Original subtitles

[man] heil hitler!

Sieg heil!

[crowd] heil!

[man] sieg heil!

[crowd] heil!

[man] sieg heil!

-[tense music] -[train rumbles]

[train station announcer speaks in foreign language]

[man speaks in foreign language]

-Sieg heil! -[train horn blares]

Sieg heil!

-[train clattering] -[ominous music]

-[man grunts] -[woman gasps]

-[object thudding] -[women groaning]

[woman speaks in foreign language]

-[object thudding] -[women groans]

-Sieg heil! -[train clattering]

[suspenseful music]

[narrator] step back in time.

Discover a place.

Investigate a crime.

And reveal

A "murderous history."

-[tense pensive music] -[train whirring]

[alexandra richie] my name is alexandra richie.

I'm a professor of history at the collegium civitas

University in warsaw, poland.

Berlin's a city I've lived and worked in,

I feel a great connection to it.

It's the capital of germany.

It's an economic powerhouse. It's full of glamour.

It's a very exciting and amazing capital city.

But the city has a dark past.

[crowd cheering]

[richie] this is the story

Of how the nazis twisted reign

Allowed a serial killer to flourish in wartime berlin.

At the heart of berlin is this massive

Over ground rail system called the s-bahn.

It's over 200 miles long

And spans the entire city like a giant spider web

And it's transported berliners all over the city

Since the 1920's.

Today, berlin is an extremely safe city.

I wouldn't think twice about getting on the s-bahn,

Even very late at night.

In the 1920's,

It was a very different story.

After world war I, germany was in turmoil

And berlin became a very violent place.

[crowds yelling]

The whole society has really collapsed

And been turned on its head,

It's racked with poverty and rampant inflation.

You have a revolution, you have the nazis emerging,

Fighting against the communists

And all sorts of street violence is going on.

-[ominous music] -[crowds yelling]

[man] sieg heil!

[narrator] once hitler is in power,

He continues to use violence

To keep the nation under control.

He blames foreigners, jews, and communists

For the downfall of the country.

Hitler uses his uniformed mob of brownshirts

To viciously attack these people, their property,

And anything that dares oppose nazi ideology.

The brownshirts were the original nazi stormtroopers

And they were established initially

As a sort of personal bodyguard for hitler.

They used to take on the nazi's

Political opponents on the streets

And later graduated into the original nazi boot boys.

[crowd chants in foreign language]

[man] sieg heil!

[crowd] heil!

[richie] of course, once the nazis have taken power

They wanna show that this violence is in the past.

They wanted to create this veneer

Of the perfect german society, of safety and of conformity.

[suspenseful music]

But in the 1940's world war ii is underway,

Eight murders had taken place and dozens of attacks.

And this is about to threaten the nazis' image

Of a perfect crimeless society.

[train rattling]

[tense music]

[birds crowing]

[richie] in the early morning of the 21st of September,

A 29-year-old woman, confused and in pain,

Wakes up on the side of the s-bahn tracks.

Gerda kargoll had been traveling on the s-bahn

The night before.

-[gerda screaming] -[ominous music]

She vaguely remembered somebody trying to strangle her

And then she found herself being thrown off the train

Out onto some sand at the side of the s-bahn tracks.

[birds crowing]

A passerby finds her and calls the orpo,

The german order police, to come and help.

The orpo, the ordnungspolizei,

Would deal with all, sort of, everyday policing matters.

[ominous music]

[narrator] under the nazis,

The orpo were part of a new centralized police force,

Uniting all of germany's law enforcement units.

They took on the role of regular uniformed police,

Keeping order in nazi berlin.

[phone ringing]

[moorhouse] gerda kargoll is duly interviewed by the orpo

Who don't take too much notice of her.

They consider that her predicament

Is most likely an accident.

It's most likely, perhaps the result of a drunken night out.

[train rattling]

[richie] but then just two months after

The gerda kargoll incident,

The police are listening to a very disturbing report

By another young berlin woman, elizabeth bendorf.

Elizabeth was so brutally attacked on the s-bahn

She wasn't able to make a report to the police

For eight days.

On the night of her attack,

She just finished working her shift as a ticket salesperson.

[train rattling]

[dramatic music]

[moorhouse] women like bendorf and kargoll

Where increasingly brought into the german economy,

To make up for the large number of men

Who had conscripted and taken into the german army

To fight on the front for adolf hitler.

[train bell ringing]

And that meant, of course,

That they are traveling in and out of the city

Perhaps at times they wouldn't necessarily

Have been doing so before.

So that opened them up

To a potential risk from an attacker.

[tense music]

[richie] elizabeth bendorf tells the police

That she was traveling home on the s-bahn

From the friedrichshagen station in eastern berlin.

But just as she was about to board

The third-class compartment a man beckoned to her

To come to the nicer second-class compartment.

Elizabeth explains to the police

That in this pitch darkness,

She sat very close to this stranger

Who'd invited her there.

[train rattling]

[elizabeth gasps]

[elizabeth speaks in foreign language]

-[object thudding] -[elizabeth screaming]

She was struck many times in the head and fell unconscious.

[elizabeth screaming]

She remembered somebody pulling at her feet

And swinging her off the train.

And she woke up dazed and baffled

At the side of the s-bahn tracks.

The orpo start to compare this

To the gerda kargoll attack a month earlier.

What they thought was a drunken incident,

Starts to look more sinister

Because neither of the victims were sexually assaulted

And neither of them were robbed.

So why were they attacked?

The orpo come to the conclusion

That both cases sound like attempted murder.

And this is far too big

For the ordinary orpo police to handle.

And so the kriminalpolizei, the criminal police department,

Is brought in to handle this very serious case.

[narrator] the kriminalpolizei or kripo,

Were plainclothes detectives.

They handled serious crime like rape and murder.

They and the orpo worked with the gestapo,

The secret political police.

By 1940, all three were controlled by the ss,

The nazis paramilitary state police.

The head of the kripo, is detective wilhelm ludtke

Who is brought in to investigate the case.

[suspenseful music]

[lars von lennep] ludtke was one of the leading detectives

In germany of this time.

He was an old, classic policeman.

He doesn't have a law degree but he has much experience.

He was a detective. He wanted to investigate crimes.

Ludtke was not a party member

And he was not a true believer in the nazi ideology.

In spite of that, the nazis needed experienced policemen

To solve crimes.

They cannot do it with untrained party members.

They need real pros for that and ludtke was a pro.

[richie] but ludtke's reputation

As one of germany's top investigators

Was about to be put to the test.

[ominous music]

Just a month after the bendorf case,

The bodies of two women are found in the karlshorst area

Of eastern berlin.

Elfriede franke is discovered

On the railway tracks.

And irmgard frese on the street close to the station.

[thunder crashing]

Frese is initially found alive

But dies a few hours after her discovery.

[tense music]

The autopsies on both those victims

Revealed that both of them had died from fractured skulls.

But the second of those victims, irmgard frese,

Had also been raped

And this was a new departure in the investigation.

[richie] the autopsies show that both women

Suffered similar attacks to kargoll and bendorf,

The two women who'd miraculously survived attacks

A month earlier.

These four attacks are the latest

In what seems to be a spate of violence

Taking place near what's known as the garden colony,

Right next to the s-bahn.

-[traffic rumbles] -[car horn blares]

[narrator] garden colonies are small,

Single-family plots of land in the middle of the city.

Today in berlin there are approximately 71,000

Of these garden allotments.

[tense music]

[birds chirping]

But in the 1940's,

There were three times that many.

As food became scarce,

Berliners would grow their own produce

To feed their families.

Some 25,000 people lived in these garden colonies

During the war.

[baby cooing]

[von lennep] the garden colony don't have proper streets,

They only had pathways.

It was dark, it was lonely.

The garden colony was the ideal field for attacks.

[suspenseful music]

[richie] the attacks in the garden colony,

Around the s-bahn area, and around the city

Seemed to have increased since the blackout

Which was imposed in 1939.

[moorehouse] the blackout was put into force

Right at the beginning of the war

To try and prevent the city falling victim

To too much aerial bombing.

[footsteps tapping]

The blackout has a very profound effect.

The number of deaths by accidents

-Goes through the roof. -[car tires screeching]

[car thudding]

But also crime did spike

Noticeably during the blackouts.

Over 30 attacks, both assaults and sexual assaults

Had been reported in the garden colony,

Since the beginning of the blackout the previous year.

Also, a murder had been committed in the same period,

So it was clear that there was

Some considerable criminality going on.

[richie] violent crime is still a problem in berlin.

But the nazi propaganda machine,

Headed by joseph goebbels,

Wants to protect the image of a pure,

Idyllic germany.

Goebbels ensures any news of the murders

Is kept out of the press.

Detective ludtke

Is forced to conduct the investigation in secret.

He decides to review the case of gerda ditter,

A woman who was murdered in the garden colony

On October 4th, 1940.

[ominous music]

[von lennep] gertrude ditter lived in the garden colony

With her two children in a wooden shack,

Her husband was in the army

So he was away most of the time

And she was found one morning killed by a knife.

[richie] her husband,

Who was stationed in military barracks near the city,

Was interrogated soon after the body was discovered.

But he was let go because he was able to prove

That he'd been in the barracks

During the time of the attack.

With no obvious connection

Between the two garden colony attacks,

Ludtke expands his search.

A tenacious detective,

He's taking an analytical approach to solving the crime.

He checked all the older files about murder attempts,

About sexual crime attempts and sexual crimes,

And they made a map.

And when they marked the crime scenes

They found out that the proximity to the s-bahn tracks

And to the railway station rummelsburg,

That was the connecting element.

[richie] what seemed like random crimes

In a bad neighborhood,

Now appears to have a pattern.

So next, ludtke looks at the method of attack

And realizes that most of the victims

Have been hit on the head.

So he sends his detectives

To search the second class carriage,

Where elizabeth bendorf has been attacked.

And they find a crucial piece of evidence.

[moorehouse] police discovered

The length of telephone cabling,

Which is a length of, probably about 18 inches of lead cable

Which was used to hit her over the head.

It would have been very effective as a weapon.

[richie] they found a serial number on the lead cable.

And it showed that it had been installed

At the rummelsburg railway station.

For police, this was another piece of evidence

Clearly connecting the crimes to the rummelsburg area.

Ludtke starts to believe that the s-bahn killings

And garden colony killings

Have been carried out by the same person.

That a serial killer is stalking berlin.

[ominous music]

Rumors that a serial killer is on the loose

Are spreading by word of mouth.

But propaganda minister josef goebbels

Doesn't want the story made public.

[moorehouse] the nazi regime covered up

The crimes that were occurring on the s-bahn,

It was considered, for propaganda purposes,

A very difficult case to publicize killings like this

Because it reflected very badly on the regime itself.

And this hindered any sort of public information campaign,

Any sort of dissemination of greater awareness

Amongst berlin's women.

So this not only hampered the police operation

But also meant more women fell victim,

Ultimately, to this perpetrator.

[tense music]

[richie] they do nothing to warn berlin's women.

And in preparation for attack from raf bombers,

Berlin remains under blackout restrictions

Providing the killer with the perfect cover

To commit more murders.

Meanwhile, detective ludtke discovers a potential clue.

In surviving victim bendorf's testimony,

She remembers that the man is wearing a uniform,

But she was so dazed that she can't remember what type.

And there are plenty of possibilities

For different uniforms in nazi berlin.

Ludtke is looking for a wolf in wolf's clothing.

Detective ludtke needs to jog elizabeth bendorf's memory.

So he decides to present her

With a number of different types of uniforms

That both military and civilians wore

In berlin at the time,

Each had a different color and insignia.

Bendorf was asked, "do you recognize the uniform?"

Bendorf remembers that the uniform

Was not a party uniform,

It was not a policeman uniform,

It was not a fire fighter's uniform.

She picked the railway worker's uniform.

[ominous music]

This is the breakthrough that ludtke needs,

He can now focus the investigation

On railway workers who are working in the rummelsburg area

And near the garden colony.

But this immediately puts him in a difficult position

With the nazi regime, as all railway workers were german

And some were even nazi party members.

[crowd cheering]

It was considered that a german

Wouldn't be committing such heinous crimes

As attacking german women on berlin's railways.

[train clattering]

The thinking in 1940,

As regards who this possible perpetrator could be,

Was very much influenced by concepts of nazi justice.

Certain groups, foreigners, and jews, particularly,

By definition, have a predetermined propensity

Towards criminal activity.

And this meant that the investigation into these crimes

Initially focused on foreigners.

[narrator] in early 1941,

74,500 jews still lived in berlin.

They are stripped of their rights

And banned from public places.

The nazis have another use for them, slave labor.

[man] sieg heil!

[narrator] hitler has ordered berlin rebuilt

And rebranded as germania,

The supreme capital at the heart of his new aryan empire.

[man] sieg heil!

[narrator] berlin's jews, and thousands of prisoners

From the recent invasions of eastern europe,

Are forced to work,

Building hitler's gleaming new aryan capital.

[suspenseful music]

As news of the murder spread across berlin,

Joseph goebbels, the minister of propaganda,

Continues to keep the story out of the press,

To protect the image of the nazi's idyllic society.

[man] sieg heil!

If they'd managed to pin the murders on a jew

I'm sure they would have been widely publicized,

But if it was a german,

It would've been counter to everything

That they were trying to persuade the public to believe.

I mean, fighting a war,

You don't want your civilian population

To think that they're being attacked from within as well.

[richie] but ludtke was a very good policeman

And he very quickly understood that slave laborers

Weren't exactly free to go on the s-bahn all the time.

And the jews in berlin are traced and followed

And people are aware of their whereabouts.

So ludtke dismisses these racial prejudices

And starts to look at all germans

Including nazi party members as potential suspects.

[tense music]

Unable to ask the public for information,

He looks for another way to catch the killer.

Detective ludtke was gathering evidence

From the crime scene,

Trying to create a psychological picture of the killer.

He was using a technique used since the mid-1920's

Called criminal profiling.

It's generally believed that criminal profiling

Started with the fbi, but, in fact,

It started in germany.

[vicky desai] criminal profiling is a means

To try and collate data,

Any information from crime investigations,

To derive an understanding of the type of individual

That is committing the offenses.

What are the behavioral indicators?

What might be psychological attributes

Associated with the perpetrator?

[narrator] berlin law enforcement

Was advanced in criminology

And in the 1930's, the term serial killer

Was coined here by ernst gennat,

Director of the berlin criminal police.

Ernst gennat set up the first homicide task force in berlin

In the 1920's.

[dramatic music]

His techniques centered around gathering data,

Collecting evidence from the crime scene,

And using psychology

To better understand the killer's motives.

[richie] ludtke worked with gennat

And used his methods when investigating this case.

He begins assembling the facts

And looking at it holistically.

[desai] detective ludtke is hypothesizing that the offender

Is familiar with the area.

The offenses were happening in pure pitch-black conditions.

So the blackout meant that his identity

Couldn't be picked up by the victims.

[ominous music]

What ludtke does know

Is this person is likely to be a rail worker.

He uses a blunt object to hit the women on the head.

He attacks mainly between 11 and 12 in the evening,

Indicating a possible shift break.

He always attacks in the second-class carriage,

On or near the s-bahn line.

And he's definitely taking advantage of the blackout.

Ludtke also knows the perpetrator preys on women.

[train station announcer speaks in foreign language]

So he sets up a sting operation

In the killer's hunting ground.

[carriage door clunks]

[train horn blaring]

[gentle suspenseful music]

The kripo use male kriminalpolizei officers,

Dressed in women's clothing,

To act as bait for the attacker.

[von lennep] but this great plan of the police was a failure

Because the policemen disguised as women

Looks too tall maybe

And it was not dark enough in the carriages.

[richie] so ludtke decides to take a different tack.

He sends a lone undercover kripo policewoman

To sit on the s-bahn in a second-class compartment,

Hoping that she'll be able to lure the killer to her.

-[tense music] -[train rattling]

The officer becomes aware of a man

Acting suspiciously near her.

She tells him that she's a policewoman.

[moorehouse] he is spooked

And he manages to jump from the train

And disappear into the night

Using the blackout for his escape.

Though this operation to catch the murderer failed,

It actually spurred him on to a new spate of attacks.

Between the 22nd of December and the 5th of January,

He murders three more women in just 14 days,

Bringing the total number now up to six.

The sudden escalation in body count

Prompts propaganda minister joseph goebbels

To react for the first time.

January 7th, a small article is published

In berlin's 12 o'clock journal.

It says, "the s-bahn murders.

Who knows the criminal?"

[moorhouse] there is the offer of a reward

Of 13,000 reichsmark for any information offered

On the identity of the perpetrator,

And this comes from goebbels himself.

[richie] the regime also offers a solution,

They decide to send party members

Specifically the brownshirts

To chaperone women traveling on the s-bahn.

-[tense music continues] -[men laughing]

[moorhouse] they are men from the street,

They are people who are very often uneducated, uncultured.

They are side-lined by the ss which is considered much more

Loyal to the nazi regime.

But still has large numbers of personnel

And in a case like this one,

It was quite easy for the regime to draft those numbers in

To act effectively as auxiliary policemen.

[richie] ludtke's now under extreme pressure

To stop these attacks.

Despite help from the regime, the killings continue.

[ominous music]

On February 11th, in the rummelsberg area,

Pregnant, 31-year-old, johanna voigt, mother of three,

Is found dead.

Believing the killer must be a german railway worker,

Ludtke responds by launching the biggest operation yet.

[moorehouse] they have a sweep bringing in

5,000 employees of the railway to be interrogated

About shift patterns, alibis, and about their workmates.

[suspenseful music]

[richie] the police activity and the publicity

Seemed to spook the killer and the attacks stop.

-[guns blasting] -[tank rumbling]

[narrator] while the killer has gone underground,

On June 22nd, 1941,

Hitler attacks the soviet union

With the largest invasion force ever assembled

In the history of warfare.

[man] sieg heil!

[narrator] the nazis seem invincible.

[pensive music]

It's been four months since the last attack.

[ominous music]

[flies buzzing]

Another body is found in the garden colony.

35-year-old frieda koziol.

The eighth victim killed in eight months.

Like the others, she's been hit on the head,

But she's also been raped.

But this attack produces a very significant lead.

[tense music]

[von lennep] when frieda koziol was murdered,

It was a rainy and wet night

And so they found some footprints

Very close to her body.

And they could follow the footprints

In the direction of the railway tracks.

[richie] the police go in, they take photographs,

They do a plaster cast and they discover

That this is the sole of a shoe

With a very distinctive tread pattern.

And they manage to trace it to a very well-known

Shoe manufacturer called salamander.

[von lennep] the footprint comes from a sole of a working shoe

And working shoes were on the ration

And you only received them with a special ration card.

[crowd chattering]

[richie] because of the rationing system at the time,

It's quite easy for the police to go to all the shoe shops

And find out exactly who purchased shoes

At a specific time and from a specific shop.

Using these cards, they have a set of names.

They narrow it down to one person

Within walking distance of the crime scene

In the garden area.

[von lennep] his height was matching,

His working place was matching,

Many things were matching.

[richie] the suspect, mr. Heimann,

Lives only 300 feet from the crime scene,

And the police records show that he has a conviction

For a previous sex offense.

So this looks very promising.

Then they confront him with the evidence of the shoe

[dramatic music]

And this breaks him.

He confesses that he was at the scene of the murder.

[tense pensive music]

[richie] heimann confesses to seeing frieda koziol's dead body

But says that he did not murder her.

On this particular evening,

He saw a woman lying on the ground

And he went in for a closer look.

But then he realized she was dead

And he ran away in panic,

Knowing full well that he was caught on the spot,

He would face a severe punishment.

Even to commit a minor criminal act

During the blackout had severe consequences.

The nazi regime was very keen

To maintain order on the home front.

In the first instance,

If you failed to blackout sufficiently well

In wartime berlin,

You could even end up in a concentration camp.

And any crime committed under blackout conditions

Could be interpreted as undermining the war effort

Which, potentially, could bring the death penalty.

[richie] detectives search heiman's house,

But fail to find anything to connect him to the crimes.

He wasn't a rail worker, he was a carpenter.

Ludtke realizes that heimann is not the s-bahn killer.

[von lennep] in the end, they discovered he had an alibi,

And they discovered he was only a peeping tom,

He was walking around at night in the garden area,

Spotting through the windows

And he hoped to see some women, maybe, inside the shacks.

[suspenseful music]

This person was not the right person.

So they had to start over again.

[moorehouse] this was a very difficult situation for ludtke

Because this was an embarrassment

To the nazi regime.

It was something that the regime would have felt

Was crucial that they produce a perpetrator.

[von lennep] ludtke, took the decision,

"okay, we go back to the beginning,

Let's see what suspicions we had in the last months."

And they found a couple of people and they said, "okay,

Let's invite them again, we will interrogate them again."

[richie] so they bring the railway workers back in.

On July 10th, a week after the last murder,

One of the workers says something

That makes the police really take notice.

[moorhouse] one employee suggests that one of his

Fellow members of berlin's railways

Is someone who disappears while he's on duty.

And also this man is someone who has many times before

Expressed rather misogynistic sentiments,

Very prejudicial against women

And this is something that naturally

Is of interest to ludtke.

[von lennep] and the police asked him,

"okay, can you drop the name of this person?"

And he said, "yeah, I don't remember the name, right?

But I can look it up in the duty book.

The name of my co-worker,

The suspicious person is paul ogorzow.

He's living in a street, there in karlshorst."

And the police checked the address and they realized

His home is right next to the s-bahn tracks

And it's very close to rummelsburg

And the garden allotment area.

They had already interviewed him as part of that sweep,

That interrogation of 5,000 railway personnel.

Ogorzow had initially been dismissed by the investigators.

[richie] looking at his file,

Ludtke doesn't see anything to suggest

That this is the serial killer he's looking for.

But he knows he needs to bring this man in for questioning.

-[tense music] -[footsteps tapping]

[door clunking]

Ogorzow had been an assistant signaler

On the s-bahn since 1938.

He was also a member of the nazi party

And of the brownshirts.

He had even served as one of goebbels' volunteers,

Protecting women on the trains.

[suspenseful music]

[moorhouse] ogorzow's excuse for leaving work at odd times,

Which is what he was accused of having done,

Was that he was carrying out an affair

In the garden colony with a local woman.

[von lennep] they take his uniform

From his home in karlshorst

For a forensic examination.

Forensics was very advanced in this time.

[liquid solution trickling]

They had modern techniques of examination of fabrics.

And they checked the uniform of ogorzow

For bloodstains using the luminol test.

Invented by a very famous german.

The luminol test is a chemical test

That is when you treat a fabric,

And there are invisible bloodstains on it,

The bloodstains will become visible in darkness

Because they're starting a light blue glow.

And this is what they found on ogorzow's uniform.

[moorhouse] when ogorzow is questioned

About the presence of that blood,

The excuse he gives is that he and his wife

Had been having sex while she was menstruating.

[von lennep] but it's not explainable with that

Because the police understood

The pattern of the bloodstains.

It was spray bloodstains.

And this leads to the idea

That these bloodstains come from hitting someone.

[richie] but in an era before dna testing,

They can't prove who the blood belongs to.

Ludtke can't be sure that he has the man he's looking for.

He now knows the only way he can convict orgorzow

Is to get him to confess to the crimes.

[tense music]

On the 15th of July 1941,

Despite revisiting the crime scene

And three days of intense interrogation,

The criminal police still don't have a confession.

Ogorzow requests to speak to someone higher up,

The head of the serious crime unit,

Believing that somebody at the highest level

Would be able to help him,

Given the fact that he was a nazi

And he was a member of the brownshirts.

[moorhouse] the idea that the serial killer

Who was responsible for these killings in berlin

Could have been an ordinary german and more than that,

A member of a nazi organization like the brownshirts,

Was almost unthinkable to the nazi authorities.

[richie] but ludtke is certainly not gonna let

Party hierarchy get in the way

Of him solving this horrific crime.

He has one more idea that he hopes

Will trigger a confession from the man

Who's using the city's s-bahn

To viciously murder women in eastern berlin.

-[tense music] -[door creaks]

Ludtke brings ogorzow into a darkened room.

[door creaks]

[door clunking]

[light switch clicks]

[ominous music]

[people voices whispering]

These are the fractured skulls

Of some of the murder victims.

Ludtke showed the skulls to ogorzow and said,

"you have killed these people.

Some months before

The skulls have been human beings.

That's what you've done. That's your work."

[richie] ludtke asks him what he used to kill these women?

Finally, the cold-blooded killer breaks.

Ogorzow blurts out that he used a lead cable.

[lead cable thudding]

This is followed by a full confession

To all eight murders on the s-bahn

And in the garden colony.

Ogorzow knows he's facing execution.

Even to commit a minor criminal act during the blackout

Is grounds for execution in nazi germany.

[suspenseful music]

In a desperate bid to avoid the death penalty,

He uses his status as a loyal nazi

To try and get him off the hook.

He comes up with all sorts of excuses for his actions.

He tried to use nazi prejudices to his advantage

By blaming prostitutes

For the sexually transmitted diseases he'd contracted.

And the other thing was, he said,

"I was treated the wrong way by a jewish doctor

And the jewish doctor, he knew that I'm a party member.

I'm good party member".

And as a jewish doctor, he wanted to harm me.

And he treated me bad and this is the reason

Why, from time to time, I need to go out

And have this feeling I need to rape a woman."

Ludtke never believed all his excuses.

They don't believe that

He was treated bad by a jewish doctor.

[desai] orgozow was part of the brownshirts,

It was their job to bring about violence

And control weaker members of society.

And it's highly likely that ogorzow

Became desensitized to using violence.

He liked to dominate and take control.

The act of control and dominance

Led him to feel more superior.

[door clunking]

Ludtke finally had his man.

But it took seven months and eight murders.

[moorhouse] one key obstacle the police faced

Was the racial blinkers

That they were obliged to wear.

They effectively had dismissed the possibility

That the perpetrator could be an ordinary german.

[richie] the censorship imposed by the nazi regime

Also meant that unsuspecting women

Continued to ride on the s-bahn,

Allowing ogorzow to continue to prey on them

During the blackout.

The nazi authorities are relieved

That the murderer has been caught

And goebbels breaks his silence,

Writing in a very prominent newspaper,

"the s-bahn murderer has been caught."

[von lennep] justice worked very quickly.

The war was going on so there was no time for long trials.

The nazi party was not interested having a killer

Or a gangster or a criminal element in their rows.

This is why they recalled his party membership

After the trial began.

On the 23rd of July 1941,

Paul ogorzow is found guilty of eight murders

And six attempted murders.

[door clanking]

The nazi regime declares

Ogorzow as an enemy of the people

And he's sentenced to death.

[ominous music]

12 days after his arrest and just one day after his trial,

He is executed by guillotine.

[guillotine thuds]

[train whooshing]

Solving this case really is the pinnacle

Of ludtke's career and it makes him famous.

[von lennep] after he solved this orgozow crime,

He was told, or forced maybe,

To join the nazi party.

And so, he joined the nazi party,

And some months later, he received his promotion

As a chief commissioner.

[dramatic music]

In 1941, many things changed because nazis melting together

Of the gestapo and of the kripo was very wide,

And many policemen had to serve in the war areas.

[richie] in a bid to create hitler's vision

Of a perfect society

And a superior aryan race,

Some of ludtke's kripo detectives

Who worked on the s-bahn murder case,

[guns blasting]

Became part of the nazi's killing squads.

[gun blasting]

Some of them worked in death camps

To implement the final solution.

They were mass murderers on a vast scale,

A terrible reminder of the horrific crimes

Committed in the name of the third reich.

[sirens blaring]

In the end, it was a unique combination

Of nazi racial ideology, censorship,

And the blackout during wartime berlin

That enabled the brutal s-bahn killer, ogorzow,

To claim so many victims.

[dramatic music continues]