A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin (30 page)

BOOK: A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin

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Nebe was in charge of
Einsatzgruppe
B from its inception in June 1941 until November 1941. There are conflicting reports regarding the extent to which he tried to minimize the murders committed by his group, as well as his personal reaction to various massacres.

Nebe played a key role in the development of the use of hermetically sealed vans to gas people to death. Until then, the Third Reich had mostly used firearms to slaughter people. Gunning down civilians, including women and children, was bad for the morale of troops, and gas was a way to efficiently kill large numbers of people without needing large numbers of soldiers to shoot them. Those placed in the back of the vans would die as a result of carbon monoxide being pumped in.

If Nebe had survived the war, there were other war crimes he could have been charged with, including selecting fifty prisoners out of those captured from the Great Escape (the famed breakout from the
Stalag Luft
III POW camp) for execution. The head of the Gestapo ordered him to pick which prisoners were to be killed.

These were just the major crimes with which he was involved. There were other very troubling events that would have been investigated if he had lived to be tried at Nuremberg by the Allies.

Nebe was executed just before the end of the war for his role in the July 20, 1944, bombing plot to kill Hitler. Nebe’s job as part of this plot, called Operation Valkyrie, was to neutralize his enemy/boss Heinrich Himmler, but he never received the signal to do so. When Hitler survived the bombing, Nebe thought the Gestapo was on to him, so he ran away on July 24. He was mistaken, as they had no idea he’d been a part of this plot to assassinate Hitler.

He hid on an island in the outskirts of Berlin until his ex-mistress, Police Commissioner Heidi Hobbin, turned him in to the Gestapo. She did this out of jealousy of his relationship with another woman.
¹³

On March 21, 1945, he was executed in the same Berlin prison as Ogorzow. While Ogorzow was killed by guillotine, Nebe was hung using piano wire, as Hitler reportedly wanted those who had tried to kill him hung like cattle.

Nebe’s old boss Reinhard Heydrich did not survive the war either. If he had, the Allies would have tried him for his many war crimes. In addition to being director of the Reich Main Security Office, he was appointed the deputy protector of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941. In essence, this new job meant that he was the dictator of this majority Czech territory and responsible for brutally suppressing any and all resistance to Nazi rule.

On May 27, 1942, Heydrich was riding to work when Czech and Slovak resistance fighters dramatically attacked him. An assassin stood in front of his Mercedes convertible and tried to open fire on him with a submachine gun. The convertible was open, and if the gun hadn’t jammed, this might have spelled the end of Heydrich. Instead of fleeing, Heydrich had his driver stay so he could shoot back. Given this additional opportunity to attack, another assassin threw a grenade at Heydrich. This grenade mortally wounded Heydrich, and he died after a surgery to remove grenade fragments from his body.

Heydrich’s old boss, Heinrich Himmler, survived the war, but just barely. The man who until the fall of the Third Reich a month before had been in charge of the German Police and the SS was reduced to trying to pretend to be a normal soldier making his way home. He was picked up at a British checkpoint, and only two days later did his captors realize his true identity. He’d shaved off his famous mustache and removed his trademark glasses. When a doctor tried to search inside his mouth for any concealed poison pill, Himmler bit down on a cyanide capsule, which caused his death.

Another high-ranking Nazi official who played a key role in the investigation into the S-Bahn Murderer, Joseph Goebbels, also took his own life. Near the end of the war, he was living in the Berlin Reich Chancellery bunker along with his wife Magda, their children, Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun Hitler, head of the party chancellery Martin Bormann, and other Nazi personnel.

As the Soviets fought their way into the government center of Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed himself on April 30. His very recent wife, Eva Braun Hitler, killed herself as well.

On May 1, Joseph and Magda Goebbels arranged for the murder of their six children. (Magda Goebbels’s grown son from a previous marriage was not there.) There are conflicting versions of exactly who administered what to them, but it is clear that both parents agreed to kill their offspring. They were aged from four to twelve years old when they died in the bunker.

Unlike Himmler, Goebbels did not try to go into hiding. He and his wife walked out of the bunker to the chancellery garden and killed themselves on the night of May 1. Others in the bunker area tried to break out of the Soviet encirclement that evening, and some, including Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, made it out of Berlin. Goebbels did not take the chance of doing so and being caught, as he feared what the Soviets would do to him. German forces in Berlin surrendered to the Soviets the next morning.

One of Lüdtke’s main detectives on the S-Bahn case was Georg Heuser. The two of them would jointly write an article on the murders for the
Journal of Criminology
in 1942. Heuser, like Arthur Nebe and many Kripo detectives, served in one of the mobile killing squads on the Eastern Front after the Ogorzow case. At first, he was in the operational subunit
Sonderkommando
1b of
Einsatzgruppe
A, but he went on to a variety of different positions, including head of the Gestapo in German-occupied Minsk.
¹⁴

Ironically, this meant that one of the lead detectives in the Ogorzow case would kill more innocent civilians on a particularly brutal day than Ogorzow did during his entire crime spree.

Heuser survived the end of the war by getting rid of his SS uniform and wearing civilian clothes. By that time, he’d had the same rank as his old boss Lüdtke,
Hauptsturmführer
. Lüdtke, though, had been foolish enough to keep wearing his uniform.

After the war, Heuser worked a number of odd jobs before he managed to become a policeman in West Germany, rising to the rank of police chief of the West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Heuser lied about what he had done during the war, and a typo, in which his last name was misspelled with an “ä,” helped him in that regard. He’d concealed his past, but it eventually caught up with him. He’d committed alleged war crimes in Slovakia in 1944–45, but he was never tried for those. Instead, he was in trouble for the murders he’d committed when he’d been based in Minsk (the capital of Belarus).

He was arrested for war crimes on July 23, 1959, specifically the murder of more than eleven thousand men, women, and children. Most of these people were murdered for being Jewish. The charges were that Heuser had issued orders for these mass murders as well as taken direct part in some of them personally.

He was tried in 1962, as part of a large war crimes case, along with other defendants who had committed war crimes in Belarus. In a particularly chilling bit of testimony, he recalled one mass shooting of Jews “in early May 1942 in Minsk. I went to the pit. A shock came over me. Someone shouted, ‘There is one still living.’ I shot at him. Then I shot more like an automaton.”
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The court convicted Heuser and sentenced him to fifteen years’ imprisonment. However, he was released early on December 12, 1969. He died in January 1989 in Koblenz, Germany.

Another key figure in the S-Bahn investigation was the forensic pathologist Dr. Waldemar Weimann, who conducted autopsies of the bodies of Ogorzow’s victims. He did a psychological character study of Ogorzow after he was caught, based on his knowledge as a psychiatrist.

Even while he worked with the Berlin police to solve and understand crimes, Dr. Weimann allegedly secretly assisted Reich doctors who euthanized hundreds of sick children. As a book on Nazi medicine explained, “in clear contravention of his professional duties, he would develop an inordinately inconspicuous, painless, and unprovable killing procedure.”
¹⁶

Despite this, he continued to work at his job in Berlin assisting the police with forensics until he retired in 1958. In 1963, Dr. Weimann cowrote a book on forensic medicine (
Atlas of Forensic Medicine
) that became a standard work in this field. His memoirs, including his thoughts on the Ogorzow case, were published in 1964 as
Diagnose Mord
(“Diagnosis Murder”). He died in Berlin on February 14, 1965.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Berlin S-Bahn train system came under the ownership of East Germany. The
Reichsbahn
controlled the trains in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), while a new train company was formed to run the trains in West Germany (
Deutsche Bundesbahn
). The Reichsbahn however continued to operate the S-Bahn in Berlin, including in West Berlin. So the East German government controlled the commuter train system in all of Berlin. In August 1961, Berlin was physically divided with the construction of the Berlin Wall. The S-Bahn now served two different groups of passengers, those in West Berlin and those in East Berlin. With the reunification of Germany, the S-Bahn became whole again and passengers could ride it across the entire city.

In later years, the signal tower Ogorzow worked at would become covered in graffiti. In May 1998, it was retired from use. On December 5, 2005, it was destroyed to make way for the construction of a new bridge.
¹⁷

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank my family: my brother Todd (aka “The Selby”); my parents, Richard and Rikki; Maria Olga Vargas and her son Christopher; my girlfriend Mandy Jonusas and her mother, Kerstin Jonusas; my cousins Marc and Mitch Goldstone; and my aunt Marcy Goldstone.

Additional thanks go out to my literary agent, Scott Miller of Trident Media Group. Thanks to everyone at the Berkley imprint of Penguin, including my editor Natalee Rosenstein and Robin Barletta.

To my friends who kindly gave me advice on this project, thank you. They include Jennifer Brody, Laura Dawson, Felize Diaz, Janet Dreyer, Kikki Edman, August Evans, Catherine Culvahouse Fox, Leor Jacobi, Jordan Joliff, Michael Maggiano, Rachel McCullough-Sanden, Gabriel Meister, Annabel Raw, William Salzmann, Jeremy Sirota, Alfred “Dave” Steiner, Ryan Swanson, Nader Vossoughian, and Abigail Wick.

For help with translations: Nader Vossoughian, Ph.D.; Lee-Ellen Reed; Bettina Wirbladh; and Abigail Wick.

For help related to the research for this book: Martin Luchterhandt, Ph. D., of the Landesarchiv Berlin; Kee D. Kim, M.D., associate professor and chief of spinal neurosurgery, Department of Neurological Surgery, University of California Davis School of Medicine; Robin Gottschlag and Historische S-Bahn e.V. (Berlin)—a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the Berlin S-Bahn, www.hisb.de; Professor Patrick Wagner; Frank Pfeiffer; Sven Keßler; Mike Straschewski and Thomas Krickstadt from Geschichte und Geschichten rund um die Berliner S-Bahn (stadtschnellbahn-berlin.de); Roland Anton Laub (photo laub.com); Gabi Schlag, Benno Wenz, and Dörte Wustrack; and others who wished to remain anonymous.

FOR FURTHER READING