In Police Custody
About a week after this last murder, the police experienced their big break in the case, although they had no idea at the time how important this new lead would be. They had been questioning thousands of railroad employees in order to see if any of them were suspect in any way or could provide any information that might help in the investigation.
After having determined that a particular railroad worker they were interviewing was not a suspect, the Kripo detectives would conclude their interview with this now standard question: “Have you noticed anything suspicious about any of your coworkers?”
This particular worker replied that while he did not know the identity of the killer, he had seen a coworker ditch his job by climbing a fence. Then, much later, this coworker returned to the job before anyone in charge had noticed that he’d left his post. When he asked this man where he was going, he replied that he was going to see a woman. He did not know the man’s name, but he could describe him. He also told the police that the work site in question was the signal tower Vnk at the S-Bahn Rummelsburg station. These were enough details for the police to be able to follow up and determine the identity of this mystery railway employee.
This coworker turned out to be Paul Ogorzow, who had worked for years near the Rummelsburg S-Bahn station. The police looked at Ogorzow’s work record and saw that he had a certificate for good service issued by his superiors and that there were no complaints against him. And the vast majority of the criminal acts the police were investigating occurred during times that he was at work. They had talked with him before, as they had talked with most railway workers and people who lived near the garden area.
The police had cleared him on the basis that he was working at the time of some of the attacks. They noted three different times that he was on duty when attacks occurred, including one time he was manning a telegraph, a task the police thought it would be impossible for him to leave without getting in trouble with his superiors.
Ogorzow had not looked to the Kripo like whatever they imagined a serial killer would be like. He appeared to be a happily married family man, a loyal party member and Brownshirt, whose only interest outside his work and family was tending the fruit trees in his garden. His superiors gave him high marks for the quality of his work. There was some grumbling by his coworkers that he said offensive things about women at times, but nothing that suggested he hated women so much that he killed them.
Now the police took another, much closer look at him. When the detectives looked in detail at his work records, they realized that the activities that provided him with alibis for certain murders could not be corroborated.
During these times, Ogorzow was working alone, with duties that he could have temporarily abandoned without being caught by his employers. The police now knew that he would sometimes climb over a fence to ditch work. They also realized that he could simply walk to the S-Bahn station closest to his workplace and ride the rails from there.
This made him a potential suspect; although the police were far from certain that he was their man. This was simply another lead to be investigated—one of many generated by the extensive interviews with thousands of railroad personnel.
At six-forty-five in the morning on Saturday, July 12, 1941, Kripo Detective Georg Heuser went to Ogorzow’s apartment with two lower-ranked officers for backup. They picked up Ogorzow without incident and brought him back to their station for questioning.
This same day the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signed a formal agreement, the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, to fight together against Germany. This was a huge turning point in the war, as until Germany had attacked the Soviets three weeks ago, a nonaggression pact had been in place between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Lüdtke studied the file he had on Paul Ogorzow. It showed a married man with kids, a Nazi Party member in good standing, and a sergeant in the SA. He’d been employed by the railroad for a long time and worked his way up to his current position. Lüdtke thought that the description that they had, as conflicted and vague as it was owing to the blackout conditions, did not particularly match Ogorzow, other than that he was the right general size. Most noticeably, Ogorzow had a striking nose that no one had mentioned in their descriptions of the S-Bahn Murderer.
As for his criminal record, Ogorzow’s only entry did not suggest a sexual predator or murderer. It was for a break-in he’d committed with two others in 1932. He’d committed this crime in the town of Königs Wusterhausen, which was at the end of the line for one of the Berlin S-Bahn routes. He and his two accomplices had broken into an inn to steal things. He’d been unemployed at the time. For this crime, he was tried in the district court of the town of Nauen. The Nazis had not yet gained power, and the German government of the time was known as the Weimar Republic. Ogorzow’s trial took place under their laws, and this court sentenced him to nine months in prison.
However, with Hitler and the Nazi Party gaining power in early 1933, things changed for Ogorzow. On March 21, 1933, Adolf Hitler handed President Hindenburg two documents to sign. One was for a full pardon of party members such as Paul Ogorzow. As a result of this amnesty, Ogorzow was a free man. Others who were set free that day included numerous other Nazis who’d been convicted of violent crimes.
Often sexual predators will have past crimes in their record that indicate their progression from relatively small-time crimes such as harassing women to the much more serious crimes of raping and killing. While Ogorzow had such an escalation in his criminal activities, it was not reflected in the paperwork the detectives had in front of them, as he had not been caught for any of his prior crimes against women.
Moreover, Ogorzow did not fit the preconceived notions that the police had developed early on in their case. A family man was not thought of as a serial killer—instead the image police generally associated back then with such crimes was a single man. Also, the racial ideology of the Third Reich meant that many of the detectives had focused on the usual suspects of their warped belief system—Jews, who had yet to be deported from Berlin to concentration camps, and foreigners, who were used as forced labor.
But Lüdtke had kept an open mind and come to believe that his suspect had to be someone who worked at the railroad company. So seeing Ogorzow’s file did not result in Lüdtke letting him go. Instead, he had his men follow through on this possible break in the case.
When questioned by Detective Heuser, Ogorzow at first denied that he had ever left his workplace while he was supposed to be on the job. He also denied ever climbing the fence there. So for the moment, the police only had the word of one railroad employee against another.
Although the forensic science of the time was primitive compared to what we have now, there still was a great deal of evidence that could be gathered by examining Ogorzow’s belongings. Though the police found nothing of interest in his home, they did confiscate his clothing and submitted it to their lab for inspection.
The police sent to the lab a combination of the clothes Ogorzow had been wearing when they brought him in and items they took during the search of his home. They later put together a list of these items as follows:
ITEMIZATION. THE SECURED PIECES OF CLOTHING OF THE ACCUSED, PAUL OGORZOW:
In gathering these items, the police concentrated on things that Ogorzow could have been wearing during his various attacks on women, as well as anything he might have used to clean himself up afterward. As the police were not certain of exactly what uniform he’d been wearing, they took anything that was a uniform or resembled one. The towels were taken as well, as they were still dirty, and so if he’d wiped off blood or other evidence on them, it might still remain. If the towels had been laundered, they would not have bothered with them, as their forensic technology could not pick up usable evidence from washed items. Even today, that would be difficult to impossible, depending on what one was looking for. The most one could hope for in such a scenario would be fibers that might match something or a suspicious stain.
The uniforms, even if washed, would be potentially useful for determining if they looked familiar to any of the reports from witnesses in this case.
During his interrogation, the police refused to believe Ogorzow when he claimed that he had never abandoned his work post. As long as he was believed to have been at work at all the times he was supposed to be there, then he had an alibi for the time of many of the S-Bahn Murderer’s crimes. He didn’t need solid alibis for the times of all the crimes. It would be enough if his alibis held up for some of the crimes, as the police believed that one man had committed all of these attacks on the S-Bahn and in the garden area.
When confronted repeatedly by his coworker’s statement that he’d seen Ogorzow ditch work, Ogorzow eventually admitted to leaving work by climbing the fence, but claimed that he had done so in order to secretly meet with a woman who lived nearby. According to Ogorzow, they had been carrying on an affair and he had lied to the police because he did not want to get in trouble for leaving work; nor did he want anyone to know of this sexual relationship, as they were both married. Her husband was away in the military.
When brought in by the police, this woman admitted to the affair. Ogorzow now had a credible explanation for ditching work and lying to the police about it, but he still had two problems. One was his demonstrated ability to leave work without being caught, which meant that he could no longer use his job as a meaningful alibi. If it had been just this, the police would have let him go. Lacking an alibi was not enough, even in Nazi Germany, for the Kripo to close the case. Besides, with thousands of railroad workers interviewed, there were bound to be some who did not have alibis for key times.
The second, and much more pressing problem for Ogorzow, was that the police lab found blood on his uniform. While the police were interviewing him, they had sent his uniform for a rush examination by the lab.
A microscope was needed to see this blood, so Ogorzow had not been aware that it had stained his uniform—both his jacket and his pants. A particularly incriminating, and disgusting, detail was that a large amount of blood was found in and around the crotch area of his pants, especially the zipper region. He’d already cleaned up anything that he could see himself, but there was enough blood remaining for the examiner to determine that it was of human origin, although not enough to run tests to establish blood type.
Again, Ogorzow tried to explain away the evidence against him. He had yet another plausible story: his wife had been very sick three days before, and in caring for her, he had gotten blood on his work clothing. The police then questioned his wife, who had no opportunity to consult with her husband. She confirmed that she had been sick, that she had bled on him, and that all this had happened on the same date that Ogorzow claimed it had.
As DNA testing did not yet exist, and there was not enough blood evidence to see if it was the same blood type as his wife’s, the police now had no way to disprove Ogorzow’s version of how it came to be there, given his wife’s corroboration of his story.
Because Ogorzow did not know that blood type was a nonissue, he also provided a second explanation for any blood that did not match his wife’s. He claimed that he’d injured his finger recently and wiped it on his clothes.
The problem for Ogorzow was that the forensics lab believed the bloodstain on his jacket to be the result of a struggle. The blood spatter on the jacket, in particular, did not fit a narrative of either wiping a bloody finger or helping his injured wife. Neither situation would explain why the blood found on his jacket appeared to be in a pattern consistent with him having violently attacked someone.
So the police viewed Ogorzow as a strong suspect. If it were not for this bloodstain pattern analysis, they would have probably let him go. Instead they detained him for on ongoing process over a period of days. The police were holding on to Ogorzow until they either were convinced he was their man or until they cleared him of involvement in this gruesome case.