Uniforms, Decoys in Drag, and Another Murder
Police Commissioner Wilhelm Lüdtke focused in on the attacker’s uniform. His men interviewed two women from the garden attacks who saw their assailant wearing a uniform, along with the women who had survived being attacked on the S-Bahn.
However, due to the darkness, the speed of the assaults, and the problems with eyewitness testimony generally, the police were not able to pinpoint who the attacker was from his uniform. For example, the two women who survived being thrown from the train said different things about what their attacker wore. One said that it was a blue uniform; the other said it was black. They both testified that he wore a hat pulled forward to partially conceal his facial features, but they could not agree on what kind of hat it was.
The police found this incredibly frustrating, as they desperately wanted to know more about their suspect. A basic fact like whether his uniform was blue or black could point the investigation in a totally different direction. The last thing the police wanted to do was interview thousands of people who had blue uniforms if the killer actually had a black uniform.
As much as the police wished it was otherwise, it was to be expected that there would be so little useful information that their witnesses could agree on. Eyewitness evidence can be problematic under the best of conditions, as people are nervous when they are victims of a violent crime, and the human mind generally does not retain as many useful details as we think it does. As such, it is not surprising that the police did not gain much useful information from those whom Paul Ogorzow attacked.
The police had a pool of five thousand active train workers whose uniforms could match their composite description. And this did not even include someone with a similar-looking uniform who did not work for the railroad, or someone who only impersonated a railroad employee, or a former railroad employee, for that matter. Checking out all these potential suspects and whether they had alibis for the times of the crimes would be a huge undertaking.
Besides, Nazi Germany was awash in different kinds of uniforms, many of them in dark colors that would look the same in blackout conditions.
If it was not an S-Bahn-related uniform, then the other main possibility the Kripo considered was that the uniform belonged to a member of the SS paramilitary organization. The SS had a number of uniform changes over the years, most notably going from all-black uniforms to a field-gray color.
If it was an SS uniform the assailant wore, then the accompanying hat was not part of it. Although it was dark, and witnesses had not seen much that could help the police, what they had noticed of the perpetrator’s headwear did not match an SS cap. The SS had a peaked cap with an eagle and an ominous-looking skull and crossbones insignia, known as a death’s head, on it.
The National Railroad hat Paul Ogorzow wore looked similar to many other German uniform caps during World War II. While they might look the same from a distance or in the dark, a major difference between these hats was the varying emblems used by different organizations. Ogorzow’s hat featured the eagle clutching a swastika, but with a slightly different version of the eagle that was specific to the National Railroad Company. In addition, his hat had a white circular badge with a large red dot in the middle affixed to a wraparound black band. Taken together, this created the black, white, and red color scheme that represented Germany at the time.
It would be hard for one of Ogorzow’s victims to see this in blackout conditions. Plus, after suffering a traumatic event, such as being attacked and then thrown off a moving train, it is understandable that one would not remember the exact details of what the eagle looked like on Ogorzow’s hat or that it had a white circle with a red dot on it. There were other details specific to a given kind of hat, such as the colors on the braiding, but since more noticeable branch-of-service indicators went unnoticed, these smaller details were not relevant to the investigation.
If a member of the SS were riding the S-Bahn and throwing German women off the train, toward what he believed to be their deaths, then Lüdtke could be in for a hard time. It was one thing for him to question civilians working for the state railroad company, and quite another to cast aspersions on members of the SS.
Going after the SS would be a major problem for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that the director of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, reported directly to the head of the SS (Reichsführer-SS) Heinrich Himmler. Heydrich and Himmler were close; Heydrich was widely considered one of Himmler’s most trusted aides.
Lüdtke realized that the best approach for now would be to put the SS issue on the side and focus in on the railroad. He flooded the S-Bahn late at night with decoys, using men in drag that in the darkness of the blackout a killer could mistake for lone women. Other police would travel in the adjacent compartment as backup, so that if they heard a struggle, they could rush in to assist. The idea was that these men would not need immediate backup in the same way that a female police officer would, the big difference being that these men would be carrying guns, while the female police Lüdtke had used before did not.
Young, skinny men who might pass for women in the dark were called to this highly unusual duty. A photo taken at the time showed a group of these policemen dressed as women. They looked ridiculous. All of them wore tall leather boots that ended just below the knees. They had on leather gloves, maybe to fit in with the winter clothes worn by real women, or perhaps to conceal their manly hands and spare them the indignity of putting on nail polish. Common accessories included knotted head scarves, wide-brimmed hats, and brooches. One policeman had a fur stole around his neck, while the others had silk scarves. These were attempts to conceal their large Adam’s apples.
They were all clean-shaven and wore a dark, possibly red lipstick. Some might pass as women in a poorly lit environment. Others would appear to be men if there were any light to expose them at all. Unfortunately for these cross-dressing policemen, there was some light on the S-Bahn trains even during the blackout, although the platforms themselves were shrouded in darkness.
Male agents dressed as women were an unusual occurrence in Nazi Germany, a country whose government persecuted those it identified as homosexual.
Their target, Ogorzow, knew of these police actions, so he did not fall for them. As mentioned previously, he had two main sources of information about the police investigation—one, as a railroad employee he heard gossip about activities on the train, and two, as an active member of the paramilitary SA, he had friends in the police force who mentioned this use of decoys.
The police primarily rode the rails late at night, as most of Ogorzow’s prior attacks had been around midnight. Ogorzow simply adapted to this fact and began attacking during the early morning hours, while it was still dark.
Early on Sunday, December 22, 1940, Ogorzow searched on the S-Bahn for a woman traveling alone that he could attack. Sometime before seven in the morning, he found her. The sun would not rise that day until 9:15 A.M., so there was little light out.1
Thirty-year-old Mrs. Elisabeth Büngener was riding the S-Bahn to see her husband. He was a military recruit in a town near Berlin called Fürstenwalde. Christmas was only days away and she wanted to see him before the holiday.
Germans celebrated Christmas Eve the way Americans did Christmas morning. So for her, it was only two days until the holiday during which she normally would exchange presents and eat a large meal with her relatives.
In the second-class compartment of the train, the only passengers were Ogorzow and Büngener as the train pulled out of the station at Friedrichshagen. If someone else had happened to travel second-class as well, Mrs. Büngener would have been safe. But with just the two of them in this section of the train, Ogorzow felt comfortable attacking her.
He stuck to his modus operandi on the train—he hit her on the head with a blunt object, and while she was out of it, he pulled the train door open, felt the wind blow on his face, and then dragged her body to the door. She was still alive.
He then felt the rush that came with throwing a woman off the S-Bahn while it was in motion. She tumbled off into the night between the Friedrichshagen and Rahnsdorf stations. He threw her things off after her, as he always did. The train was still in motion, so these items landed a good distance from her.
This marked his first attack in the early morning hours of a Sunday. It was a time to which he would soon return. It was still dark in the early morning, so he could take advantage of the blackout while avoiding the heavy police presence that evening now brought to this part of the S-Bahn. Moreover, the trains tended to be relatively empty early on Sundays as many people had that day off from work and were still asleep at home. Fewer people on the train meant there was more of a chance that Ogorzow would be able to find a woman traveling alone.
Five hours later, around noon, workers for the railroad stumbled across Mrs. Büngener. By then, she had died from her injuries. The workers had to be careful as she was lying near the third rail, which had 750 volts of direct current flowing through it to power the S-Bahn trains. As such, it posed a serious electroshock hazard. These workers contacted the police immediately.
At first, the police thought that this was a suicide, given that such events were common right before Christmas, and the victim had on her person a piece of paper that declared her psychologically unfit to work. This note was an attestation from a doctor.
Upon examination of the area around her body, however, investigators found her belongings approximately one thousand feet down the railway. It was not possible for her to throw herself off the train to commit suicide and then somehow throw her belongings afterward. Someone had to have tossed them out of the moving train.
If Mrs. Büngener had committed suicide and someone had been in the same train compartment, the police wondered why they would throw her stuff away, rather than leave it on the train or keep it. There was tobacco, which was a valuable commodity during this time of wartime rationing and shortages. There was also money.
Paul Ogorzow never stole from his victims. Perhaps he felt bad about what he had done and wanted nothing to do with their bodies once he had finished attacking and sexually assaulting them. He had a good working-class job, but he was not so well off that the money in his victim’s handbags would have meant nothing to him. If he had taken their money and valuables, it would have had the added benefit, from his perspective, of possibly leading the police astray as to his motive. They might have then believed that someone was throwing women from the train not out of a sexualized compulsion, but for the far more mundane reason of wanting to rob them. The violence might then be seen as an attempt to avoid having a witness that could go to the police.
So if he had stolen from his victims, not only would Ogorzow have been able to spend his victims’ money and smoke their tobacco, but the police might have been wasting time looking into muggers and purse snatchers instead of a more productive path of investigation.
Unlike some other serial killers, Paul Ogorzow never kept souvenirs or trophies of his kills. He never took anything from them, even something of no economic value, such as a torn bit of clothing or lock of hair. He did not take anything from the scene of his crimes either, like a bit of dirt or foliage from one of his garden area attacks. Nor did he revisit crime scenes to relive the memories of his attacks. He returned to the same general area to hunt again, but he did not return to the exact locations of his past crimes.
It would have been better for the police if he had taken souvenirs. If he had taken, say, an item of clothing from each victim, it would not have confused the police as to motive, but it would have given them something concrete to search for when they finally did have a suspect. Distinctive souvenirs mean that the police will someday have an easy case if they find this collection in the possession of the killer.
Given the discovery of the victim’s tossed out belongings, it was clear to the police on the scene that this was no suicide, despite the doctor’s note about Mrs. Büngener’s mental state.
This meant that it was a case for the Kripo, which quickly linked it to the other women attacked on the S-Bahn.
Lüdtke came down to the scene and examined the body as best he could without moving it. His initial thought was that the attacker had choked Mrs. Büngener by grabbing her neck and then thrown her still-living body off the train. While her body remained lying on the side of the tracks, it was hard to tell what injuries she had sustained from the attack on the train and what damage had come from the fall off the train.
Dr. Weimann arrived at the scene after Lüdtke. Weimann took a look at Mrs. Büngener’s body and was able to determine that she had been hit in the head. Lüdtke’s initial thought that she had been choked was wrong. Dr. Weimann determined that she died from injuries to her skull and internal damage to her body caused by the fall from the train. All of this suggested to both men that this was the work of the S-Bahn Murderer, as the man who attacked women on the train had come to be called.
Furthermore, the police speculated that the change in this criminal’s time of attack from late at night to the early morning suggested that he was aware of the hours that the police monitored the trains. Lüdtke mentioned that the S-Bahn night shift had ended at six that morning. This fact, he reasoned, might explain the timing of this attack.
Regardless of the reason for this change in the killer’s pattern, it meant the police needed to stretch their resources even thinner to cover this time on the train as well as the late night shifts they had focused on until now.