The First Murder
As October 3, 1940, turned into October 4, Paul Ogorzow headed out into the night. He was not hunting for victims on the train, though, or in the garden area. This time he already had a specific target in mind—a woman he’d met on the S-Bahn.
Three or four days beforehand, Ogorzow had been standing at the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station when he saw Mrs. Gertrude “Gerda” Ditter waiting for a train. He went up to her and asked if he could visit her sometime. She said yes and told him where she lived. It was an address in the garden colony area of Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, where Ogorzow had formerly prowled for women to attack.
Mrs. Ditter was twenty years old with two young children. Her husband, Arthur Ditter, was away in the military. With so many men away fighting, it had become easier for someone like Paul Ogorzow, who was still in Berlin, to find married women who were willing to have an affair.
Ogorzow visited Mrs. Ditter for the first time that night, and she let him into her home at Kolonie Gutland II, path 5a, number 33. Each house in the garden area had an address of Kolonie Gutland I or II, then a path number and letter, and finally a house number.
They started off talking. It began as a casual encounter, the sort of prelude before two people who barely know each other commence an affair. It was a small house and they were in the kitchen, while Mrs. Ditter’s two small children were sleeping in the living room.
Ogorzow wanted to keep Mrs. Ditter comfortable with his presence until he was ready to attack, so he was careful not to say anything that might alarm her. The last thing he wanted was for her to figure out that something was wrong before he began his assault.
Just as with some of his train attacks, there was an abrupt shift in their interaction when Ogorzow decided that now was the time he would strike. The switch between normal behavior and killer was a fast one for him. It was a conscious decision, made when he felt that it was safe for him to attack. He had complete control over this moment, when he crossed the line from the acceptable to the criminal.
Without any warning, Ogorzow abruptly ended their conversation with a violent attack on Mrs. Ditter’s person.
He began this attack by grabbing her with both of his hands wrapped around her slender neck. He squeezed so hard that he fractured her hyoid bone. “The hyoid bone forms part of the axial skeleton and two characteristics make it unusual (for a bone): it is a single U-shaped bone that does not have a partner, and it does not articulate with any other bone,” a textbook on forensic biology explained. “It is found in the anterior region of the neck between the mandibles and the larynx and its function is to act as a sling to support the tongue and for some of the neck and pharynx muscles. Damage to the hyoid bone, especially one or both of the horns of the ‘U,’ is a characteristic sign of manual strangulation.”1
In cases with only skeletal remains, a broken hyoid bone is a strong indicator that the person was strangled. It is hard to break it otherwise.
Despite this serious injury, Mrs. Ditter was still alive. Paul Ogorzow kept one hand on her neck, to hold her steady, while removing his other hand. He used his free hand to take a knife out of his pocket and then stabbed her in the neck. His knife cut severed her left carotid artery and she quickly bled out. As she died, she became Ogorzow’s first murder victim.
Ogorzow then fled the scene. He walked out the front door. None of Mrs. Ditter’s neighbors saw him leave her place. This was not surprising given the darkness of the blackout and the fact that most people were asleep at this time. He walked through the garden area until he reached the suburban neighborhood where he lived. Ogorzow reached his apartment on Dorotheastrasse 24, where his family was likely already fast asleep. His wife and small children had no idea that he had just crossed an invisible line by killing someone.
The timing of Mrs. Ditter’s murder was quite strange as it coincided with a very turbulent period in her life. The authorities believed that she led what they considered to be an inefficient life, and they had planned to remove her two small children from her care and place them in an orphanage. They had previously warned her about this possibility.
This was the work of the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt), known by the acronym of NSV. This was a social welfare organization created by the Nazi Party. Among its various responsibilities was child welfare.
The man responsible for carrying out this order, Konrad Braun, arrived at Mrs. Ditter’s house around noon on October 4. No one answered his knocks, and he discovered that the door to the front garden area of her home was unlocked. He let himself in, and then found that the door to the house itself was also unlocked. He then entered Mrs. Ditter’s home and walked around, looking for her.
With the conditions of the blackout, it was hard to see inside the house. Windows that had been blocked to prevent light from going out also stopped light from coming in.
In the kitchen, Braun lit a match to better see, and discovered Ditter’s body. It was immediately apparent to him that Gertrude Ditter (maiden name Barth) was deceased. Her long black hair was tucked behind her neck, exposing the bruises on it. She had a scarf on, but it hung loose on her so it covered her collarbone, not her neck area. She was wearing a dark-colored loose dress or nightgown with thigh-high stockings held up by a garter belt. Mrs. Ditter was not wearing shoes.
Her body was propped up where she had died, with the clutter in the small kitchen working to keep her vertical. Her right foot was under a small table while her head was stuck between this table and a kitchen container. Her right hand lay on top of a bench.
The children themselves were fine. They were found in the living room of the tiny home. One was in his cot, while the other was in a stroller.
Braun then contacted the local police to report his grizzly discovery. When the uniformed officers arrived, they briefly considered the possibility of suicide, given that Mrs. Ditter was found dead on the very day that the government was to take away her children and that they saw no signs of defensive wounds on her body.
Suicide fell under the jurisdiction of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, known as Orpo), who handled relatively lower-level police matters. These were mostly uniformed police, whose distinctive green uniforms resulted in their nickname—the Green Police. They included administrative police who often did not need to wear uniforms—they did the kind of work for which many other countries used civilian workers.
However, people do not normally commit suicide by manually strangling themselves and then stabbing themselves in the neck. So the police on the scene quickly decided it was likely a homicide.
With it being a homicide, the Orpo referred the case to the Berlin Kripo’s homicide squad at about a quarter past three that afternoon. And so the Kripo promptly took over responsibility for this case from the Orpo, who had the case for only a few hours. If it had been a suicide or an accident, the Orpo would have handled this matter on its own. There was a clear hierarchy between these two groups, with the Kripo above the Orpo in status, power, and responsibility.
Criminal Commissioner Zach now headed the investigation. At this point, it was a routine murder case. Just as in contemporary America, detectives wore plain clothes, not uniforms. One of the main differences between their dress and that of contemporary detectives was that they generally wore hats outdoors, as that was the custom of the time.
As they did not have uniforms, these detectives needed a way to quickly reveal their authority to take over a crime scene such as Mrs. Ditter’s house. For this purpose, they had warrant discs. An expert wrote that these “were die struck, exactly like a coin, and were of very high quality. The police agency identification number assigned to each officer was hand-punched into the space provided on the reverse side of the disc.”2 The side with the number said, “Staatliche Kriminalpolizei” for State Criminal Police and the front side had the German imperial eagle clutching a swastika encircled by a wreath.
The disc itself had a hole punched in it so it could be kept on a chain, secured to the detective’s belt like a skateboarder’s wallet. While the police had identification cards, they were not supposed to be used in circumstances such as these, when flashing one’s warrant disc was the way to gain entry to a house. A warrant disc functioned in much the same way as a police shield or badge does today.
In investigating this case, the Kripo detectives observed, “Immediately nearby the deceased—namely, under her right hand on the ground—there was a kitchen-knife with the blade under a dirty cloth. Whether this knife was the one used in the murder is not yet clear. Fingerprints have not yet been found on the knife.”3
They sent the knife to be tested for fingerprints and to determine whether it was the murder weapon. The Forensic Institute of the Security Police at the Office of the Reich Criminal Investigations Department examined this kitchen knife carefully, with all the latest scientific tests.
After a thorough investigation, they determined, “Human blood was not able to be detected on the kitchen knife. Additionally, no other meat or fat remnants were found on the knife. Beyond that, it can be explained with certainty that this knife cannot be considered as the murder weapon. This fact is especially evidenced by the detail that the fine layer of mold on the handle and blade was intact, which could not have been the case if this knife had been used in the last few days. Further, there was a dark crumb, about four millimeters long, stuck firmly to the point of the knife, which had nothing to do with blood, but was rather made up of plant-root, sand, and seeds. A little clump at the back handle end was also only made up of sandy soil and small bits of plants. Red areas on the back of the knife turned out to be rust; here, also small specimens of little feathers were found which are not from chicken or duck.”4
The murder weapon was not found on the scene at all. It was a knife that Ogorzow had brought to the scene of the crime and taken with him when he left. So there was no weapon for the police to examine.
Dr. Dolgner, based nearby in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, examined the body before it was moved. He declared Mrs. Ditter officially dead. His preliminary examination revealed the cause of death to be a stab wound on her left carotid artery.
The Kripo arranged for Mrs. Ditter’s body to be delivered to Dr. Waldemar Weimann so that he could conduct an autopsy.
Dr. Weimann dictated a transcript of his findings. He observed signs of asphyxiation, including hemorrhaging marks in the eyes. He did a thorough check of Mrs. Ditter’s fingers, hands, arms, and legs and found no signs of defensive wounds. This lack of defensive wounds, in an attack that involved a knife, suggested that the victim knew her killer. The totality of evidence suggested to Dr. Weimann that Mrs. Ditter invited her attacker into her home and he then strangled her with his hands before he attacked her with a knife. So that by the time the knife was part of the attack, she was not able to defend herself.
Given the lack of defensive wounds, the Kripo had someone they very much wanted to question. Then, as now, the first suspect when a woman was murdered was often her husband. He was in the German army, which had him stationed in Potsdam at the time of the murder. The distance between there and Berlin was only about thirty miles, but the husband was not free to come and go from his barracks.
The police worked very fast to locate him, however, and find out precisely where he had been during this crime. They arrived at Arthur Ditter’s barracks just hours after his wife’s body was discovered. The police were locking him into a timeline and a history of his relationship with his wife before her body was even cold.
The police interrogated him and then typed up a very detailed five-page statement with all the information that he had provided them about his now deceased wife, Gerda, and his whereabouts for all times between when she was last seen alive and when her body was discovered by Konrad Braun. Arthur Ditter signed this document, as did Kripo Detective Zach.
Mr. Ditter gave the police his work and educational history in addition to background on his relationship with his wife. They’d met as kids at school, and their mothers in turn had also been school friends. When Gertrude turned sixteen, their relationship became a romantic one. Gertrude’s mother did not approve of this relationship, as she wanted her daughter to marry a government official and believed that Arthur’s prospects in life were not great. A big part of this, according to Arthur’s mother, was that Arthur was not a German citizen.
The complicated change in control of territory in Europe in the early twentieth century resulted in Arthur’s father being considered a Czech citizen. This was a huge problem for Gertrude’s mother.
Arthur’s mother, confusingly named Gertrud Ditter, the same name as his deceased wife except without the “e” at the end of her first name, explained this citizenship issue to the Kripo detectives: “Because my husband was born an Austrian; his home town fell in 1919 to the former Czechoslovakia and, through this, my husband became a Czech citizen. Gerda’s mother did not want her daughter to marry a Czech man. My husband and I wrote to the Führer that he was born German and, therewith, Arthur became a citizen.”5
By the Führer, she meant Adolf Hitler. Presumably someone in his office handled this matter and it never rose to Hitler’s personal attention. Many Germans wrote to Hitler personally, expecting that he could handle matters for them. In this case, it worked.
The young couple married in November 1938 and had two children, a daughter named Helga and a son named Wolfgang. When Ogorzow murdered Mrs. Ditter, Helga was around four months old and Wolfgang was a bit over a year and a half old.
Mr. and Mrs. Ditter had purchased their garden house in Kolonie Gutland II for one hundred and fifty reichsmarks. The associated fees for this place, what Germans call rent and Americans call maintenance fees, were sixteen reichsmarks a year. This was very little money—Mr. Ditter made much more than this in a single week.
As Mr. Ditter explained, it was his wife’s decision to continue to live in this garden house: “I gave my wages almost exclusively to my wife so that she could keep herself busy. I kept almost nothing for myself because I neither drink nor smoke. Recently, when I was employed as a track shifter, I was giving my wife about forty-five reichsmarks a week. She was frugal and was able to make do with this amount of money. However, she almost always told others that she didn’t have any money. That was a habit of hers. But she always had groceries in storage. I always got along well with my wife. There were never serious arguments. It only happened two times in our marriage that we bickered—because I blamed her for not being tidy enough or watching the children enough. My wife waved it off and said she couldn’t manage the work—it was too much. I always wanted to move into a real apartment. My wife was against this, though. She wanted to save that rent money.”6
If they had moved to a proper apartment, instead of the small colony house, perhaps Gertrude Ditter would not have suffered this terrible fate.
The German army had drafted Mr. Ditter into military service. He told the detectives that this meant he had no free time during which he could have visited his wife in Berlin: “During my military service, I haven’t had a single vacation. I was only allowed to leave once by myself, and that was to go to the dentist. Later, other comrades drove me to the dentist. The last time I was there was at the end of September 1940. Otherwise, I haven’t left the barracks except for performing military duties. Also, I was not in Berlin in the last few days. During my time as a soldier, I have only been in Berlin once, and that was to the parade for the Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano. But that was still at the end of the last month. I didn’t get to see any relatives at that time.”7
Arthur Ditter informed the Kripo of all of his recent activities: “Yesterday, I was working until about 5 P.M. I was shooting. After returning from shooting, I ate lunch and then received the command to report by the gunnery sergeant. The sergeant told me secretively that my wife had died and that I had vacation until Sunday evening at 10 P.M. The day before yesterday, on Thursday the third of October 1940, I had service in the barracks. We had shooting. At 5 P.M., we were finished with shooting—that means we had to clean the guns until 6 P.M. After this, I had to write a resume. The company leader made me do this. Then, I had to tidy my things, clean my uniform, boots, etc., and I went to bed at about 8:30 or 8:45 P.M. At 9:00 P.M. is curfew. Surely I did not leave the barracks on these days or in the evening. My comrades from barrack room 94a can attest to this.”8
The police were able to verify the information that he gave them, and so Arthur Ditter was quickly cleared as a suspect.
Mr. Ditter did provide detectives with some additional information. He didn’t know who would do this to his wife, but he mentioned a dispute with his neighbor, Hermann Herlitz of garden house number 32. This was over the pigeons that Mrs. Ditter kept at their property. She also had hens and rabbits, but the pigeons were the basis of this dispute. While Mr. Herlitz, like many of the people who lived in this colony area back then, also had animals, it was the noise of the pigeons that upset him.
Mr. Ditter alleged that Mr. Herlitz picked similar fights with a large number of neighbors over petty, neighborly disputes. There was nothing to indicate that Mr. Herlitz had used violence in any of these altercations though.
The police still investigated him and interviewed mutual neighbors of his and the Ditters’, but that line of investigation went nowhere. They also talked to Mr. Herlitz’s girlfriend of five years, Auguste Bohm, and she explained the dispute over the pigeons. This turned out to not be much of a dispute, as besides a few harsh words over it by Mr. Herlitz, nothing had happened. As for Auguste Bohm, she expressed her displeasure at Gertrude Ditter’s pigeons by not greeting Mrs. Ditter when she saw her in the streets.
Auguste Bohm provided an alibi for Herlitz. Bohm said to the police, “When Herlitz came home as usual on this Thursday evening, shortly before 6 P.M., he first ate something and then got feed for our animals. He was not away for more than an hour. When he came back, it was still light outside. After this, he didn’t leave our property. We went to bed really early, as is usual in recent times. It was probably about 8 P.M. Herlitz hardly left our bedroom during the night—I would have noticed. When he gets up in the night, I almost always hear it. The next morning, he went to work as usual. Even then he couldn’t have gone to Ditter’s garden house because he went in the direction of path 5a towards Triftweg.”9
They talked to Mr. Herlitz on October 6 and did not find out anything incriminating. A neighborly dispute over pigeons seemed an unlikely motive for such a brutal attack.
However, the police uncovered evidence suggesting that there may have been issues of fidelity in the Ditter relationship. They found a letter in the couple’s home written by a woman, a G. Weinberg from Fürstenwalde, that they were curious about. Arthur Ditter told them a bizarre and implausible story to explain this letter.
His explanation tied in to the job he’d held just before the army drafted him. In a very strange coincidence, he worked for the Reichsbahn at the train-switching yard at Rummelsburg. This location would be ground zero for the S-Bahn murders, and it was here that Paul Ogorzow worked as an auxiliary signalman. Later on, the police did not generate any evidence that he and Ditter knew each other or that this was anything more than the sort of strange coincidence that sometimes pops up in the course of such an investigation. Of course, at the time the police were questioning Mr. Ditter, they had no idea who Paul Ogorzow was.
The story Mr. Ditter told about this letter was an odd one: “About fourteen days before my draft into the military, or maybe three weeks, I was working at the switching yard at Rummelsburg. A younger woman came out of a train compartment in the second class and asked if there were mailboxes nearby. My coworker ‘Stark’. . . . told me: ‘You can put the letter in the mailbox.’ The previously mentioned woman gave me the letter and asked me to put it in the mailbox. I brought this letter with me, put it in my jacket pocket, and then didn’t think about it again. Some days later, my wife found it in my things, ripped it open, and read it. Since doing that, we didn’t dare to send it. I wanted to put it in another envelope and send it, but my wife told me not to. So, that’s why the letter is in my apartment.”10
This version of events could be true. If so, it suggests that Ditter’s wife did not trust him in regards to other women. If it was a lie, then perhaps Mr. Ditter had cheated on his wife and did not want the Kripo to know of this. Even with an airtight alibi, in Nazi Germany, it was not a good idea to draw the attention of the authorities. If the police believed that he had been cheating on his spouse, they might decide to the pin the murder on him and claim that he’d hired someone to do it for him. He had no way of knowing that these particular detectives had no interest in finding a scapegoat. They wanted to capture the actual killer.
More damning, though, was a document the police found that Mr. Ditter had written to his wife. It was titled, “My Confession.” When asked about it, Arthur Ditter said, “I wrote this note years ago. We were not even engaged with each other yet. It’s not important at all. I just was trying to get her to become more attached to me. At that time, my wife went out once in a while to the movies with a certain Fritz Gann, who lives in our garden colony. . . . However, I don’t think in the slightest that Fritz Gann had anything going on with my wife or that he has to do with the death of my wife.”11
The police were curious about this strange note. After having first asked Mr. Ditter about it, and written down his explanation, they confronted him with the actual document. In response, Mr. Ditter told them, “I wrote this note because my wife asked me to after the first time we had sex. My wife dictated the text, but only the beginning, and I wrote the end by myself. The subtitle, ‘If Gerda Barth swears to me that she will no longer lie to me and go out with other men, give out her address, or do any other nonsense’—is so that she wouldn’t go to the movies with Gann anymore and then keep it a secret from me.”12
Mr. Ditter’s explanation did not fully clear this matter up. Both the backstory and the note itself were quite odd. However, the police accepted Mr. Ditter’s account of how he came to write this unusual letter given that he had a solid alibi for the night of the murder. This note did suggest, however, that there were issues of fidelity in the Ditters’ marriage and that perhaps Mrs. Ditter had cheated while her husband was away. Unknown to the police at this time, Mrs. Ditter had given out her address to a strange man (Paul Ogorzow) she met while waiting for the S-Bahn, and that was what had led to her death.
However, there was nothing at the scene or in the investigation thus far to tie this murder to the S-Bahn. While Mrs. Ditter had ridden the train, so did most everyone in Berlin. There was no way for the detectives to know that she had met her assailant there days before.
The police were aware of other crimes against women that had been committed in this area during the blackout. As Berlin historian Dr. Laurenz Demps later explained, this “brutal murder . . . was something new for them—even though there had been multiple rape attempts and instances of rape in this garden area.”13
In addition to investigating suspects with connections to Mrs. Ditter, they also focused on the possibility that the man who killed her was the same one who had been harassing and attacking the women of this garden colony area.
On October 7, the Berlin Kripo announced a thousand-reichsmark reward for information that led to solving this crime. They posted reward posters with information about this crime as well as questions they hoped the public could help them with:
Warning!!! Do Not Destroy!!! Relay Contents!!!
Woman murdered in “Gutland II” colony
1000 RM reward!
On Friday, October 4th, 1940, Gerda Ditter, a 20-year-old married woman, was found murdered in her garden plot, Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, “Gutland II,” Way 5a, Number 33, with a deep knife cut in the left side of her neck. The woman was additionally strangled. Nothing was stolen.
Mrs. Ditter was seen last on October 3, 1940, at about 5 P.M. near her apartment.
For a long time, in colony “Gutland,” and in the surrounding area, solitary women have been immorally harassed and some have also been wounded with a knife—especially in the dark—by an unknown offender. It is to be assumed that this situation concerns the same offender.
It is the duty of every citizen to actively participate in identifying this demon!
Description of the suspect:
30 to 40 years old, 1.65–1.70 meters tall, bawdy facial expression.
Clothing: mostly blue visor caps, short jacket (leather?), sports-shirt with open collar, long dark pants, often has or is riding a bicycle.
The answers to the following questions are of urgent importance:
Every notification—even things which seem unimportant—is important and will be, by request, handled in a strictly confidential manner.
The Criminal Police Department of Berlin issued the above-mentioned reward for information from the public which leads to the identification and seizure of the offender. This reward is not meant for officials whose occupational obligation it is to track offenses or crimes. The disbursement of the reward will follow upon closure of the legal process. Every member of the police department is capable of taking in updates, especially the homicide division “Ditter,” police headquarters of Berlin, Alexanderplatz, entrance Dircksenstraße, number 13/14, floor IV, room number 902, extensions 699 and 738.
Berlin, October 7, 1940.
Homicide Division “Ditter”14
This reward poster was put up in and around the garden area where Ogorzow preyed on women. While the poster did reveal that a murder had been committed in the area and that women had been harassed there, it played down the level of such attacks. It did not spell out that there had been actual rapes, instead using the euphemism “immorally harassed.”
Also on October 7, the Kripo published a detailed announcement of this crime in the Reich Criminal Investigation Department newspaper (Deutsches Kriminalpolizeiblatt). This was a newspaper that was not intended for the general public; instead it was meant to be read by law enforcement personnel. This way they could share information on cases so that if any police officers knew something related to a given case, or saw a connection to another case, they could get in touch with the detectives involved.
This announcement included the material contained in the reward poster as well as additional information intended only for law enforcement. It was more blunt about the activities of the suspect in this area: “The criminal should be searched for in circles of sexual-offenders. Since 1938, a sexual-offender has been making trouble in the area. He attacks solitary women in the late hours of the evening or at night; mostly from behind. He chokes them and then abuses them sexually.”15
The police looked at where Mrs. Ditter shopped, in the hopes it would lead them to a suspect, or at least give them additional insight into this victim. This was a time long before supermarkets were the norm, and the police knew that the local shops were a good source of gossip.
On October 10, they wrote, “The findings have shown that Mrs. Ditter almost only bought goods from the grocery store of Frenzel, Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, Triftweg 9, and the dairy man Hampe, Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, Volkradstraße 10. The findings in both businesses have shown that there is no evidence that Ditter associated with other men. In general, people speak well of her there.”16 So this was another dead end for the police.
On October 15, the Kripo sent out a local news release related to this crime. Just as with the original reward poster and the announcement in the police newspaper, no connection was made between this crime and the attacks on women on the S-Bahn. This was not because the police were covering up this connection. It was because they were unaware that any such connection existed. They did however view this murder as possibly related to the sexual assaults and harassments in the garden area. As for the arrests the news release mentioned, these referred to people who were temporarily detained by the police for questioning such as relatives and neighbors, before being cleared.
This release read as follows:
Berlin, October 15th, 1940
1,000 RM Reward. Lichtenberg woman—murder still unsolved
A couple [implying a man/woman in a relationship]
is being searched for as witnesses!
Despite intense investigation towards solving the murder of the 20-year-old married woman Gerda Ditter, who, as reported, was found murdered on the fourth, Friday, midday, in her garden colony home in Colony Gutland II in Berlin Lichtenberg-Friedrichsfelde, the [Kripo] have not been able to trace the criminal. Mrs. Ditter was killed by being strangled and stabbed in her neck. The crime most likely happened during the night.
With reference to the established reward of 1,000 RM, all sections of the population are being asked to actively participate in solving this crime.
During the course of the manhunt carried out by criminal investigators over the day and night, many suspected people were arrested; none of these, however, were found to have been involved in the crime.
The manhunt for the investigation of the suspected man who was, as reported, in Colony Gutland II and the surrounding area some time before the crime and who, at that time, harassed lone women in the night, is still in process, as he has not been able to be apprehended. Hints, which could lead to the determination of who he is or to his arrest, are, as before, being accepted by the [Kripo]. The suspect is 30–40 years old, 1.65–1.70 meters tall, was wearing mostly blue visor-caps or sports-caps, a short jacket, maybe leather—it’s probably a heavy jacket—a sports-shirt with an open collar, and long, dark pants. He often had a bicycle with him.
Recently, it was found that, in the evening before the discovery of the murder, on Thursday the third of the month at about 11 P.M., not far from the garden house of Mrs. Ditter, on a cattle/sheep track at the corner of Way 5a, a couple was standing and talking to each other for a while. The testimony of these two still unknown people is very sought after by the [Kripo]. They are being requested to come forward immediately.
Pertinent information which could lead to finding the previously described suspect, or in any other way could lead to solving the crime, is being accepted by the homicide division “Ditter” (Police Headquarters, room 902, phone number 51 0023, extensions 699 and 738) under assurance of confidential handling.17
The police hoped that this news release would result in useful clues, or perhaps even the name of the killer himself. That did not happen, though, and the couple the police sought had nothing to do with this crime, which was committed by one man operating on his own. The police had claimed to be looking for them as possible witnesses, but there had been some hope that they had something to do with the crime. They did not even have any use as witnesses.
The description that the Kripo had of Ogorzow was all the information they had about the man behind the attacks on the women in this area. There was no description of who had come to Mrs. Ditter’s house that night to kill her. They were only speculating that it could be the same man who was responsible for the crime spree against women in this garden area.
By early November, the Kripo had identified roughly thirty suspects. After a thorough examination of these suspects, none were believed to be the killer.
They also chased a red herring in the form of a hearsay report of a scream on the night of the crime. This tip came in after the reward had been announced.
Mrs. Helene Schollain, a resident of Colony Gutland II, informed the police that she had heard rumors of a scream that night. This was all hearsay. She had not heard this alleged scream herself.
Mrs. Schollain told the Kripo a convoluted story of one person telling another about this supposed scream and so on: “On Monday, 10/7/1940, Mrs. Liebetraut, [residing at] Heinrichstraße 27, told Mrs. Schollain that she heard that, during the night when Ditter was murdered, a scream was heard from an unknown person. According to Mrs. Liebetraut, this came from a neighbor of Mrs. Ditter. There was even the assumption that it might be the neighbor Mrs. Bohm, who, out of fear of revenge of Mr. Herlitz, who lives with her, doesn’t dare to say anything. Mrs. Liebetraut heard about the scream through her father, Mr. Gerbert, who apparently heard it from a coworker.”18
This sounded like a rumor based on the well-known (within the neighborhood) dispute between Mr. Herlitz and Mrs. Ditter over Mrs. Ditter’s pigeons. But the police could not be certain if there were something to this or not without investigating it.
The police talked to Mr. Herlitz’s live-in girlfriend, Mrs. Auguste Bohm, on October 16 about this alleged scream, and she told them, “I did not hear any scream(s) on Thursday evening. If that were the case, I would say it without hesitation, without trying to protect someone.”19
The police were not surprised that Mrs. Liebetraut was willing to snitch. Nazi Germany was full of people willing to inform on their neighbors to the authorities, and the announcement of a huge reward only contributed toward that tendency.
A police history set forth how the Nazi state used informants: “There were two general categories of informers in Nazi Germany. First, there were those who had a more formal relationship with the Gestapo and often had connections to the activity they were informing on. The state often paid this type of individual, the most important of whom were known as Vertrauensleute, or V-persons. . . . The numbers of those formally enlisted, however, pale in comparison to the second major category: volunteers who came forward to inform on or denounce an acquaintance or neighbor or even a spouse or child, to the Gestapo. These did so through letters, both anonymous and signed, tips and even visits to the local Gestapo office.”20
So in addition to the people who came out in response to the prospect of a big reward, there were those in Nazi Germany who enjoyed denouncing others for free. It was a way to get revenge on a neighbor, neutralize a romantic rival, or simply feel important as a loyal citizen of the Third Reich.
Unfortunately for the police in this case, the tips they had received so far were worthless scraps of information like that provided by Mrs. Liebetraut. And these bad tips wasted police resources, as they needed to track down all of the people involved and interview them.
Meanwhile, a killer was still out there, hunting the women of Berlin.