Early life

Paul Ogorzow was born on 29 September 1912 in the village of Muntowen, East Prussia, Imperial Germany (present-day Muntowo, Poland), the illegitimate child of Marie Saga, a farm worker. Saga's father later filled out his new grandson's birth certificate, marking it with three crosses and the child's birth name: Paul Saga.^[3][4]

In 1924, the now 12-year-old Paul was adopted by Johann Ogorzow, a farmer in Havelland. He would eventually take his adoptive father's surname as his own. Paul was initially employed as a laborer on a farm in the village of Nauen, and later worked at a steel foundry in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, before ultimately settling in Berlin.^[3]

Adult life

At the age of 18, Ogorzow joined the Nazi Party and eventually became a member of its paramilitary branch, the Sturmabteilung (SA). Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Ogorzow rose modestly in the Party ranks, and by the time of his capture he held the title of Scharführer (squad leader) in the SA.^[4]

In 1934, Ogorzow was hired as a platelayer by the national railroad, Deutsche Reichsbahn, which ran the S-Bahn commuter rail system in Berlin. He steadily worked his way up through the organization, eventually becoming an assistant signalman at Rummelsberg depot in the eastern suburbs of the capital, close to Karlshorst. This was the area where most of his crimes later occurred.^[3]

Ogorzow married Gertrude Ziegelmann, a saleswoman two years his senior, in 1937. They had two children, a son and a daughter. Initially they lived with Ogorzow's mother in a working class section of Berlin with numerous allotments, apartment blocks and tenement shacks. The family later moved to another apartment in Karlshorst, near to where Ogorzow worked. He was often seen playing with his children, spending a lot of time in his garden and tending a small cherry orchard in the backyard.^[3] At his trial, Ogorzow's wife gave evidence that he often became violent and abusive, obsessively making unfounded claims of her being unfaithful to him.^[4]

Ogorzow traveled to his job daily, either by train, on foot or by bicycle. He was generally well-regarded by his co-workers, and was considered reliable and highly competent by his supervisors, often operating both the light signals and the telegraph simultaneously. Although he generally worked in and around a signal box at Zobtener Straße, where the VnK Railway meets the S-Bahn, Ogorzow was often dispatched to work at various locations along the S-Bahn, always wearing his uniform.^[3]

Early crimes

After his capture, Ogorzow extensively detailed his various criminal activities to police, allowing for a more precise reconstruction of his crimes.^[3] In late August 1939, while he and his family were residing in Karlshorst, Ogorzow embarked on a series of violent attacks, randomly assaulting and raping dozens of women in and around the Friedrichsfelde district.^[3][5] At that time, the neighborhood was populated mostly by solitary housewives whose husbands had been called up to serve in the recently-commenced Second World War. It was these vulnerable women who initially served as Ogorzow's primary source of victims, and police documented 31 separate attacks that occurred in the allotments and tenement area, all of which were later connected to Ogorzow. During his attacks, he either choked his victims, threatened them with a knife or bludgeoned them, and in their statements all the victims mentioned their attacker wore a railway worker's uniform.^[3][4]

Escalation

Ogorzow's initial attempts at murder were unsuccessful. Between August 1939 and July 1940, he attacked and stabbed three different women, all of whom recovered and later gave evidence against him. In August 1940, Ogorzow savagely bludgeoned another woman after raping her on board the S-Bahn. She survived only because after she lost consciousness, Ogorzow mistakenly thought she had died. Another failed effort in September resulted in the victim surviving not only an attempted strangulation, but also being thrown from a moving train by Ogorzow. He soon suffered another setback when he attempted to rape another woman in an S-Bahn station, only for her husband and brother-in-law, whom Ogorzow had failed to notice, rushed to her aid after she screamed for help. Ogorzow managed to escape after being severely beaten. In light of this close call, Ogorzow changed his modus operandi and his subsequent crimes were more successful.^[3]

Murders

Ogorzow renewed his attacks in October 1940, focusing primarily on the 9-kilometre stretch of the S-Bahn between the Rummelsburg depot and Friedrichshagen railway station. Wearing his work uniform, he lurked aboard empty carriages waiting for potential victims, as the train's passenger cars were not illuminated at the time because of wartime blackouts around Berlin. He relied heavily on the fact that lone female passengers were not suspicious of a uniformed employee of the S-Bahn approaching them, apparently to ask for their ticket. Once the women were distracted, Ogorzow attacked, strangling or striking the victim in the head with a 2-inch-thick piece of lead-encased telephone cable.

Ogorzow committed his first murder on 4 October 1940, going on the pretext of a tryst to the home of 20-year-old Gertrude "Gerda" Ditter, whose husband, Arthur, was away in the military. Ditter was stabbed to death. Two months later, on the evening of 4 December, he killed two more women: S-Bahn passenger Elfriede Franke had her skull crushed with an iron bar before her corpse was thrown from the moving train, and 19-year-old Irmgard Freese was raped and bludgeoned to death while walking home.^[1] On 22 December, railroad workers discovered the body of a fourth victim, Elisabeth Bungener, discarded alongside the tracks. A medical examination determined she had died as the result of a fractured skull.^[4]

Six days later, on 28 December 1940, the Berlin Police recovered Gertrude Siewert the morning after she had been assaulted and thrown from the train by Ogorzow. Suffering from exposure and various life-threatening traumas, she was rushed to hospital and died from her injuries the following day. This scene repeated itself on 5 January 1941, when the unconscious body of Hedwig Ebauer, who was five months pregnant, was located near the S-Bahn. Ogorzow had unsuccessfully attempted to strangle Ebauer before throwing her from the train alive. Like Siewert, Ebauer succumbed to her injuries later that day in hospital, never regaining consciousness.^[2]

On 11 February, the remains of Ogorzow's seventh victim, Johanna Voigt, a pregnant mother of three, were found. An autopsy later confirmed what most suspected, that Voigt had died as the result of repeated blows to the head and injuries sustained after being thrown from the train. Given the obvious similarities in the various crimes, all seven deaths were deemed to be the work of the same individual.^[3][4]

War-time conditions

Historian Roger Moorhouse has suggested that the Kriminalpolizei were hampered in their investigation of the murders by several concurrent obstacles. Firstly, the Nazi regime had instituted a rigorous program of media censorship in order avoid demoralising civilians during wartime. This censorship meant that there were only cursory details released about each case, which impeded the progress of the investigation. Secondly, due to ongoing Allied bombing raids on the capital, blackout conditions were necessary to shield strategically important targets from airborne destruction. As a side effect, however, these conditions were conducive to criminal activity.^[1] Ogorzow himself exploited the blackouts, using them to stalk and kill his victims and then to escape from possible surveillance under the cover of darkness.^[8]

S-Bahn operations

The S-Bahn appears to have had a poor health and safety record at the time of the murders, which meant that the Kriminalpolizei had to contend with a surplus of corpses resulting both from accidental deaths on the rail line and those killed during bombing raids. This resulted in a large forensic backlog that placed the police force and municipal medical services at a further disadvantage.

Nazi doctrine

The official Nazi ideology, whose tenets included anti-Semitism, xenophobia and notions of German racial superiority, actively discouraged investigators from considering the possibility that someone "racially German" (Aryan) could be responsible for the murders. Much initial suspicion wrongly settled on foreign forced laborers (mostly Polish prisoners of war) working in the numerous factories adjacent to the rail network.^[1] Local Jews were also targeted unjustly for investigation in connection with the murders, albeit mainly for ideological reasons. In any event, survivor testimony eventually established that the suspect was indeed German, and the perpetrator was in fact a veteran member of both the Nazi Party and the SA.^[1]