Technical Difficulties

A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer by Scott Andrew Selby

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


First things first: Paul Ogorzow was a German railroad worker (on the S-Bahn, Berlin's commuter rail system) who attacked at least fourteen women, and murdered eight of them, between 1939 and 1941. Seven of these women (including five of the women who died) were attacked on the S-Bahn at night, beaten unconscious, and thrown off the train. (Remarkably, two of these women survived.) The women not attacked on the S-Bahn were attacked in a neighborhood of garden allotments, also at night during the blackout, and were beaten, beaten and raped, or beaten, raped, and murdered. The police put massive amounts of manpower into finding Ogorzow, hampered by Goebbels' refusal to allow them to publicize the investigation, and finally caught him because another railroad employee had once seen him climbing a fence to sneak off the job. (And it wasn't even to murder someone. It was to visit his mistress.) They realized that this meant Ogorzow's alibi was as full of holes as a whiffle-ball, and the police commissioner in charge of the case, Wilhelm Lüdkte, in interrogation, tripped Ogorzow up once and from there, baby step by baby step, got a full confession out of him. Ogorzow put forward every excuse he could think of (the gonorrhea made him do it; the Jewish doctor who maliciously mis-treated the gonorrhea made him do it; insanity made him do it, but none of them held water. He was indicted the 23rd of July, 1941, tried the 24th, and executed (by guillotine) the 25th.

There are two particularly Nazi-esque ironies that stung me: (1) Ogorzow's heirs (his wife and two children, who had known NOTHING of Daddy's extracurricular activities, including his non-homicidal affairs with other women) were billed for wear and tear on the guillotine.

(2) Although Goebbels wouldn't allow the police to publicize the fact that they were trying to catch a serial killer, he did have a bright idea for protecting potential victims: a late-night escort service, where men could volunteer to accompany women on the S-Bahn and see them safely to their homes. The system was quite intelligently run: the women had to request an escort formally, and the details were entered in a log book. But the criteria for being allowed to volunteer to protect the fair flower of German womanhood? (a) You had to be a Party member and (b) you had to be a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA)--more familiarly known as Brownshirts.

As if that weren't bad enough, Paul Ogorzow was a Party member and a Brownshirt. He volunteered for escort duty and did in fact see all his charges safely home, protecting them vigilantly from himself.

I found the book intensely frustrating because Selby writes and uses primary sources like a lawyer rather than a historian, but he's not presenting a case, just the basic, convoluted narrative of Ogorzow's career as a serial killer. This creates a muddle of nonfiction genre conventions and basically leaves me with the feeling like there was no book in this book. YMMV.

As far as I know, it is the only book in English about Paul Ogorzow.



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