A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin by Scott Andrew Selby Read Free Book Online Page A

the wind rushing against him, he threw Kargoll’s unconscious body off the moving train. He was surprised to discover as he did so that he felt an incredible high as he touched her body and saw it fly into the night.
    After throwing Gerda Kargoll off the train, Ogorzow tossed her belongings, including her purse with all its money still in it, right after her. He could live with himself as a sexual predator and a killer of women, but for some reason, he did not steal.
    It was just before the train reached the station at Karlshorst. He closed the door before the train arrived at the platform. Through the use of a compressed air system, any open doors would automatically close before leaving a train station, but because the train was still in motion, Ogorzow had to manually shut the door by pulling on one of its handles. At the time, most of the handles were made of brass, but as the war progressed, cheaper metals were substituted.
    If anyone had been standing out on the darkened platform, they would not have noticed anything amiss as the train pulled into the station.
    Despite the fact that Ogorzow had not molested Kargoll, he experienced a sexual thrill from this attack. The forensic pathologist who would come to work on this case, Dr. Waldemar Weimann, later wrote that the combination of attacking this woman, having her body in his arms, and throwing her off a moving train “all called in Paul Ogorzow sensations produced by unprecedented violence. He then became addicted to it, attracted again and again to repeat that horrible situation.” 9
    Unusually, in addition to being a forensic pathologist, Dr. Weimann was also a psychiatrist. This explains why he was comfortable making such an assessment about Ogorzow’s psychological state.
    So while Ogorzow had decided to start killing his victims as a way to protect himself, he discovered that he enjoyed killing women. As he threw Kargoll’s seemingly lifeless body from the speeding train, he looked out into the black night. Adrenaline pumped through his veins. This had been the most singularly thrilling experience of his entire life. Killing, he realized, felt even better to him than did committing sexual assault.
    Ogorzow was very aware of the S-Bahn timetable and the fact that there were only a few minutes between stations on this line. Given that he could not start his attack until the train left a station (the blacked-out windows prevented anyone from seeing anything from the platform, but he had to make sure no one could hear his attack either) and that he needed to dispose of his victim before reaching the next station, he had a very short amount of time in which to attack a woman, drag her to the door, and then throw her off the train, followed by all her belongings. There was not enough time to do more than touch his victims. He could not sexually assault them. And yet he continued to attack women on this mode of transportation despite the tight timeline it imposed on him, because the attack combined with his dragging the victim’s body and throwing her off the train, gave him a strong, sexual feeling of power and pleasure.
    While Ogorzow had thought Gerda Kargoll was dead, she miraculously survived not only his strangling her, but also his throwing her from a train traveling around forty or fifty miles an hour.
    She landed on a soft pile of sand by the side of the track. This was an amazing stroke of luck, as the vast majority of the ground alongside the train track was stony. Perhaps this sand had been put there once as a resource to help put out a fire, and it had since been forgotten about. The police were not certain why it was there, only that it had saved Miss Kargoll’s life.
    She woke up on her own, on the embankment by the train tracks, where she slowly put together what had happened to her. She could see that she was lying in sand, and she was in pain from her injuries. Even with this sand to land in, it was still rough to be beaten up and then thrown from