A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

by Scott Andrew Selby

  The press release stated, “Countless further criminal offenses of the murderer, in particular the moral offenses committed by him, are not being considered for the accusation because the punishments expected for these deeds hardly carry any weight.”5 By “moral offenses,” this statement meant the attacks on women that did not rise to the level of violence required for an attempted murder charge, or the death required for a murder charge. There were serious punishments against such crimes, including long terms in prison if all the punishments for all these offenses were added together. However, such punishment paled in comparison to the death penalty that was a potential punishment for the attempted murder and murder charges that Ogorzow faced. As such, it was a practical decision for the German criminal justice system to focus on these fourteen crimes.

  On July 24, 1941, Ogorzow’s trial was held at the Special Court III of the Berlin Regional Court. The trial lasted only about six hours, with the judgment issued at 4:40 that afternoon.

  Ogorzow’s wife spoke to the court to ask for mercy on the grounds that he was good to her and his family, other than his bouts of jealousy. This plea for Ogorzow’s life fell on deaf ears.

  The first words of the court’s decision, underlined and on the top of the page, said, “In the name of the German people!”6 This court was very much an institution of the Nazi government, and it believed that its right to judge a man and to sentence him to death flowed from the German people via the Nazi Party.

  The court considered Ogorzow’s defense of mental disease or defect, also known as an insanity defense. Courts around the world had and continue to have very different tests for what mental capacity means in regard to whether a person is responsible for his actions. Some common tests include whether the defendant, at the time of his actions, knew the difference between right and wrong. Another, much stricter, test is whether someone would have done the same action even if a policeman had been standing nearby watching him.

  For instance, if a mentally ill person thought he was fighting off muggers when he was actually kicking innocent passersby, would that person still do this even if a cop were there? But Paul Ogorzow would have failed this insanity test, since he would not kill a woman if a cop were watching him. He would control himself and wait until it was safe to commit the crime.

  The German law regarding this issue was contained in the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, or StGB), section 51, paragraphs 1 and 2. If Ogorzow had any chance of not being sentenced to death for his heinous crimes, it would have to come down to one of these two possible defense pleas detailed in German law. If he fell into either category, he might survive.

  The first possibility was one of his being considered as not having committed an offense at all. Paragraph 1 stated, “An act does not constitute an offense if the actor at the time of the commission of the act was either unable to realize the forbidden nature of his act or unable to act in accordance with proper understanding because his consciousness was impaired or because he has suffered either pathological mental derangement or mental infirmity.”7

  The second plea mentioned in the German law was one of a reduced punishment insofar as the court finds that paragraph 1 does not apply, but that there still should be some consideration given to a defendant’s excuses. Paragraph 2 sets forth, “If the ability to realize the forbidden nature of the act, or the ability to act in accordance with its proper understanding, was considerably diminished due to one of the above stated reasons, the punishment may be reduced in accordance with the provisions for the punishment of attempt.”8 By “above stated reasons,” Paragraph 2 means the reasons contained in Paragraph 1 above. So for example, if a mental infirmity was not severe enough to fit the criteria of Paragraph 1, it could still mitigate the punishment given to a defendant.

  While other aspects of the law catered explicitly to Nazi Party ideology, as a U.S. Army commentary explained after the war, this version of the “text of Section 51 was introduced at the very beginning of the Nazi regime and was derived from the drafts of a new Criminal Code prepared earlier and is rather in line with pre-Nazi European penological doctrine.”9 This commentary summed up the two provisions as follows: under “a condition of complete irresponsibility, the perpetrator must be acquitted; in case his responsibility is diminished he must be convicted, but a lighter penalty imposed.”10

  In order to determine whether Paul Ogorzow’s claimed reasons for mental incapacity fit either of these two paragraphs, the court relied on the report of an expert, Dr. Freiherr von Marenholtz, regarding Ogorzow’s mental health.

  In regards to his headaches, the doctor attributed them to a chronic nasal disease resulting from the damage to Paul Ogorzow’s improperly set broken nose. As such, the doctor explained to the court, “the headaches are therefore not the result of a disease of the brain or otherwise damage to the central nervous system.”11

  The doctor informed the court that the accused lacked any inherited diseases. The doctor also did not find any “serious diseases which could have a bearing on the central nervous system.”12 Although this doctor may have been under pressure to produce findings in line with what the court wanted, there is no reason to doubt his conclusions. The health problems that Ogorzow complained of, the headaches, the sexually transmitted diseases and associated treatment, would not explain away his attacks on women.

  In analyzing this issue, the court took a closer look at Paul Ogorzow and his criminal and sexual activities. The judgment states, “The defendant had a very strong sex drive.”13 It goes on to detail his gonorrhea infections and that he lost his virginity at sixteen. The court also claims that he “masturbated too much” but what amount of masturbation a German special court considered to be just right, as opposed to too much, it did not say.

  The court went on to note that Ogorzow had a history as an exhibitionist—before he escalated to actually attacking women, he apparently flashed them. This was not in his criminal record, though. The court perceived him as having variations in his sex drive as compared to normal people, and that it was this that led him to attack women. In fact, he derived sexual pleasure from the process of attacking women, even without sexually assaulting them. Ogorzow told the police that he ejaculated once while throwing a woman from a train, and the court referred to this detail.

  Step by step, the court tore apart Ogorzow’s attempt to use a section 51 mental capacity defense. It found no medical basis for Ogorzow’s claim of some sort of psychological drive or mental noise compelling him to attack women. As for alcohol, he was never drunk enough to not remember in detail his attacks. And so Ogorzow’s detailed confession was used against him, as “the accused had for almost all his deeds an accurate memory, which is a sign that he was sane when he committed the deeds themselves.”14

  The court looked at the nature of how the accused committed his crimes. This is the same strategy that a modern American prosecutor would use when confronted with a mental capacity defense—break down the details of the crime to show the elaborate forethought and planning that went into it and how the accused was careful to avoid being caught.

  The court wrote that “the defendant had acted according to a plan, as is particularly apparent from the fact that he was often on the train a long time back and forth, until he met a woman traveling alone. Had he acted in a ‘frenzy,’ such a scheduled execution of the act would not have occurred. The accused can also control his perverse instincts, because if he did not find a suitable victim on the rails, he did not commit a crime.”15

  The fact that Ogorzow was very picky when choosing his victims, in the sense that he made sure that he only attacked women traveling alone, during a time and place such that he felt secure he could get away with the attack, suggested to the court that he did have control of his actions. Having perverse sexual desires was not enough to satisfy either paragraph of section 51, otherwise no one would be fully punished for committing sexually related crimes.

&nbs
p; In sum, the court’s expert informed the court that there was nothing to Ogorzow’s claims: “According to the expert report of Dr. Freiherr von Marenholtz the Defendant did not meet the requirements of § 51, paragraph 1 or 2 of the Criminal Code. This means that the defendant does not suffer from a mental illness or mental deficiency. He was not at the time of the acts disturbed in his mind . . . in accordance with . . . section 51 paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code.”16

  The special court agreed with the expert’s opinion and ruled, “The defendant is therefore fully sane and responsible for his actions.”17

  Since Ogorzow’s mental capacity defense was not valid, the next issue became whether he in fact violated the laws the court charged him with breaking. Some of the laws Ogorzow was charged with breaking, most notably the murder charge of section 211, had been changed since Ogorzow had committed his earlier crimes, but the court decided to retroactively apply the new laws to all of his offenses, regardless of whether they had occurred before the law had been amended.

  This would not have happened in the United States, as the U.S. Constitution prohibits ex post facto (“after the fact”) laws in article 1, section 9, clause 3. The idea is that people should be charged with the laws in force at the time of their alleged actions, not the laws in place when they are facing trial. Although there was a significant change to the murder charge, even if the court had used the earlier definition, Ogorzow would still have been in very serious trouble.

  The court convicted Ogorzow of all the charges against him—eight counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder. The special court sentenced him to death and ruled that he now had no civil or political rights.

  The judges did not care that he had a past as a party member or that he was an SA man, nor that he blamed his crimes on a Jewish doctor mistreating him. Even in the Third Reich, the excuse that a Jew made him do it did not work to absolve Ogorzow’s many sins.

  The head of the court stated that Ogorzow was “a beast in human form deservedly eliminated from the national community.”18

  That same day, the police issued a press release celebrating the fact that Ogorzow had been convicted. Under the headline OGORZOW FOUND FULLY ACCOUNTABLE, it stated, “In addition to the eight witnesses who showed up to the trial against the 28 year-old, 8-fold woman-killer, Paul Ogorzow . . . a medical authority was invited to examine the mental state of the accused. His report states that the requirements of § 51 StGB (legal insanity) do not exist at all. He has been found fully accountable for his multiple crimes.”19

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A Date with the Executioner

  The next morning, at 6 A.M. on Friday, July 25, 1941, the Third Reich executed Paul Ogorzow. It had been only thirteen days since his arrest.

  The execution took place at the notorious Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. During the Nazi reign of terror, this huge brick structure would be the temporary home to many prisoners on their way to the executioner. These would include a diverse range of prisoners, from ordinary criminals such as Ogorzow to political criminals, including many Germans who took part in the July 1940 plot against Hitler.

  Ogorzow was not the only person put to death in Plötzensee Prison that morning. Three political prisoners were killed as well. Two of them had been sentenced to death for “actions subversive to the defensive strength of the German people, treasonable furtherance to the enemy, and preparation for treason.”1 The third political prisoner had been convicted of “spying for an enemy intelligence service for purposes of personal enrichment.”2

  There was also a fifth prisoner executed by the German state that day. This man, Kurt Polenski, had killed his wife.

  The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the executions that morning with the rhyming headline of 3 NAZI TRAITORS AND 2 SLAYERS DIE ON GUILLOTINE.3 It described Paul Ogorzow as “one of the most notorious mass murderers of recent times in Europe. For two years he is said to have terrorized passengers on late elevated trains operating in the outer suburbs, attacking women in empty compartments and disposing of his victims by pushing them out of the moving train.”4

  This article also noted the fact that Ogorzow had been found guilty only the day before his execution, which was fast, even in Nazi Germany.

  The prison authorities would use a guillotine to swiftly separate Ogorzow’s head from his body. That was the method used in Germany in 1941, and Ogorzow had no choice in his manner of execution. Until a few years before, the state had killed condemned prisoners by beheading them with an axe. Future executions at Plötzensee Prison would include hangings.

  The guillotine was widely considered to be more humane than an axman doing the job. A man with an axe could make a mistake and require more than one swing to decapitate a condemned prisoner. An eighteenth-century French executioner, who used a sword to chop men’s heads from their bodies, talked about this problem: “In order to accomplish the execution in accordance with the law it is necessary, even without any opposition on the part of the prisoner, that the executioner should be very skillful and the condemned man very steady, otherwise it would be impossible to accomplish the execution with the sword.”5 He went on to talk about swords breaking, which was less of a problem with Germany’s twentieth-century axes, but still could be a problem after heavy use.

  The guillotine, as long as it was kept in working order, had no such flaws. Adolf Hitler saw one in operation and liked it so much that he ordered a number of them to be made and installed in his prisons.

  Kee D. Kim, a doctor and professor of spinal neurosurgery, recently explained Paul Ogorzow’s cause of death in medical terms: “Guillotine leads to an instantaneous and complete disruption of blood supply (carotid and vertebral arteries in the neck) and neural connection (spinal cord in the neck) to the brain. Sudden disruption of blood flow to the brain leads to certain death. The answer can become more complex depending on the definition of death.”6

  A related question is the time it takes to lose consciousness. There are plenty of stories told about people still retaining a few seconds of consciousness after their heads are separated from their bodies, including a number of colorful, if hard to verify, ones involving scientists beheaded during the French Revolution.

  The macabre image of a dying man seeing out into the world and his brain processing that last sensory information is a powerful one, but the question remains of whether it is real. Would Ogorzow have had one last look at his prison after he was just a head?

  Dr. Kim went on to answer this question as follows: “Timing of the loss of consciousness is more difficult to answer. If we define loss of consciousness very narrowly as an inability to perceive pain, that may be easier. One recent animal study from Holland looked at EEG tracings of rats that were guillotined. The investigators found that in approximately 3.7 seconds, the EEG readings changed to the levels that they equated to the loss of consciousness. I don’t think anyone can be absolutely sure, but my feeling is that the loss of consciousness in humans also takes place in seconds.”7

  So Paul Ogorzow may have a had a few extra seconds to contemplate his fate after a fast-dropping metal blade cut his head off. Perhaps he finally did feel some regret for the things he’d done. Given his thought processes up until then, though, that seems unlikely. He never expressed regret for what he had done and all the suffering he had caused.

  Now that Ogorzow was dead, the German state would not waste his remains. Instead, his head and body would be taken to the Institute of Anatomy and Biology to be dissected.8

  After executing a prisoner, the authorities would mail a bill to the deceased’s heirs. In this case, that meant his grieving wife, who was completely innocent of any involvement in his terrible crime spree. This bill sent to Mrs. Gertrude Ogorzow contained a charge for the wear and tear on the guillotine blade caused by severing Paul Ogorzow’s head from his body.

  EPILOGUE

  After the Berlin police had caught the S
-Bahn Murderer, the regime reversed its previous ban on publicity regarding this case, since now that it was solved it would no longer generate fear in women who needed to travel alone, but would serve to highlight the effectiveness of the Third Reich in solving crime.

  The day after Paul Ogorzow’s execution, the police issued the following press release to highlight their work in catching him:

  The Chief of Police in Berlin

  Newspaper/print.

  Berlin local announcements

  Date: July 26, 1941. Number: 178

  Karlshorst S-Bahn Murderer Executed

  The judiciary press office in Berlin discloses:

  Paul Ogorzow, who was sentenced to death and long-lasting suffering this Thursday by the Special Court of Berlin as a parasite to the people and violent offender of civil rights, was executed on Friday. In many instances, Ogorzow used the darkness on the S-Bahn to attack women and throw them out of the train. He also committed multiple murders and murder attempts in the garden area of Berlin-East.

  On Thursday of last week, the serial woman killer, whose gruesome deeds put the people of Berlin-East in fear and dismay, was captured by the police after painstaking investigation. A week later, the trial–thanks to the commendable cooperation between the criminal police and judiciary–was able to be carried out against him. Yesterday, the death penalty of this beast in human form was carried out. The public greeted this quick execution of the law with satisfaction.1

  This press release praised the rapidity with which Ogorzow went from arrest to trial to execution. The government was proud of the level of “cooperation” between the police and the courts. The idea was that the courts and the police worked hand in hand to eliminate those people from German society who posed a threat to the well-being of the Third Reich and the German people. There is a very different view of the role of the courts and police in a democratic society with civil rights, in which the courts serve as a protection against the police arresting the wrong person or violating a suspect’s rights.