Paul Ogorzow

Paul Ogorzow (born Paul Saga; 29 September 1912 – 26 July 1941), also known as the S-Bahn Murderer, 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 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. Following his arrest by the Kriminalpolizei, Ogorzow was convicted of killing eight women and executed by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison. In late August 1939, while he and his family were residing in Karlshorst, Ogorzow began randomly assaulting and raping dozens of women in and around the Friedrichsfelde district. The neighbourhood was populated mostly by solitary housewives whose husbands had been called up for the Second World War. It was these vulnerable women who initially served as Ogorzow's primary source of victims, and police documented thirty-one 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. Domestic news coverage was censored by various agencies within the Nazi government, as it was believed the murders would damage wartime morale. 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.

The homicide unit of the Berlin Police, under SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Lüdtke, was not able publicly to seek information about the murders or to warn the population about the danger of travelling by rail at night. Lüdtke sent out his best detectives to discreetly investigate.

Impact of World War II and Nazi society War-time conditions Historian Roger Moorhouse has suggested that the Kriminalpolizei were hampered in their investigation of the murders by concurrent obstacles. The Nazi regime had instituted a rigorous program of media censorship to 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. Due to Allied bombing raids on the capital, a blackout was necessary. These conditions were conducive to criminal activity.

Nazi doctrine The official Nazi ideology, whose tenets included anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and notions of German racial superiority, deterred investigators from considering the possibility that someone "racially German" (Aryan) could be responsible for the murders. Much initial suspicion wrongly settled on foreign forced labourers (mostly Polish prisoners of war) working in factories adjacent to the rail network. Local Jews were also targeted unjustly for investigation in connection with the murders, albeit mainly for ideological reasons. Survivor testimony eventually established that the suspect was a German, and the perpetrator turned out to be a veteran member of the Nazi Party and the SA.