Forbidden History - The S-Bahn Murders: A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

During the blackouts of the Second World War, serial killer Paul Ogorzow stalked the darkened trains of Nazi Berlin. In this episode of Forbidden History, we uncover the S-Bahn Murders, and reveal how... wartime chaos and Nazi censorship helped the so-called S-Bahn Murderer hide in plain sight. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Paul Ogorzow: Archive footage Ivan Moy: Dr Waldemar Weimann Jens Dobler: Police historian Sven Hartwig: Forensic pathologist Nigel Jones: Author Jim Maidment: Wilhelm Lüdtke Frank McDonough: Historian Linda Papadopoulos: Psychologist Robert M. Stafford: Georg Heuser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. In wartime Berlin, women using the city's train network at night were falling victim to a psychotic serial killer. The Criminal Politsai reports said that he was cold-blooded, that he was a sociopath. and he was someone that had no feeling for his victims whatsoever. But despite desperate attempts by the police to catch the murderer,
Starting point is 00:00:40 the Nazi High Command wanted to keep the investigation a secret. The authorities didn't want the population to get frightened or to feel that the authorities were not in control of the situation. Tremendous limitations were placed on what could be released to the general public. During World War II, the Allied bombing campaign against Germany had caused the Nazi to issue blackout orders in all major cities across the Reich. As war raged across Europe during the largest conflict mankind had ever seen, the people of Berlin spent their evenings in almost complete darkness.
Starting point is 00:01:18 But for women traveling on the Aspen train network, they had to contend with the added terror of knowing a serial killer stalked the carriages at night. Under the new Nazi government, construction of the Berlin-Espan commenced in 1934. The last phase of the project was finally completed in 1939, one month after the start of the Second World War. The S-Barn, the S comes from Schnell meaning fast. It's basically an overground suburban railway. The network of S-Bahn lines that runs right across Berlin still does. It goes right out into the suburbs and runs till very late at night.
Starting point is 00:01:57 It's an absolutely crucial part of public transport. It's central to a Berliner's life as the tube is to a Londoner or the subway is to New Yorker. It's absolutely one of the arteries of communication within the city. The whole way of life of Berlin is tied up with the Espan. And it was the way that the majority of Berliners would have got to work in the morning. And it was the way that the majority of Berliners would have got to work in the morning. The Esban was vital to the German war effort, transporting workers to and from the factories
Starting point is 00:02:28 around Berlin. But as the war progressed and more and more German men left for the front line. It was up to the women of Berlin to continue the fight on the home front. From 1939 onwards, all of the men, the younger men, from the age of 18 to 41, they're fighting in the war. So women are being called into industrial work for the first time. So there's a greater proportion of women riding the Espan on a daily basis. But with its factories, infrastructure and prominent position within the Reich, Berlin was an obvious target for the Allies, and its location was well within striking distance of the British RAF bombers.
Starting point is 00:03:12 The blackout order was given on the first day of the wall, the 1st September 1939 in Germany, and effectively meant that any light source visible from above 500 meters, so visible from the air, had to be shrouded or covered and otherwise made invisible. And this meant generally that you had to sort of tape up windows, you had to have thick blackout curtains for doors and so on at night time. All street lights would be either turned off or shrouded. And so the blackout was as total in Berlin as it would have been in London. So it was taken very seriously indeed. And this of course caused a degree of chaos for the people of Berlin because they weren't used to that. Berlin was very much, you know, a lively modern city with
Starting point is 00:03:56 neon lights, street lights and traffic and everything else. And to suddenly plunged that world into darkness was a big shock for a lot of people. While the Berlin blackout served to hinder the accuracy of the Allied bombers, it also created an environment in which crime was able to thrive. It was a very surreal twilight atmosphere in cities under bombardment at war and all sorts of nefarious deeds went on under the cover of darkness. There is an upsurge in crime, robbery, prostitution, all of that stuff. And there's a massive massive spike in accidental death.
Starting point is 00:04:33 Car accidents, people falling on train tracks, people falling in front of trams. The discovery of dead bodies around the streets of Berlin was nothing unusual for the time. But in early December 1940, Dr. Waldemar Zeman, a renowned forensic pathologist, was called to the scene of a body found by the tracks of the Esban. The woman was identified as Elfrida Franca,
Starting point is 00:04:59 Franca and at first glance it seemed possible that she had accidentally fallen from a moving train. But a closer examination would be required to determine the cause of death. On inspection of Elfrida Franca's head wounds, Dr. Zimon noticed several unique features inconsistent with the theory of accidental death. Dr. Sven Hartwig is a pathologist at the Charity Institute in Berlin, where Dr. Simon originally conducted the autopsy in 1940. It had been another night of the Berlin blackouts, and in the complete darkness of the Aspen train, Elfrida Franca, a 26-year-old nurse, was returning home at night after a long shift. The Espan, like everything else, would be blacked out, so there'd be no light visible from the
Starting point is 00:05:52 Espan carriages at all. Franca was the only passenger travelling in the second-class carriage that night. That was until she reached Carl's Horse Station in the suburbs of Berlin. She would hardly have been able to make out the features on the man who boarded the train, even as he made his way down the carriage towards her. It would take time for the police to realize that Elfrida Franco was not his first victim.
Starting point is 00:06:19 But they would soon find out that she would not be his last. Blacked out, coming home late at night, it's a perfect scenario for a serial killer. That same evening, Dr. The viceman received another corpse into the morgue. Nothing unusual for wartime Berlin, except this body bore a familiar head wound to the one found on Alfreda Franca. The forensic pathologists recognized that the victims had suffered comparable injuries.
Starting point is 00:06:51 They concluded that the same weapon must have been used. The first time it all starts coming together is in the double killing. And the reason that's important is that one of the killings, a woman has clearly been thrown from the S-Bahn. And the other one that has taken place on a street by the railway lines, but on the street, and they're only a few hundred meters apart. And so the picture starts beginning to come together.
Starting point is 00:07:18 19-year-old Ermgard-Friza had been walking home alone at night, close to the Berlin-Carlest railway station. It had been no more than 30 minutes since the killer had last struck. struck. But his murder spree had not yet ended. Two murders in a single day, one on the train and one next to the train tracks. And at that point the police realized that they have a serial killer on their hands. A crime of this nature was a serious concern to the
Starting point is 00:07:50 Nazi party, and the case was quickly picked up by the German criminal police force, known as the Kripo. The Kripo is a shortening of the words criminal police, criminal police. They were the old-fashioned police detective investigation branch. The creeper of the criminal polizzi was a special organization dealing with serious crime. So it dealt with murder, rape, serious robbery and so on. Leading the investigation was police commissioner Wilhelm Lutka of the serious crimes unit in Berlin.
Starting point is 00:08:24 Wilhelm Lutka was relatively unusual in sense that he was a high-ranking officer and he was perhaps not a fervent believer in Nazism. He did join the Nazi party, but very late in the day, and probably for reasons of professional advancement. So he was someone who was relatively objective about the investigation that he was carrying out. Before Germany had come under complete Nazi control, he had been a member of the Democratic Party and actively worked against Hitler's rise to power.
Starting point is 00:08:57 But despite making many powerful enemies in the regime's early years, he had been a member of the Democratic Party, even the Nazi government had realized his skills as a detective far outweighed his political leanings. Lutka is not a character who has a tremendous amount of public profile except for the fact that he was very highly regarded at the time. He had solved more murders than any other serving detective. So you have to think of Lutka as being like, you know, one of the top detectives in Germany a really experienced hard-nosed professional.
Starting point is 00:09:32 Lutka and his team of detectives were eager to mount a full and swift investigation into the murders. They wanted to make a public appeal for witnesses to come forward, but also make sure that women traveling on the Esban remained vigilant while the murderer was still at large. But the Reich Minister for Propaganda, Yosef Goebbels, wanted an altogether different approach. The normal reaction would be that the press would get onto the story. It would be splashed across the newspapers and on television. And that would not only inform the public that there was a risk out there, it would also potentially bring new leads of inquiry into the investigation.
Starting point is 00:10:11 Things didn't work like that in Nazi Germany. Gorbils had the news blackout on this. He controls all of the newspapers through his daily press conference. So this case doesn't appear in all the German newspapers. They're not putting out as kind of, you know, wanted poster. For reasons of propaganda, the authorities didn't want the population to get frightened, or to feel that the authorities were not in control of the situation.
Starting point is 00:10:39 They wanted to maintain the fiction that all was well. And so tremendous limitations were placed already quite late in the case on what could be released to the general public. Hindered by the constraints of having to keep the investigation as quiet as possible, Butka decided to search the records for similar cases to see if the killer had struck before. The police were able to link six previous attacks to the killer, all of them having taken place either on the Espan itself or in and around a small part of Berlin known as the garden area. There is a clear escalation.
Starting point is 00:11:19 So initially the early assaults are almost comical. They are jumping out and shining a torch in a woman's eyes at night, for example. which then graduates to sexual assault, to physical assault, and then of course to rape and murder. One of the things that you see is actually quite common amongst this type of psychopathology, and it's this sort of escalation
Starting point is 00:11:41 that it's closer and closer approximations to the behavior that you ultimately want. So you don't kill right away, but you violate, you harm, you show sadistic behavior. Oftentimes, we see this sort of combined with sexual gratification. gratification. While many of the previous attacks had been either failed or opportunistic attempts, one had resulted in the fatal stabbing of a young mother from the garden area of Berlin,
Starting point is 00:12:08 named Gertrude Ditter. A killing has happened in September, in a shack, in an allotment in Frijcifielder. The first murder that he commits is not actually on the S-Barn at all. It's in what's known as the Lauban which was an area of small houses, often wooden houses, where effectively the poor, the proletariat of Berlin tended to live. And his first murder was of a woman there in the autumn of 1940. That was investigated by the police, of course,
Starting point is 00:12:39 but was seen, I think, initially as a one-off. It wasn't connected to any of the previous crimes, the assaults and so on. Until now, the Berlin police had failed to link the crimes to one single perpetrator. primarily because there did not seem to be a consistent pattern to the attacks. This allowed the killer to build up his murders by learning from his mistakes and honing his craft.
Starting point is 00:13:04 When a serial killer begins to kill, you look at the methods employed, you look at whether there's like a temporal rhythm to it, how often they're doing it, you look if there's a certain type of person that they're targeting in a certain location. And one of the things that we know what's happening in this case is that there wasn't as many patterns as you'd expect. he would change the way he killed. He changed his modus operandi a number of time.
Starting point is 00:13:27 His first victim was killed away from the train tracks. He used predominantly battery, so he would batter women over the head. Occasionally there was sexual assault and rape, but not always. And then occasionally he also used stabbing, so he used a number of different methods. There appear to be different motivations in the sense that some are clearly sexual attacks, and some appear to be just assaults, just for some. violent assault. He would use different means, and I think that would have been very difficult for,
Starting point is 00:13:57 you know, the detectives on the case. Although there was no clear pattern to the attacks, they all had one crucial thing connecting them. The common factor was the proximity to the S-Barn in East Central Berlin. That was the thing that linked to all of his murders. Now that he had a taste for it, the police knew that it was only a matter of time until he would kill again. But they now had a vital piece of new evidence. The killer for most of his murders used a length of lead cabling, probably about 18 inches long, which the investigators think he used to keep up his sleeve so that he could then slide it down his sleeve and into his hand.
Starting point is 00:14:40 And this could be brought down onto the head of a victim with tremendous force. At the Landis Archive in Berlin, they hold the original case files on the S-Bahn murderer. Dr. Jens Dobler is the official historian for the Berlin Police Department. In the first case, which was still an attempted murder, a weapon was found, a lead-covered cable containing several colored wires. The piece of two-inch-thick lead-in-case telephone cable was the kind you could have found at any industrial construction site across Berlin. But the Cripo Detentionerese was the kind of the type of the carpool detect. But the Crepo detectives painstakingly scoured every cable fabrication company in Germany
Starting point is 00:15:27 until they found its manufacturer. From the shipping records, they were able to determine that the cable used as a weapon in the attack had been destined for use on the S-S-Bahn Railway. The forensic work helped to tighten the net and directed the investigation towards Reichsbahn railway employees. The police were now certain. that the murderer was an employee of the Esban Railway. But this conclusion would not sit well with the Nazi High Command.
Starting point is 00:15:58 Although they had a very clear idea quite early on, that it almost certainly was an employee of the Esban. Cos Nazi ideology said, no, no, no, it must be a Jew, it must be a foreign worker, it must be an Unter-Mensch. There were pressures on them, as it were, to look somewhere else, to look among foreign workers, to look among Jews, even though Jews weren't allowed on the railway. To keep the regime happy, they had to publicly investigate the possibility that the killer was not a German citizen.
Starting point is 00:16:36 There's appeals for information, there's leafleting, they put posters up around foreign laborer work camps, which there are a few in the area. They seem to be convinced that it must be a foreigner who's committing these murders. So they try to appeal for information from those places. But even though Goebbels tried to keep the murders quiet, word that there was a killer on the law, soon began to spread. People in Berlin tended to know what was going on. There was an urban grapevine and people knew that there was a killer at large. So there are a number of accounts of people talking about this spate of killing,
Starting point is 00:17:12 so it was certainly known about by the people of Berlin. The case placed the police in a serious predicament. There were considerable protests over how long the investigation was taking, while more and more women felt they were in date and refused to travel on the Esban. This created significant public pressure. Wurden? Women refusing to travel the Esplan to work
Starting point is 00:17:38 could have impacted... Women refusing to travel the Esbond to work could have impacted production for the German war effort. But they still wanted answers. In any serial killing, one murder happens after another, the police are bound to be under tremendous When it's happening in the capital of the Third Reich, the kind of pressure you're under is of a completely different order.
Starting point is 00:18:06 You're under pressure from people who can have you killed, who can make you disappear. So they are really desperate to try and solve this crime, both to save the lives of future victims, and I guess in the back of their minds, kind of to save their own lives too. And insoferren, were umphalry. Extensive manhunt operations were therefore launched. Hundreds of people were deployed to guard the espion. They patrolled the routes and established guardposts. Railway staff were also involved in the operation.
Starting point is 00:18:39 Despite pressure from the regime to investigate foreigners for the crimes, Lutka also continued to pursue evidence that the killer was an employee of the railways. The detectives really stuck at their task. And they did proper good, solid policing. They interviewed 3,000 employees of the Esper. They started putting people onto the trains, see if they could attract the murderer to attack one of their people.
Starting point is 00:19:10 The detectives came up with a plan to plant people on the train in a bid to catch the murderer. Officers from the women's branch acted as the bait. And that approach almost bore fruit. While on night patrol one evening, An officer watched as a figure appeared out of the darkness of the carriage and made his way towards her. But to the killer, something about this potential victim seemed different. Oh, hang on. This woman doesn't feel quite the same as the others.
Starting point is 00:19:43 He seems to have become spooked, and when the train pulled into the station ran off. When she chased after him, other police chased after him, he ran off the tracks and they lost him in the darkness. I mean, they came this close to getting the killer. The Cripo had come close to catching the killer by using the female police officers as bait, so they decided to employ the same method again. But this time, they would make a small adjustment to the plan. It was a very large and systematic operation, one unusual feature of it, which we might smile about a little today.
Starting point is 00:20:24 although it was obviously a serious matter at the time, was that approximately six or seven police officers disguised themselves as women. They traveled on the S-Barn at night dressed as women, hoping that the murderer would approach them and that they would then be able to catch him. These were singularly unconvincing, not least as it turns out because men by a large are bigger than women, and the killer as they finally were, realized was the Vrain, one of the common denominators of his victims, was that they were all small,
Starting point is 00:20:59 people he felt he could easily overpower. But all the police efforts had been in vain. Less than two weeks after the night of the double murder, workers found the discarded body of Elizabeth Bungener on the tracks near Rheinsdorf station. Over the next three months, a further three women would also be attacked and murdered. With the body count rising, Lutka was in desperate need of a breakthrough, but the killer had gone to ground. Nearly five months would pass before he would strike again.
Starting point is 00:21:34 The eighth victim, 35-year-old woman, and in the subsequent investigation it's discovered that a boot print has been left at the scene. In every murder case, police illustrators traditionally produce a crime scene diagram. It records the position of the body, every type of the evidence that was found in the surrounding area, allowing the scene to be reconstructed at any time. In the case of Mrs. Kurz, which was the final case, the use of the footprints can be traced particularly clearly. Footprints are found at the scene.
Starting point is 00:22:14 The footprint was the break the police had been hoping for, and Lutka quickly ordered his detectives, to get to work, tracking down the man who had been standing by the body. Because at the time Berlin has had rationing, and so they had to give coupons over for the shoes, they were able to find out exactly who had given coupons to buy these shoes. They were able to make a match to a Mr. W. Hyman, a carpenter who lived less than 300 meters from the crime scene. When investigators checked his records, they also discovered that he had previous convictions for sex crimes. Based on this evidence, Hyman was brought in for questioning. The evidence placed him at the scene of the murder, and his prior history of sex crimes meant that he fitted the killer's
Starting point is 00:23:07 profile. The Creepo were convinced that they had their man. They proceeded to interrogate him in the hope of obtaining a confession and getting a resolution to the case. They'd got the footprint, by a body, they'd got a creep. In Nazi Germany, it would have been been the work of an instant to get him eradicated. End of problem, end of grief they're getting from the Reichmane Security Office, job done. But as the interview unfolded, they soon realized that something was not adding up. Hyman was able to provide them with cast-iron alibis for the previous murders, and witnesses were able to corroborate his story. So how had his footprint come to be found beside the body of Frida Kotzio.
Starting point is 00:23:54 It turned out it wasn't the killer. It was a peeping Tom who liked to kind of prowl in the neighborhood, seeing if he could see women undressing or couples at it, found what he thought was a sleeping woman lying there, saw the wound in her head and then did a runner. They caught him, they found him, only to discover they had got the wrong guy. The investigation was back to having him. no suspect. At a loss, Lutka ordered his detectives to go over the work rosters of all the
Starting point is 00:24:28 Espon workers until they had narrowed it down to employees whose shift patterns could have potentially matched with the murder sprees. Late, late, late on in the case, Lutka says, no, let's go back and let's just see if we can find anybody, go through all the interviews all over again and find people who have, if you like, anything that may tie them to one of the killings. And they come up with a list of eight people. What they did at that point was to re-interview their list of suspects. And in that process, one name kept coming up, which was that of Paula Gautzv, who was a assistant signalman on the S-Bahn. His name kept coming up because he was renowned amongst his...
Starting point is 00:25:17 work colleagues for having very outspoken misogynist views. He was someone who, a number of his colleagues said, frequently absconded in the middle of his shift, jumped the fence and ran home. So he was someone who certainly acted in a suspicious manner. One of the things that we know in a Gozo's case is that he spoke about women with a lot of contempt. So this idea of seeing them as objects,
Starting point is 00:25:42 of seeing them as things to be used. This is certainly something that we see with sociopaths and also violent sexual predators. The science of criminal profiling, people think of that as an FBI invention in the 1970s. It's absolutely not. German police were onto it in the 20s and 30s.
Starting point is 00:25:58 In fact, the phrase serial killer, Syrian murder, was created by the Berlin murder squad. But if Ogosov had been known to act so suspiciously, why had it taken the police so long to investigate him? Polo Gotsov was among the very first tranche of people, to be interviewed by the police right back in the summer and autumn of 1940. So even before he'd killed the first time, he'd already been interviewed. He had, of course, been interviewed before by the police,
Starting point is 00:26:31 and he was someone that, as far as the Kripo were concerned, initially, was a fine upstanding German. He was a member of the Nazi Party. He was a member of the SA, the Sturm Abtai Long. He was someone who they considered to be very much the backbone of Nazi Germany. So the initial investigation was actually, suspended against Ogotsov because they considered that this was someone who was beyond reproach. The police decided to re-interview Ogotsov, but this time he failed to provide them with satisfactory answers.
Starting point is 00:27:00 But there were a couple of killings which he couldn't explain his whereabouts. Now they have the pieces beginning to fit together. So now they can go after him. The man who actually arrested at Paul Ogosoff was a young detective, 28-year-old, 28-year-old, old Gail Koizzer. He was a very brilliant young detective if he'd passed out top of the leader school, which is the cadet school for detectives. His reward for that had been to be made Lutka's assistant.
Starting point is 00:27:29 Lutka left it to Hoyser to conduct the interview, instructing him to make Ogosov feel comfortable. He was a staunch Nazi, a true believer, and he was sent in effectively to play the good cop in the interrogation, to put an arm around Ogorsov and say, come on, you know, you can tell me, we're on the same side here, that sort of thing. It would later be revealed that Hoyser had more in common with Ogotsorff than anyone had realized. It's almost as if this young guy, almost exactly the same age as Orgatsov,
Starting point is 00:28:01 they're born within a few months of each other, sits down, two young guys together, having a bit of a chat, softening him up. Just as Orgatsov came to feel at ease, Lutka came in and took over. In comes a tough grizzle cop. Enough of this. Bosch, let's go down to the hard stuff. The premise of good cop, bad cop, is being made to feel that you have a sense of safety and security.
Starting point is 00:28:28 If you're able to kind of fear someone in the room and be angry at them, but then seek refuge with the other person in the room, and hopefully that refuge means being honest about what happened, at least giving some detail, striking a deal, then you're more likely to do that. Boltsoff's first instinct is to say, I'm a good party man, because that is in fact his best defense. He joined the party in 31, so he was a good, solid party member
Starting point is 00:28:56 from way back in the day before they were in power. And Lutka was also a party member, less out of any affiliation, but almost as a requirement of your police career. So he says, you're a good party man, I'm a party man, do us a favor. And then again, to Lutka's credit, he says, I don't care. You don't care. You're a disgrace to the party. So now let's talk about your crimes. And this didn't initially bear fruit. Agorzov had various excuses for his presence where he'd been at various times,
Starting point is 00:29:25 and he was quite adept at explaining away the evidence that the Cripo had. But Ogotsov remained tight-lipped, and Lutka didn't have enough evidence to secure a conviction. So he pinned his hopes on conducting a forensic analysis of his railway uniform. Blood traces were discovered on Orgasov's uniform. He initially explained them by claiming it he had had sexual intercourse with his wife while she was menstruating. The police, of course, asked his wife if this was the case, and initially she said yes, that was true. However, she made it known to the police that she was changing her story. That was not the case and that that blood did not come from her.
Starting point is 00:30:15 Later examination showed, however, that the bloodstains on his uniform formed a very fine spray pattern. This could not be explained by sexual intercourse. Instead, it indicated that he had had a wound on a victim using blunt force. But in a time before DNA, and with forensic techniques still in their infancy, the amount recovered was not enough to test against the victim's blood type. So Lutka and Hoyser decided to take Oglethorf back to the scenes of the crimes in the hope of provoking a reaction. Lutka takes Orgutov out to the scenes of his first crimes in Friedrichsfielder in the allotments and walks him through the allotments.
Starting point is 00:31:04 For some criminals it does help take him back to the scene of the crime. For others, it doesn't. A lot of them enjoy the celebrity. So the longer they can drag something out, the better. better. He stops by places where they know he's committed serious crimes and says, well, something happened here, but it was nothing much. Initially just says, yeah, okay, I did the odd thing here.
Starting point is 00:31:25 You know, I remember I shone a torched in a woman's face just to see her reaction or I would say dirty things to them and he starts giving himself away. But they had one more trick up their sleeve. Gertrude Sivart had been one of Ogotsorff's early victims who survived the attack and the The police had arranged for her to be waiting in the garden area to both identify and confront the man who had attempted to murder her. Now they have corroborating evidence because they've got people who've seen him. Not necessarily for the murders, but at least they've got him on the assaults.
Starting point is 00:31:59 Lutka was wearing his suspect down, but too much was riding on this case for him not to obtain a full confession. So in a last-ditch attempt, he delivered his final blow. The final stage of the interrogation is, I think, a great theatrical moment. It's one of those things that you couldn't make it up. This was the moment that turned the investigation. And then, you know, the like the kind of magicians flourish. Ludke had on his desk a number of the skulls of Agorzov's victims.
Starting point is 00:32:32 And says, these are the women you killed. And that's the moment at which Orkosov cracks. Somehow it overwhelms him the reality of what he's done. comes clear to him, he starts confessing and they know they've got him. At the end of that confession, he admitted to eight counts of murder, a further six counts of attempted murder and 31 counts of assault. When the skulls were revealed, it would have been a confrontation with, you know, the physicality of what he'd done.
Starting point is 00:33:04 What they were trying to do is to kind of say, we have you. Ogotsorff also confessed to crimes that the police were not even aware of. Some of those assaults that Ogotsov gave his name to had not either been reported to the police or the police had certainly not linked in with the Esban killings. At his trial, Ogotsov pleaded guilty to all charges. He was duly convicted of eight counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder, and was sentenced to death. And two days later was executed by guillotine in Pleurzenze prison in Berlin. One of the things that is bizarre about this case is the irony that here we are talking about a serial killer who killed eight people in a city which is ruled by one of the greatest examples of institutional serial killing the world has ever seen.
Starting point is 00:33:59 At the period these crimes happening is precisely when the Holocaust is being planned. So there's this terrible sin that is occurring at the same time as these murders. It's a depressing fact that of the three men present in that interrogation room, it was not Paul Ogosurv who turned out to be the most prolific murderer. Georg Heiser is the person who drew me to this story. He's a fascinating, troubling character. He was a brilliant young detective. He did something heroic.
Starting point is 00:34:35 He's a good cop at this point. Later that year in 1941, he was called up as many policemen were to serve in the Einzatskruppen, which were mobile killing squads. Their task was essentially to round up Soviet civilians, predominantly Jews, anyone effectively that the Nazis didn't like, and they would be marched out of town,
Starting point is 00:34:58 ditches would be dug, and they would be shot into ditches. Hoyser was not only instrumental in organizing all that, he was one of the killers. He was finally caught up with in the 1950s and was taken to trial, and was imprisoned as a prisoner. an accessory in 11,000 counts of murder. So you had somebody who'd been a hero, an absolute hero,
Starting point is 00:35:21 a guy who catches a serial killer, archetypal hero, becomes an SS mass murderer. For the crimes that Gail Koizzer committed, he was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment, of which he served six. So we have to wonder who the bad guys are in this story. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode,
Starting point is 00:35:47 Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.

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