‘Get hold of all the women from the first attacks,’ he said. ‘Budzinski, Jablinski, Nieswandt and Schumacher. I want them all close at hand tomorrow. Keep them out of sight, but close, always close.’

  ‘Yes, Commissar.’

  ‘And see if you can find any record of this woman who shouted back at him. If she was angry enough to shout, she might have made a complaint as well.’

  ‘I’ll see to it immediately.’

  ‘And there’s one last thing …’

  Lüdtke gave me a final, very strange order. ‘Weimann will sort it out for you,’ he assured me when I looked a little unnerved by what he’d just requested. Then he held up a hand in front of my face with his thumb and forefinger just a couple of centimetres apart and said: ‘We’re close – this close! But this is the trickiest moment of all. We’ve gone fishing. We’ve hooked our fish. He’s on the line. But now we have to bring him in … slowly … delicately … knowing that at any time the line may break.’ He slapped his hand against my upper arm and gripped my biceps. ‘But it won’t break, Heuser. Believe me, it will not break.’

  Lüdtke grinned with a predatory glee I’d never seen in him before. ‘We’re going to land this damn fish. Just you wait and see.’

  25

  Lüdtke was right. Ogorzow was almost in our grasp. By mid-afternoon we’d found a record of a complaint from a woman who’d had a torch shone in her face in a way that exactly matched the description he’d given. So now we called up every similar incident reported in that leafy corner of Berlin, and a pattern emerged that precisely matched Ogorzow’s steady escalation from low-level encounters that might frighten or humiliate a woman, through the first physical assaults, to fullblown rape and eventually murder. He’d been at it for at least three years, and though the women who had survived his attacks had no desire ever to encounter him again, they were soon persuaded to help us if that meant saving other women from the ordeals they had been forced to endure.

  Gertrude Ogorzow was also changing her tune. I spent another hour with her and she revealed a very different Paul Ogorzow from the decent family man that the neighbours saw. ‘He’s a jealous man,’ she said, ‘jealous like you wouldn’t believe. I never cheated on him, not once, though I had my opportunities all right. You might not think it to look at me now, but there was a time when plenty of men were chasing after me. But I never said yes. I’d made my vows and I was sticking to them. Paul just wouldn’t believe it though. I don’t know if it’s his mother’s fault – she was always off with other men, that one, though she’s been good to us and I shouldn’t speak ill of her. But I’m only telling the truth. All the time he was a boy there was one man after another. So maybe that’s why he’s the way he is.’

  ‘How did it show, your husband’s jealousy? Was he angry with you? Was he ever violent?’

  ‘Not really violent, no – I mean, no more than any other husband getting angry with his wife. He could shout a bit, I suppose, when he thought I’d been looking at a man, which was often. I only had to say excuse me to someone on the street and Paul would think I was flirting with him. But it was mostly him trying to control me. He had all these rules about how I was supposed to behave when he was off at work: places I could or couldn’t go; people I was allowed to speak to, all that sort of thing.’

  I thought of Ogorzow in his working hours and the things he was doing to other women, and the hypocritical injustice of his attitude towards his wife filled me with a greater determination than ever to rid the world of this menace.

  The following day, Lüdtke took Ogorzow out for his tour of the leafy neighbourhoods between Karlshorst and Rummelsburg. It was a perfect day for a stroll among the gardens. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the high twenties, with just enough of a breeze to keep it from feeling too hot. The allotments were lush with vegetables coming into their prime. The beds were filled with potato plants, lettuces and cabbages, marrow plants and ripening ears of sweetcorn, while tomato vines and runner beans climbed up trellised frames, bamboo poles and slender hazel branches bound with twine. There were even a few strawberry beds with their scarlet fruit clustered beneath the clumps of dark green leaves.

  Such an abundance of life was a strange setting for our pursuit of violent death. As Lüdtke and Ogorzow walked along the dusty, shade-dappled paths I was close by to handle any tasks Lüdtke might require, and there were uniformed constables all around us to deter Ogorzow from even thinking of escape. Ogorzow pointed out four places where he said that he’d flashed his torch at women and made obscene suggestions. Now his stupidity came to our aid, for two of them were actually locations at which he’d attempted murder. I fetched both his victims from the car that was slowly shadowing Ogorzow’s movements, out of his sight and hearing. One of the women was unable to identify him as her assailant. The other, however, needed just one look before she said: ‘That’s him. I’d know him anywhere,’ and then burst into tears.

  The net was drawing tighter around Paul Ogorzow. We had enough now to convict him as an aggressive, violent sexual predator, but the murders were another matter.

  Lüdtke and I took Ogorzow back to Alex and straight to the interview room. Before we could begin our questions, however, Ogorzow approached Lüdtke and in a quiet, confidential, man-to-man tone said: ‘Can you and me talk alone?’ He glanced knowingly at me. ‘Without him.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lüdtke said. ‘I’ll get rid of him immediately.’

  He turned to me and made a great show of insisting that I leave the room so that he and ‘Herr Ogorzow’ could have a private conversation. While his back was turned, he tapped his Party badge and whispered: ‘I’ve been expecting this.’

  The Party was a form of Freemasonry, a brotherhood in which one member was expected to help out another. Ogorzow hoped to use his considerable status as a Nazi loyalist and SA sergeant as a means of extracting himself from the unfortunate situation in which he now found himself.

  It didn’t work. Within a few minutes, Lüdtke was opening the door to the corridor and ushering me back into the interview room. ‘Ah, Heuser, do come in. I was just explaining to Ogorzow that I am sadly unable to help him. On the contrary, I am determined to make sure that our movement is purged of elements whose behaviour would besmirch the good name of National Socialism. In any case, my orders come direct from General Heydrich himself, and I don’t recall him asking me to exclude Party members from my inquiries. You were there, Heuser. Do you remember Heydrich saying I should go easy on anyone with a Party badge?’

  ‘No, Commissar. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad that’s settled. So you see, Ogorzow, you’ve had it. We’re going to get you. It’s all over. Why don’t you save us all some time and maybe do yourself a little good, eh? Courts always look kindly on criminals who’ve confessed to their crimes. If you show the judges genuine regret and remorse for what you’ve done, they may show you a little mercy.’

  Ogorzow was a deflated, diminished figure. The flicker of hope that had perked him up when he believed he could use his Party status to get himself an easy ride had been crushed. Now he just sat there, slumped and wordless.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ Lüdtke said, undeterred by Ogorzow’s lack of response. ‘It’s pointless even trying to deny the sex crimes. We’ve got you for sexual assault, rape, attempted murder – that’s enough to put you away for life right there.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said, but the denial lacked any conviction.

  ‘Come on, we all know you did. And we know you killed Gerda Ditter, too, in her little shack in Friedrichsfelde. You stabbed her, just like you’d stabbed the other ladies: Budzinski, Jablinski and Nieswandt. Only this time you killed her. Didn’t you, Ogorzow? You killed her.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he blurted, without thinking.

  Slowly it dawned on Ogorzow that he’d just given the game away. After all these months, we had him. But it was one thing solving the Friedrichsfelde cases – even the Ditter murder – and quite another tying Ogorzow definitively to the S-Bahn killings. Those were the ones that the Party and the public alike wanted solved, and Lüdtke intended to get the job done while Ogorzow was still in a mood to confess.

  He turned to me and asked: ‘Do you have that package from Dr Weimann?’

  ‘Yes, Commissar.’

  ‘Get it for me, please.’

  I left the room and returned a minute or two later carrying a white cardboard box, about forty centimetres square and thirty deep. I placed it on the table, just to Lüdtke’s right.

  ‘I want to talk to you about the S-Bahn murders,’ Lüdtke said.

  ‘What about them?’ Ogorzow asked.

  ‘Well, you went on escort duty with the SA, keeping women safe.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘Which is ironic, really, since you’re the man who committed the murders. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No, that’s not me.’

  You’re sure about that? Six women killed on the S-Bahn: two strangled, four battered to death. That wasn’t you?’

  ‘No, definitely not.’

  ‘Open the box, please, Heuser.’

  ‘Yes, Commissar.’

  I lifted the lid of the box. Ogorzow leaned forward to see what was inside. He was greeted with the sight of four skulls, each one of them severely damaged, even holed in a couple of cases.

  If that white box had been full of deadly cobras, Ogorzow could not have recoiled any more sharply, nor borne a more vivid expression of mortal terror on his face. He shuffled backwards on his chair, away from the table, as Lüdtke very calmly removed the skulls one by one.

  ‘Do you recognize these, Ogorzow? You should. They’re only here because of you. Look, here’s Elfriede Franke. She was doing valuable work as a nurse until you threw her off that train outside Karlshorst. And here’s young Irmgard Frese, just nineteen, her whole life ahead of her, until you put an end to it on Prinz-Heinrich-Strasse.’

  Ogorzow pulled his arm across his face to hide the sight of the two cracked white skulls. It struck me that he’d never before considered the reality or the consequences of what he’d done. His ability to keep killing was in that sense dependent on being able to dissociate himself from any consideration of his victims as people who had emotions or rights, not even the right to life itself. Now he was confronted with the truth and he couldn’t stand it.

  ‘Stop it! Please stop it!’ he begged.

  But Lüdtke did not stop. He took out the skulls of Gertrud Siewert and Johanna Voigt, so that now there were four of them in a line across the table, all staring at Ogorzow with their wide-eyed empty sockets and manic, grinning teeth.

  He started weeping. ‘I’ll tell you everything, I swear, everything. Just take them away from me. For God’s sake have some mercy, I’m begging you.’

  Lüdtke was implacable. ‘Mercy? Did you show these women any mercy?’

  ‘I’ll talk!’ Ogorzow wailed. ‘I’ll talk! Just take them away!’

  Lüdtke nodded at me and I packed the skulls away and put the top back on the box. Ogorzow calmed down a little, though he still kept darting terrified glances at the box as though he feared that the skulls might at any moment burst out of their own accord.

  And then, at last, he told us everything.

  There had, he admitted, been at least twenty rapes, as well as the eight murders and six attempted murders. At first he tried to pretend that he’d merely punched the women about the head. But then he admitted to using a length of heavy telephone cable, hidden up his jacket sleeve as his weapon.

  Ogorzow was consumed by a hatred for women and a desire for revenge for the harm the female sex had done him. It began, he said, when he caught gonorrhoea from a Berlin stripper. He claimed that a Jewish doctor had then made the problem worse. ‘That filthy Yid knew I was a Party member and he hated the Nazis, so obviously when he’s treated me he’s made sure I’m left with side effects, and it’s them side effects that influenced my mental state. You know, made me the way I am.’

  My wild guess that the killer might be afflicted with a sexual disease had been right, but I derived little satisfaction from it. That he blamed a Jew for his evil actions rather than accepting responsibility for them himself, only lowered my opinion of this vile little man still further. The mythical creature that had terrorized Berlin for so many months turned out to be a weakling and a coward. He only ever attacked small women, he added pathetically, because he was afraid of bigger ones.

  As Dr Weimann had hypothesized, Ogorzow had shared with Peter Kürten the discovery that the act of killing was the ultimate sexual stimulation. Touching his victims, overcoming their resistance and then watching their bodies fall helplessly from the train were all powerfully erotic, even orgasmic experiences for him. But the most horrendous revelation of all concerned his activities on the night of 3 December 1940. He had, he said, raped and killed Irmgard Frese first. Then he’d attacked Elfriede Franke and thrown her from the train. After that, he went to work on the night shift at Rummelsburg as though nothing had happened. While out on his rounds, checking the signal lanterns, he realized that he was close to the point where he’d killed Frese. So he went back to the scene of the crime and had sex again, this time with her dead body.

  When he’d finished his account I sat there, busying myself with my notes, trying to come to terms with the experience of encountering a genuinely evil human being. To be given a glimpse into the mind of a man like Paul Ogorzow was to enter a world of violence, degradation and filth, a world without pity, morality or any feeling whatsoever for his fellow human beings – a world with which I had nothing in common at all.

  26

  Paul Ogorzow’s final act as he was led away from the interview room was to beg one last time for his Party status to be taken into account. That soon became an irrelevance. He was expelled from the National Socialist Party two days after making his confession. On 24 July, in a special hearing at the Third District Court of Berlin, he pleaded guilty to all the charges against him. He was declared a public enemy and sentenced to death. The execution – beheading by the guillotine at Plötzensee Prison – was set for the following day.

  The entire murder squad celebrated the closing of the case at a bar near Alex. All our old arguments and personal conflicts were forgotten as we drank toasts, slapped backs and cheerfully agreed that we were all the most splendid fellows. Towards the end of the evening, Lüdtke got to his feet amidst a chorus of cheers, whistles and shouts of encouragement and made a brief speech. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘this is a great day in the history of our squad, and of the Criminal Police across our entire Fatherland.’ There were more cheers, accompanied by a thunder of applause, slammed tabletops and boots stamping on the floor.

  ‘We all know how hard this case has been. We all remember the times when it seemed as though we would never catch the S-Bahn Murderer. We remember the thousands of interviews we had to conduct, the statements that had to be checked again and again, and the constant grind of patrolling the S-Bahn, night after night, without the slightest respite.’ There was a murmur of grim agreement from the audience.

  Lüdtke paused and grinned. ‘Some of you men even remember the dresses you had to wear while you sat on the train, waiting to see if the killer would attack you.’ Now there was an explosion of laughter, combined with a barrage of more or less obscene suggestions aimed at the men who had played those decoy roles. Lüdtke held up his hand to silence them and then continued more gravely: ‘But now you know that your effort was worthwhile. We kept going. We stuck to our principles and did our job in the proper manner. And in the end, we tracked down that filthy bastard Paul Ogorzow and we rid the world of his evil!’

  The whole bar seemed to shake at the applause that greeted those words. By now, Lüdtke’s audience included not only the murder squad, but all the other drinkers in the bar. Even the staff had set their duties aside to listen to what he had to say. For that one night, we were the city’s heroes, and the next day everyone in the bar would boast to their friends and workmates that they had been there to see us. But Lüdtke had one more dramatic coup up his sleeve. Waiting until the room fell silent he said, ‘I have here a message from General Heydrich himself …’ There was a collective gasp of surprise, followed by a tense expectancy as we waited to hear what the great man had written. ‘It goes as follows: “My dear Commissar Lüdtke, please accept my warmest congratulations to you and your men on your great success. Your conduct as police officers represents the highest standards of our National Socialist community. A guilty man has been caught and punished, and decent German women may go about their lives in peace and security once again. Heil Hitler! Heydrich.”’

  Lüdtke put the letter away, stood to attention and saluted: ‘Heil Hitler!’ The whole bar roared out its reply. Someone broke into the Horst Wessel song, the anthem of the National Socialist movement, and we all joined in, whether Party members or not, waving our beer glasses in time to the music. It may sound appalling to say so now, but my memory of our singing is one of innocence. We knew for certain that we had done something good. We truly believed that our country was great and our cause was just.

  For my part, when I’d sufficiently recovered from the night’s celebrations to be able to form a coherent thought, I felt certain that my decision to become a policeman had been the correct one. The principles with which my father had raised me had also been thoroughly vindicated. Hard work, a perfectionist approach to detail and a determination to carry out my orders to the letter had brought me everything a young detective could possibly desire. I must have persuaded Lüdtke that I could obey his personal rules, too, for he invited me to join him in writing the official account of the solving of the S-Bahn murders, to be published in the national Journal of Criminology, thereby forever linking my name with his in the annals of the Berlin murder squad’s greatest triumphs. As a result of the interest in the case paid by the likes of Heydrich and Nebe I had been noticed and marked as a young man to watch by the most powerful men in the SS and police establishments. Within days of Ogorzow’s execution I was informed that I could expect to receive both promotion and a career-enhancing transfer within a matter of months.