Free A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin by Scott Andrew Selby

provided an alibi for Herlitz. Bohm said to the police, “When Herlitz came home as usual on this Thursday evening, shortly before 6 P.M., he first ate something and then got feed for our animals. He was not away for more than an hour. When he came back, it was still light outside. After this, he didn’t leave our property. We went to bed really early, as is usual in recent times. It was probably about 8 P.M. Herlitz hardly left our bedroom during the night—I would have noticed. When he gets up in the night, I almost always hear it. The next morning, he went to work as usual. Even then he couldn’t have gone to Ditter’s garden house because he went in the direction of path 5a towards Triftweg.” 9
    They talked to Mr. Herlitz on October 6 and did not find out anything incriminating. A neighborly dispute over pigeons seemed an unlikely motive for such a brutal attack.
    However, the police uncovered evidence suggesting that there may have been issues of fidelity in the Ditter relationship. They found a letter in the couple’s home written by a woman, a G. Weinberg from Fürstenwalde, that they were curious about. Arthur Ditter told them a bizarre and implausible story to explain this letter.
    His explanation tied in to the job he’d held just before the army drafted him. In a very strange coincidence, he worked for the Reichsbahn at the train-switching yard at Rummelsburg. This location would be ground zero for the S-Bahn murders, and it was here that Paul Ogorzow worked as an auxiliary signalman. Later on, the police did not generate any evidence that he and Ditter knew each other or that this was anything more than the sort of strange coincidence that sometimes pops up in the course of such an investigation. Of course, at the time the police were questioning Mr. Ditter, they had no idea who Paul Ogorzow was.
    The story Mr. Ditter told about this letter was an odd one: “About fourteen days before my draft into the military, or maybe three weeks, I was working at the switching yard at Rummelsburg. A younger woman came out of a train compartment in the second class and asked if there were mailboxes nearby. My coworker ‘Stark’. . . . told me: ‘You can put the letter in the mailbox.’ The previously mentioned woman gave me the letter and asked me to put it in the mailbox. I brought this letter with me, put it in my jacket pocket, and then didn’t think about it again. Some days later, my wife found it in my things, ripped it open, and read it. Since doing that, we didn’t dare to send it. I wanted to put it in another envelope and send it, but my wife told me not to. So, that’s why the letter is in my apartment.” 10
    This version of events could be true. If so, it suggests that Ditter’s wife did not trust him in regards to other women. If it was a lie, then perhaps Mr. Ditter had cheated on his wife and did not want the Kripo to know of this. Even with an airtight alibi, in Nazi Germany, it was not a good idea to draw the attention of the authorities. If the police believed that he had been cheating on his spouse, they might decide to the pin the murder on him and claim that he’d hired someone to do it for him. He had no way of knowing that these particular detectives had no interest in finding a scapegoat. They wanted to capture the actual killer.
    More damning, though, was a document the police found that Mr. Ditter had written to his wife. It was titled, “My Confession.” When asked about it, Arthur Ditter said, “I wrote this note years ago. We were not even engaged with each other yet. It’s not important at all. I just was trying to get her to become more attached to me. At that time, my wife went out once in a while to the movies with a certain Fritz Gann, who lives in our garden colony. . . . However, I don’t think in the slightest that Fritz Gann had anything going on with my wife or that he has to do with the death of my wife.” 11
    The police were curious about this strange note.