Ogorzow was born in 1912 in East Prussia and worked as an assistant signalman on the Berlin S-Bahn. He lived at Karlshorst with his wife and two children and was a member of the Nazi party and of the SA, which is directly relevant to the investigation: it was one reason he was not treated as a suspect for as long as he was not.
Between September 1940 and July 1941 he attacked women on the S-Bahn line in the east of the city, taking advantage of the blackout imposed against British air raids. He struck them with a length of lead cable, raped them, and in several cases pushed them from moving carriages; eight women died and many more were injured. His railway uniform and his knowledge of the network let him move along the line and off it without being questioned. German reporting called him the S-Bahn murderer, after the railway he worked on.
The Berlin Kripo investigation was hampered by two things beyond the blackout. The party leadership pressed for the crimes to be attributed to a foreign labourer or to Jews rather than to a party member, and Ogorzow's own political standing insulated him from suspicion; a colleague's report about him was not pursued. He was finally arrested on July 12, 1941 after the pattern was tied to the shift rosters.
He was tried before the Berlin special court on July 24, 1941, convicted of eight murders and a series of attempted murders, and beheaded at Plotzensee prison on July 26, 1941, two days later. The case was reported in the wartime German press only in the barest terms, since a serial murderer in the capital was not a story the regime wanted.
German records give his execution as beheading at Plötzensee, two days after the sentence was passed.