On the night of September 20, 1940, at 11:35, a young woman named Gerda Kargoll was pushed from a moving S-Bahn train between the Wuhlheide and Karlshorst stations in eastern Berlin. It was the fifth of Paul Ogorzow's capital crimes and the first on the railway. Wartime Berlin was blacked out against British bombers, the carriages ran dark, and Ogorzow, an assistant signalman on the Deutsche Reichsbahn, moved through them in uniform. He would sit down beside a woman traveling alone in an otherwise empty compartment, knock her down with a heavy length of lead cable, assault her and throw her from the train.
He was born Paul Saga on September 29, 1912, in Muntowen, in the Sensburg district of East Prussia. By the war he lived at Dorotheastrasse 24 in Karlshorst with his wife and two children, and he was a member of the Nazi party and an SA Scharführer. Between August 1939 and July 1941 he killed eight women and tried to kill six more. Some he attacked on the trains; others he stalked in the allotment garden colonies near the line, where women were alone at night because their husbands had been called up. He had been volunteering to escort women home under a scheme meant to keep them from traveling alone after dark.
The Berlin mortuary registers name his dead. Gerda Ditter, twenty, died on October 4, 1940. Elfriede Franke, twenty-six, died on December 3, and Irmgard Freese, nineteen, the next day, after he knocked her down with the same iron bar he had used on Franke. Elisabeth Büngener, thirty, died on December 22 and Gertrud Siewert, forty-six, on December 29. Hedwig Ehbauer, twenty-seven, died on January 5, 1941, and Johanna Voigt, thirty-eight, a mother of two who was pregnant, on February 12; she was killed just after he had left one of the women he was escorting. After a pause, and with the garden colonies no longer watched, Frieda Koziol, a divorced woman of thirty-four, was found dead on July 3, 1941, in the Gutland II colony. Ogorzow had been on duty that night.
The Kriminalpolizei had the clothing of the railwaymen examined, and the investigator Wilhelm Lüdtke found human blood on Ogorzow's uniforms. The records disagree about the day he was taken: most accounts say officers collected him from his flat at 6:45 in the morning on July 12, 1941, while the Plötzensee prison records give July 17, and one account puts the arrest at the Rummelsburg railway yard. He said nothing at first. A woman who had survived one of his attacks identified him when they were brought face to face, and he confessed. He blamed his crimes on a frenzy and on hatred of women, whom he said had infected him with venereal disease two or three times, and in an attempt to save himself he claimed that a Jewish doctor treating him for gonorrhea had made him ill with bad medicine.
On July 24, 1941, Special Court III at the Berlin Landgericht convicted him of murder and of crimes under the decree against violent criminals and the Volksschädling decree, and sentenced him to death and the permanent loss of civil rights. The court found him fully responsible for his acts. By one account he admitted eight murders, six attempted murders and thirty-one assaults. He was beheaded at Plötzensee prison at six the next morning, Friday, July 25, 1941, less than two weeks after his arrest. Some later accounts give the date as July 26, but the prison record and a news agency report printed in the Salzburger Volksblatt that Friday both give the 25th. The press covered the case in the regime's language; one report ran under the headline "Ein Untermensch."