Paul Ogorzow worked for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Germany's state railway, on the S-Bahn line that runs east from Rummelsburg in Berlin. Between October 1940 and July 1941 he killed eight women and seriously injured six more, according to a 2026 account by t-online that draws on the files of the Berlin police history archive. He attacked women on the trains and in the allotment garden colonies near the tracks, in a city kept dark at night by the wartime blackout. He was a member of the Nazi Party, and the regime kept his crimes out of the press while police searched for him. He was arrested in the summer of 1941, confessed, and was executed at Plötzensee prison the day after he was sentenced to death.
The historian Roger Moorhouse, who wrote that he rediscovered the case in the Berlin archives in 2008, records that Ogorzow admitted eight counts of murder and more than thirty counts of assault.
Ogorzow was born in 1912 in East Prussia, the illegitimate child of a farm laborer, according to a 2014 article by Marcel Piethe in the Berlin district magazine Maulbeerblatt (republished in 2023). His grandfather, a shepherd, registered the child under the name Paul Saga. He was later adopted by an estate worker named Ogorzow, whose name he took.
The family moved to Wachow, near Nauen, west of Berlin. As a young man he worked as a farm laborer and then at the blast furnace of the Brandenburg steelworks. In 1934 the Reichsbahn hired him as a track construction worker. Maulbeerblatt reports that by then he was already a member of the Nazi Party and that he had been in the SA, the party's stormtroopers, since 1931, rising to the rank of Oberscharführer, a junior squad leader's rank.
He married, and he and his wife lived in Karlshorst, in eastern Berlin, with two children. Maulbeerblatt describes the picture neighbors had of him: a man who tended a garden, grew vegetables and picked cherries. When a local butcher put up a wanted poster for the killer and joked that the man might live close by, the magazine writes, Ogorzow laughed and said the butcher might be right.
t-online describes him as a Reichsbahn employee by the late 1930s, a man who drew no suspicion on the trains because he belonged there. A 2014 review of Scott Andrew Selby's book on the case in Maclean's adds that, as a railway worker, he was exempt from military service as an essential war worker.
When the Second World War began in September 1939, a blackout ordinance took effect in Berlin. Streets, stations and trains ran dark at night to deny targets to enemy bombers. t-online writes that the blacked-out streets made life easier for criminals.
The blackout changed who was on the trains late at night. With men called up to the Wehrmacht, many of the women riding the S-Bahn alone after dark were shift workers keeping the war economy going while their husbands were at the front, t-online reports. Maclean's notes that the darkened railway was itself dangerous: 28 people died on the S-Bahn in December 1940 alone, most of them in falls or struck by unlit trains. The review says the blackout and the many night-time deaths on the railway helped him avoid detection.
t-online reports that from 1938 Ogorzow began harassing women in the streets and the allotment gardens near Rummelsburg S-Bahn station, and that he became a killer two years later. Maulbeerblatt describes the attacks in the Gutland allotment colonies as beginning with men frightening women with flashlights and growing into assaults. Witnesses spoke of a man in a railway uniform.
The Maclean's review, drawing on Selby's book, says that by the summer of 1940, when he was 27, he had already committed more than two dozen assaults, and that after he was nearly caught he decided that killing the women he attacked was the only way to keep himself safe.
Maulbeerblatt lists three women who survived attacks in the autumn of 1940, on September 20, in early October and on November 4. All three lived.
The first woman to die was Gerda Ditter. Moorhouse, writing from the Kripo (criminal police) report he found in the archives, gives her name as Gerda Ditter, born Bath, on July 21, 1920, in Berlin. Maulbeerblatt calls her Gertrud Ditter and gives her age as 20.
She was killed at her home in Friedrichsfelde on October 4, 1940. She had two small children, 18 months and three months old, who were asleep in the next room. Her husband was serving with the Wehrmacht in Potsdam.
The report Moorhouse transcribed was written the next day, October 5, 1940, by a Kripo detective named Hinze who examined the scene. It records that a welfare official from the party's NSV welfare organization came to take the two children to an orphanage. It also records that Gerda Ditter herself had been under investigation by the Nazi authorities for leading what the report called a "parasitic life".
Moorhouse notes that this first killing did not follow the pattern of the later ones, which became known for attacks on trains.
Maulbeerblatt places most of the later deaths on or beside the railway line. t-online reports that in 1940 and 1941 Ogorzow often rode the line between Rummelsburg and Erkner. Maclean's, drawing on Selby, says he looked for women who had bought cheap third-class tickets and offered them seats in an often empty second-class carriage, and attacked them between stations.
Elfriede Franke, a 26-year-old nurse, was found dead at Karlshorst on December 3, 1940, Maulbeerblatt reports, citing the prosecution file number for the case.
Irmgard Freese, 19, was found the next day, December 4, 1940, near Rummelsburg S-Bahn station. She died soon after she was admitted to hospital in Köpenick.
Maulbeerblatt records a woman found on the line between Friedrichshagen and Rahnsdorf on December 22, 1940, and two more women killed on December 29, 1940, and January 5, 1941, who were found beside the railway embankment. The magazine does not name them, and other reports do not either.
Johanna Voigt, 39, a married woman, was killed on February 11, 1941, Maulbeerblatt reports. She had asked Ogorzow to walk her to Karlshorst station. She was found the next day near the embankment.
The killings brought one of the largest searches the Berlin police had run. t-online quotes a protocol from the Berlin police history archive that lists the forces assigned: members of the homicide squad, railway surveillance officers, a special unit of one police commissioner and 20 men, 100 criminal investigators, and 10 officers of the women's criminal police.
Police tried decoys. Male officers dressed in women's clothing rode the trains as bait, t-online reports, and Maulbeerblatt describes women officers used the same way. Stations were patrolled, identity papers were checked, and detectives in railway uniforms worked on the line. Maulbeerblatt reports that more than 5,000 workers of the Reichsbahn and the Rummelsburg depot were screened; the Maclean's review, from Selby, puts the number of railway workers police went through at about 8,000.
The local Nazi Party organization set up an escort service for women who had to travel alone at night, Maulbeerblatt writes. In the Voigt case, the magazine notes, the man she had asked to walk her to the station was Ogorzow himself.
None of these measures caught him, t-online writes.
The regime did not want Berliners to know a killer was riding the trains. Maulbeerblatt reports that Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry ordered that the press be kept out of the investigation. The Maclean's review says the Nazi leadership allowed no media coverage and forbade investigators from appealing to the public for help, and argues that an open investigation would have exposed him far sooner.
After a gap of several months, the police spread a rumor that the search was being called off, Maulbeerblatt reports. The killings started again.
On the night of July 3, 1941, Frida Korziol, 35, was killed in eastern Berlin, according to Maulbeerblatt. She was the last of the eight women.
The decisive lead came from an undercover officer of the criminal police, t-online reports. Maulbeerblatt describes how the search narrowed: investigators went back over the night-shift lists of the railwaymen, and a cleaner gave a vague tip that a switchman had left his signal box during a shift and climbed over the fence along the embankment. The switchman was Paul Ogorzow.
He was arrested in the summer of 1941 (t-online); Moorhouse writes that he was captured in July 1941. Neither gives the exact day.
t-online reports that he denied the accusations at first and then confessed. He told investigators that his acts had been driven by his sexual urges. Moorhouse records that he admitted eight counts of murder and more than thirty counts of assault.
Ogorzow was tried in Berlin and sentenced to death. The court was not named in the coverage, and the charges were not set out count by count.
Maulbeerblatt reports that in his final statement he blamed a Jewish doctor, who he said had treated a gonorrhea infection badly years before, for lasting harm to his state of mind, and asked the court to take that into account. He also stressed that he was a party member. The magazine treats both claims as an attempt to save himself by appealing to the regime's own prejudices.
He was executed at Strafgefängnis Plötzensee in Berlin on the day after he was sentenced, t-online reports. Moorhouse and Maulbeerblatt both say he was guillotined. Maulbeerblatt gives the date of execution as July 24, 1941; t-online gives no date.
The case was little known for decades. Moorhouse wrote in 2013 that Ogorzow was largely unknown until he came across the files in the Berlin archives in 2008, and he told the story in his book Berlin at War. Scott Andrew Selby's book A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin followed in 2014 and was reviewed in Maclean's in January of that year.
t-online's 2026 account was written with the help of staff of the Berlin police history archive, whose files record the scale of the manhunt.
Victims' names. Five of the eight women killed have been named. Maulbeerblatt writes "Gertrud Ditter"; Moorhouse, from the Kripo report, writes "Gerda Ditter, née Bath". Maulbeerblatt spells the last victim's name "Frida Korziol".
Number of railway workers screened. More than 5,000 (Maulbeerblatt) against about 8,000 (Maclean's, from Selby).
Execution date. July 24, 1941 (Maulbeerblatt). t-online says he was executed the day after his sentence but gives no date.
Start of the attacks. t-online dates his harassment of women to 1938; Maclean's speaks of more than two dozen assaults by the summer of 1940 without a start date.
The doctor. His claim that a Jewish doctor had harmed him is his own statement, reported by Maulbeerblatt as a self-serving plea; none of the accounts treats it as true.
SA rank. Maulbeerblatt gives his SA rank (Oberscharführer) and the year he joined (1931); the other accounts do not.
1912: Born in East Prussia; registered as Paul Saga, later adopted by an estate worker named Ogorzow.
1931: Joins the SA (Maulbeerblatt).
1934: Hired by the Deutsche Reichsbahn as a track construction worker.
1938: Begins harassing women near Rummelsburg S-Bahn station (t-online).
September 1939: War begins; blackout ordinance takes effect in Berlin.
September 20, 1940: A woman survives an attack.
October 4, 1940: Gerda Ditter is killed in Friedrichsfelde.
October 5, 1940: Kripo report on her death.
November 4, 1940: A woman survives an attack.
December 3, 1940: Elfriede Franke is found dead at Karlshorst.
December 4, 1940: Irmgard Freese is found near Rummelsburg station and dies in hospital in Köpenick.
December 22 and 29, 1940, and January 5, 1941: Three more women killed (names not reported).
February 11, 1941: Johanna Voigt is killed near Karlshorst.
July 3, 1941: Frida Korziol is killed.
July 1941: Arrested; confesses.
Summer 1941: Sentenced to death in Berlin; executed at Plötzensee the next day (July 24, 1941, per Maulbeerblatt).
2008: Moorhouse finds the case files in the Berlin archives.
2014: Selby's book is published.