung).

  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia explains, “Under the terms of the law, a crime against person or property, or against the community or public security, could carry a death sentence if the accused was charged with exploiting the special conditions of war—such as blackouts or a lack of police supervision—to carry it out. . . . It is worth noting that Volksschädlinge, the key term in the law’s title, is translated as ‘folk pests’ or ‘vermin.’ As such, the law equates those exploiting the special conditions of war to carry out crimes with the type of agricultural pests that are destructive and generally outside the sphere of moral responsibility. Just as a gardener attacks the bugs and vermin that threaten his plants, so too, the Nazis believed, the national community had to eliminate those who compromised the health and well-being of the body politic.”16

  On October 24, 1939, a reporter for Life magazine wrote in a letter, “The courts are clamping down on petty crimes committed in the dark and some of the sentences are rather astounding when one considers that the penalty for murdering one’s wife may be two years in the pen. A law establishing the death penalty for persons convicted of taking advantage of the blackouts to snatch pocketbooks or commit hold-ups has been passed. A Hanover court has just sentenced three boys 17, 18 and 21 years of age, for whacking a woman shop clerk on the head and robbing her of 150 marks she was taking to the bank. All three are to have their heads chopped off because the law makes no distinction for youth. Had they robbed her by daylight, the sentence would have been a few months in prison.”17

  A serial killer and rapist taking advantage of blackout conditions would certainly fit within this notion of a pest that threatens the well-being of the German community. Such a pest would need to be identified and captured by the Criminal Police so as to protect the home front and the citizens of Berlin. The resulting sentence would be death, as Ogorzow had to be aware, given the publicity surrounding this law.

  Berliners eventually grew used to living in blackout conditions and thought nothing of riding the trains in the low light allowed on them, although they remained murky at best. Only every other lightbulb was plugged in, and the output of those that were on was reduced by half. In sum, this meant that inside the train there was one-quarter of the light that had existed before the blackout.

  And this had never been much light anyway. The trains did not have the fluorescent tubes that people are accustomed to these days; instead there were incandescent globes along two rails on the roof of the carriage, with a pair of bulbs every six feet or so. During the blackout one light in each pair was lit, with the opposing light being turned off. This alternated throughout the train, resulting in a zigzag pattern of small pools of light. One could still see inside the train, but not well.

  The windows were shut and covered over for the duration of the war. This meant that even during the day if people smoked in the train or just if there was a sweaty mass of people using it, the smell could build up to something terrible.

  Passengers could still open and close the doors, though, as that was necessary to board or exit the train. There were doors on both sides of the train, as some stations would have a platform on one side, while others would have one on the opposite side. Confusion over getting on and off the train in the blackout conditions resulted in serious accidents on a regular basis. While there was some light in the train, the boarding platforms of the train stations were themselves dark.

  The outsides of the trains were not painted black. Instead, they remained the colors that the S-Bahn had been using since 1924, a very distinctive combination of ruby red and yellow ocher. The bottoms and tops of the sides of the trains were painted ruby red and the middle area, around the windows, was yellow ocher. The same basic color scheme is used on the Berlin S-Bahn today.18 During the blackout, the outside of the train often had phosphorus paint on it as well so that people could see a faint glow in the dark as it arrived.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The First S-Bahn Attack

  In the little more than a year since Germany began World War II by invading Poland, the Third Reich had enjoyed tremendous military success. The Soviet Union was still its ally, and the only significant foe it faced in Europe was the United Kingdom.

  Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, 1940. Denmark surrendered that day. Norway surrendered on June 9. On May 9, Germany began its invasion of Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. France had built a massive collection of defenses, known as the Maginot Line, along its border with Germany. Instead of trying to fight his way through this collection of concrete bunkers, tank obstacles, retractable turrets, garrisoned troops, and other defensive measures, Hitler ordered his troops to attack from the north by conquering the countries that lay above France.

  Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg all quickly fell to the Germans. France signed an armistice on June 22, 1940, that among other provisions gave Germany direct control over the north and west of the country, while a collaborationist French government known as the Vichy Regime controlled most of southern France. There were other divisions of France as part of this agreement, including territory controlled by Italy, but these were the two major chunks of what had been the French Third Republic. The United States had not yet entered the conflict.

  Although the world was engulfed in a massive war, Ogorzow remained in the heart of Nazi Berlin, where he worked a civilian job.

  Afte
r the incident in the garden area in which a woman’s husband and brother-in-law beat him, Ogorzow had learned a few lessons the hard way. One was to make certain that his victim was alone before attacking her, so nobody could hear her screams and come to her rescue. The second thing was to kill his victims—a dead woman could not cry out for help or talk to the police.

  Paul Ogorzow wore his railroad uniform as he rode the S-Bahn train in Berlin on the night of September 20, 1940, on the hunt for a woman to attack. Until now, Ogorzow had not used the S-Bahn itself as a way to find and attack women, but he’d recently come to realize that in a train compartment he could make certain that there was no one present besides him and his victim.

  Although tonight would mark the first time that Ogorzow attacked a woman on the S-Bahn, he was very familiar with this environment. He’d ridden the S-Bahn to and from work on a regular basis for a long time. He’d been working on the railroads of Berlin for six years now. He’d started in 1934 with a temporary job as a manual laborer for the German National Railroad Company (Reichsbahn) in Berlin. For this job, he worked construction, laying railroad track as part of a large work crew. It was hard, backbreaking work, but in the economic chaos of 1934, he was lucky to have a job.

  This temporary job turned into a permanent one with the Reichsbahn. He then worked his way up from manual labor, such as turnpike maintenance, to his current job with the S-Bahn. The Reichsbahn operated the S-Bahn, so he was still working for the same company.

  There was something creepy about the S-Bahn at night under the Nazis. The S-Bahn logo at the time featured a gravestone shape of alpine green with a large stylized white “S” above the word “Bahn.” Today, the symbol is similarly colored but a circle; the shape of the old logo was ghoulish given the deaths that were to occur on this train system.

  The S-Bahn stations had large Nazi flags and bunting displayed in them. The flag consisted of a red background with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika.

  As most stations were outdoors, passengers had to wait in darkness for the trains to arrive at night. Even when trains arrived and people opened their compartment doors, only a little light flooded out because of the restrictions of the blackout.

  Although some of its parts were much older, the modern S-Bahn was formed in 1924, through the combination of various, mostly over-ground, commuter railways in and around Berlin. The system was electrified, with a third-rail power source, during the 1920s; some of the older trains had been run on steam, made from burning coal.

  The term “S-Bahn” may stand for “city fast train” (Stadtschnellbahn), but that is not certain. An expert on the Berlin S-Bahn, Thomas Krickstadt, described the confusion over what S-Bahn actually stands for. “There is no evidence what exactly ‘S-Bahn’ means, but the term ‘Stadtschnellbahn’ is the most probable explanation. To understand the story behind the name, you have to go back a bit. Until 1928–1929 the group of state-operated railway lines in Berlin had the name Stadt-, Ring- und Vorortbahnen, German for ‘City, Circle and Suburban Railways,’ which was rather an unwieldy name for a trademark. Then, with the electrification of the state-operated railway system, the trains got faster and had a modern touch. On one station a self-made logo ‘SS-Bahn’ appeared, which obviously stood for ‘Stadtschnellbahn.’ Soon after, a new symbol (a white ‘S’ in a green gravestone like shape) was invented as a trademark and the term ‘S-Bahn’ became popular (in opposition to the city-operated underground railway system called ‘U-Bahn’ with a white ‘U’ in a blue square as its symbol).”1

  There are two other popular explanations for what the “S” in “S-Bahn” stands for—Stadtbahn, the German word for “city train,” or Schnellbahn, German for “fast train.” According to customer service at the company that currently operates the S-Bahn in Berlin, the full name is Stadtschnellbahn.2

  The Nazis built a key part of this system for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Their final addition to the S-Bahn was in October 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland.

  A book on the history of Berlin explained, “The S-Bahn had its origins in the notion of a ‘Ringbahn,’ originally derived from the military, who wanted to ensure that in the event of a mobilization the various Berlin terminal stations would be linked together by a line that would also serve the Tempelhof training grounds. The actual position of the ring line was a compromise between the desire to maximize utilization by being as close as possible to the core of the city and the desire to minimize land-acquisition costs by avoiding areas of existing urban development. . . . After electrification in 1924–9 the journey time for a full circuit of the S-Bahn ring was 63 minutes. . . . A final element was provided at the end of the 1930s by another link across the S-Bahn ring, this time running north-south in a tunnel beneath the heart of the city, intersecting the ‘diameter’ S-Bahn line at Friedrichstrasse station, which developed into a major multi-level interchange of both S-Bahn and U-Bahn lines. . . . In 1939 the U-Bahn was still a relatively small system supplementing the S-Bahn in the more densely settled inner part of the city.”3

  Berlin at that time had a cutting-edge public transportation system that connected the whole city. Residents did not need a car to get around, which was a huge plus during the gasoline rationing of World War II.

  The S-Bahn was a key part of this system, along with the primarily underground subway system, the U-Bahn (Untergrundbahn). Although these were both rapid transit commuter train systems in the same city, the two systems were run by different entities—the National Railroad controlled the S-Bahn while the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, popularly called the BVG, ran the U-Bahn. As such, Ogorzow’s work had nothing to do with the U-Bahn.

  Other elements of Berlin’s public transportation system at the time included a tramway and a bus network, including trolley buses. The company Ogorzow worked for, the National Railroad, was not involved in these alternative means of transportation.

  Ogorzow worked as an auxiliary signalman of the Berlin-Rummelsburg S-Bahn station, located in the Lichtenberg borough of Berlin. Two experts on the S-Bahn explained what duties Paul Ogorzow’s job entailed: “An ‘auxiliary signalman’ or (as we call it) auxiliary staff at a signal tower (word-for-word translation of Hilfsstell-wärter: ‘Auxiliary guard of a signal tower’) had to care about faults at points (German word is Weiche, other English words are ‘switch’ or ‘flank’), signals or rails and to repair these faults. For example he had to free unheated points from ice or snow in winter. Other examples: Mechanical signal towers use metal wires to change signals and the auxiliary staff had to make sure that these wires are functioning. Signals were lighted by gas in those times. Gas came from gas cylinders that had to be replaced when empty. The gas lamps often needed maintenance, like replacing the wick. All these tasks were duties of the auxiliary staff.”4

  Ogorzow was not close with his coworkers, but he did not stick out either. His superiors viewed him as a good worker, and he did much of his work alone.

  On the evening of September 20, 1940, when Paul Ogorzow was riding the S-Bahn looking for a woman to attack, Miss Gerda Kargoll was taking the train home.

  However, while riding the S-Bahn, she fell asleep. She was tired from a long day, and had been drinking a bit, which combined with the motion of the train to put her to sleep. When she woke, she’d ridden past her station. She got off the train at the Rahnsdorf station and waited to take a train going back in the direction she’d just come from.

  Kargoll was worried because her train ticket only covered her originally intended ride from work to her home. If stopped by a ticket inspector, she would have to pay a fine for riding farther than she had paid for.

  There was a system in place in which a trip within the inner part of Berlin was one price, but the farther out one went, the more the ticket cost. By the time one reached the outer reaches of Berlin, it could be an expensive trip.

  A single trip in the inner area (known as the Ringbahn) co
st 30 pfenninge for second class. Pfenninge were the linguistic equivalent of cents, so 30 pfenninge meant 0.30 reichsmarks. To take this same trip in second class cost 20 pfenninge.5 This is what Kargoll had paid for her trip.

  While many of the women that Ogorzow attacked on the train had weekly or monthly passes that saved them money compared to buying single tickets each day, Miss Kargoll had a single ticket. Ogorzow himself had a free pass to use the train, as he worked for the Reichsbahn.

  Miss Kargoll had already had her ticket checked once, when she entered her originating S-Bahn station. In order to walk inside the station, she handed her ticket to the person working in a small office that controlled entrance and exit from the train system. Here, a ticket inspector stamped her ticket with a one- to three-letter stamp that indicated the station where her trip originated.

  If she had made it to the end of her trip, she would have displayed her stamped ticket to the ticket inspector there before being able to exit her destination station. He or she would have looked at the origination stamp to figure out if the cost of her ticket was enough to pay for this trip. If not, Kargoll would have had to pay additional monies before she would have been allowed to leave the station.6

  This meant that Kargoll would be safe as soon as she arrived at her original destination station, but while she was traveling back there, if a ticket inspector stopped her, she would face a fine for riding with a ticket that did not cover her trip. The worker at the ticket office at her final destination, however, would have no idea that she had taken this long route there.

  Given the two classes of available transport, second or third class, this system needed personnel to occasionally spot-check passengers in transit to make sure that their tickets matched the class they sat in. A pure honor system would not work for long, and it was not feasible to check every passenger on the train itself. This spot-check system was meant to make sure that people had not snuck onto the train without a ticket somehow, as well as that people did not pay third-class rates and then ride in second class. It was not meant to find people like Gerda Kargoll who rode too far on the train before retracing their trip to arrive at their desired station. But if someone stopped her, she could be subject to a fine nonetheless.