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

a moving train. She screamed for help, and eventually someone heard her cries and came to her rescue. The police were called, and they investigated this strange situation of a woman claiming to have been thrown from the S-Bahn.
    Although he had yet to actually murder anyone on the train, this marked the beginning of Ogorzow’s activities as the S-Bahn Murderer. The term had not yet been coined, but this was only his first attack on the S-Bahn.

CHAPTER NINE
    The Investigation Begins
    The Berlin police were notified that a woman had been found by the train tracks on the morning of September 21, 1940. When they interviewed Gerda Kargoll, she remembered nothing between the start of being strangled and waking up by the side of the railroad tracks. The police wrote this off as most likely being a hoax or else a drunken accident, where she fell off a moving train in the dark and then made up a story to cover up her own role in her injury.
    She had not been sexually assaulted, and she still had her belongings, so she had not been robbed. She had found her purse a short distance down the tracks, the distance the train had traveled in the time it took Ogorzow to throw it off.
    Gerda Kargoll suffered from a concussion and multiple abrasions as a result of her fall. She was hospitalized for four and a half weeks. After her discharge, she continued to suffer terrible headaches as a result of the injuries to her head.
    Without a robbery or a sexual assault, the police found it hard to believe that someone would, without warning, strangle her and then throw her from the train. A simpler explanation was that she was either mistaken or lying. It didn’t help matters that she had been drinking earlier that evening and had fallen asleep on the train two different times that night according to her own version of events.
    The police had grown used to a higher number of accidents in Berlin than there had been prewar. This made them all the less likely to believe that someone had actually thrown Kargoll from the train, as opposed to it being an accident. The blackout produced accidents in the city on a regular basis, including many related to the train. During one month alone, December 1940, twenty-eight people died from blackout-related accidents on the train tracks in Berlin. Such accidents included people walking across the tracks and not seeing that a train was coming, as well as people falling off the platform in dark train stations. Automobile-related fatalities were also common, owing to the dimmed headlights on cars and the lack of streetlights.
    Numerous criminals struck during the blackout, such as Paul Mathes, whom the Germans executed during the middle of Ogorzow’s killing spree. The German Police had caught Mathes stealing a large amount of coal, and they considered this “particularly heinous because it was carried out during a blackout.” 1 He was sentenced to death on January 17, 1941 for this nonviolent crime. He was executed by guillotine.
    When Kargoll was found in September 1940, Nazi Germany was at the height of its power. France had fallen to the Nazis three months before, and the UK was in a precarious position. They were afraid Hitler would invade, and the main way left for the British to fight was by sending out planes to bomb German targets. Daylight bombing allowed for some degree of accuracy, but it was extremely dangerous for the pilots, who ran a high risk of being shot down. So raids were conducted at night, making it virtually impossible to hit a specific target.
    The nights in Berlin were a time of darkness and potential danger. Bombs could fall from the sky with only a short bit of notice that an attack was under way. Shrieking alarms would signal that people should flee to basement shelters, public air raid shelters, or anywhere they could quickly find cover.
    For those riding the S-Bahn, what happened during an air raid depended on whether their train was heading to the outer sections or if it was on an