Paul Ogorzow (29 September 1912 – 26 July 1941), also known as the S-Bahn Murderer,[1] was a German serial killer and rapist who was active in Nazi-era Berlin between 1939 and 1941, during the height of the Second World War.
An employee of Deutsche Reichsbahn, he exploited the regular wartime blackouts in order to commit numerous murders and sex crimes, mostly targeting lone female passengers travelling aboard Berlin's S-Bahn commuter rail system, and solitary housewives whose husbands had been called up for military service.
[1] 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.
Paul was initially employed as a labourer 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.
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.
Initially, they lived with Ogorzow's mother in a working class section of Berlin with numerous allotments, apartment blocks and tenement shacks.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels even issued a directive to German journalists regarding limits to be placed on coverage of the murders.
[citation needed] The homicide unit of the Berlin Police, under SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Lüdtke,[6] was not able to publicly seek information about the murders or to warn the population about the danger of travelling by rail at night.
[3][4] Ogorzow, who often made misogynistic comments to co-workers and talked often of his fascination with killing, was eventually singled out by investigators looking for potential suspects among railway employees following the murder of Koziol.
[1] In the Kriminalpolizei summary of the case submitted on 17 July, Ogorzow's motives were listed as: An excessive sex drive, sexual attraction to his victims' resistance and a pathological hatred of women.
[3] After the war, one of the Kriminalpolizei officers who was heavily involved in the Ogorzow investigation, Georg Heuser [de], was charged by a West German court for his role in perpetrating Einsatzgruppen atrocities in the Soviet Union.
[8] 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.
Much initial suspicion wrongly settled on foreign forced labourers (mostly Polish prisoners of war) working in the numerous factories adjacent to the rail network.