The Third Reich had at least three notable serial killers: Adolf Gustav Seefeldt, Johann Eichhorn, and most infamously Paul Ogorzow. (Bruno Lüdke is a possibility, but his guilt remains undetermined.) Like Eichhorn, Ogorzow was a Fascist, an outward ‘family man’, had experience with railways, and met his end in a guillotine. All but the last one would come in handy to him.

Quoting Scott Andrew Selby’s A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer:

It helped his advancement at the railroad company that many of the men with whom he would normally be competing for jobs had left to join the military. So far, he had not been drafted, even in time of war; his job for the railroad was a skilled one that still needed to be done. Also, as a loyal member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazi Party, he was in an advantageous position when it came to promotions.

He’d joined the [NSDAP] on April 1, 1932, a year before it gained power over Germany. This meant that he had a relatively low party number, and it gave him a bit of status in the Reich, as those who joined before 1933 were considered to be among the party’s true believers. After the [German Fascists] gained power in 1933, many joined the party in order to help their careers, while beforehand it could have been disadvantageous to be aligned with it.

[…]

It was during his early days in the organization that he saw the most action. Along with other SA men, he fought in pitched street battles against Communists, socialists, and trade unionists. They also beat up those [whom] the [Fascist] considered undesirable, such as Jews, gypsies, and, […] homosexuals. Among other tasks, they were used as muscle to prevent customers from entering Jewish‐owned businesses.

This violence served as training for Ogorzow in his latter attacks on women. He found that he enjoyed the rush of power he felt in pushing people around and beating them up. And by engaging in such violence, he became more comfortable with it.

[…]

The court convicted Ogorzow of all the charges against him—eight counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder. The special court sentenced him to death and ruled that he now had no civil or political rights.

The judges did not care that he had a past as a party member or that he was an SA man, nor that he blamed his crimes on a Jewish doctor mistreating him. Even in the Third Reich, the excuse that a Jew made him do it did not work to absolve Ogorzow’s many sins. […] The next morning, at 6 A.M. on Friday, July 25, 1941, the Third Reich executed Paul Ogorzow. It had been only thirteen days since his arrest.

(Emphasis added.)

I realise that it is tempting to brush off Ogorzow as nothing more than trivia; something only of importance to specialists, but I disagree with that conclusion. Ogorzow’s case is notable because it teaches us a few important lessons.

The first is that Ogorzow’s real crime was not so much that he killed innocents but that he did so without authorization. That was what irked investigators like Arthur Nebe and Georg Heuser, who later served in death squads on the Eastern Front that killed more innocents in a single day than Ogorzow did in his lifetime. We know that the bourgeois state has no qualms with killings as long as they serve its purposes, which Ogorzow’s did not, and that’s why he had to go. Otherwise, they would have hailed him as a hero.

The twoth is that war benefitted Ogorzow. When states go to war, it is perfectly normal for them to keep negative press to a minimum in order to maintain morale. Ogorzow’s victims were vulnerable because they took no precautions. Not only that, but the police were more interested in pursuing enemies of the bourgeois state rather than serial killers. These, in addition to the wartime blackouts, made it easier for Ogorzow to commit his crimes (at least until he committed too many, then Goebbels finally cracked and made an exception for publicising this case).

The third is that Ogorzow, despite his atrocities, could easily give off friendly vibes when he need to do so. In this respect, he was no different from the Axis war criminals, many of whom came across as so neighbourly in public that one would never have suspected that they were committing horrible atrocities elsewhere. All successful abusers, the upper classes included, know when to act and keep up a good appearance for their audiences so that they’ll suspect nothing.

See also:

13 Disturbing Facts About Nazi Serial Killer Paul Ogorzow

Paul Ogorzow: Nazi Serial Killer!

Events that happened today (October 31):

1881: Toshizō Nishio, Axis general, was born.
1922: Benito Mussolini became the Kingdom of Italy’s Prime Minister.
1924: Members of the Association at the 1st International Savings Bank Congress (World Society of Savings Banks) announced World Savings Day in Milan, Fascist Italy.
1934: The Third Reich’s ‘People’s Court’ announced that ‘several persons were tried for high treason and sentenced to death recently’, but did not reveal any names.
1937: As the Sihang Warehouse’s top floors burst into flames due to Imperial shelling, Rome’s governor Piero Colonna officially inaugurated the stolen obelisk of Auxum.
1939: Benito Mussolini dismissed three military chiefs (Alberto Pariani, Giuseppe Valle and Luigi Russo) and two cabinet ministers (Achille Starace and Dino Alfieri), replacing Starace with Ettore Muti as Fascist Party Secretary and Alfieri with Alessandro Pavolini as Popular Culture Minister.
1940: The Battle of Britain finished, causing Berlin to abandon Operation Sea Lion.
1941: An Axis U‐boat torpedoed the destroyer USS Reuben James near Iceland, killing more than one hundred U.S. Navy sailors.