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husband and brother-in-law beat him, Ogorzow had learned a few lessons the hard way. One was to make certain that his victim was alone before attacking her, so nobody could hear her screams and come to her rescue. The second thing was to kill his victims—a dead woman could not cry out for help or talk to the police.
    Paul Ogorzow wore his railroad uniform as he rode the S-Bahn train in Berlin on the night of September 20, 1940, on the hunt for a woman to attack. Until now, Ogorzow had not used the S-Bahn itself as a way to find and attack women, but he’d recently come to realize that in a train compartment he could make certain that there was no one present besides him and his victim.
    Although tonight would mark the first time that Ogorzow attacked a woman on the S-Bahn, he was very familiar with this environment. He’d ridden the S-Bahn to and from work on a regular basis for a long time. He’d been working on the railroads of Berlin for six years now. He’d started in 1934 with a temporary job as a manual laborer for the German National Railroad Company ( Reichsbahn ) in Berlin. For this job, he worked construction, laying railroad track as part of a large work crew. It was hard, backbreaking work, but in the economic chaos of 1934, he was lucky to have a job.
    This temporary job turned into a permanent one with the Reichsbahn . He then worked his way up from manual labor, such as turnpike maintenance, to his current job with the S-Bahn. The Reichsbahn operated the S-Bahn, so he was still working for the same company.
    There was something creepy about the S-Bahn at night under the Nazis. The S-Bahn logo at the time featured a gravestone shape of alpine green with a large stylized white “S” above the word “Bahn.” Today, the symbol is similarly colored but a circle; the shape of the old logo was ghoulish given the deaths that were to occur on this train system.
    The S-Bahn stations had large Nazi flags and bunting displayed in them. The flag consisted of a red background with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika.
    As most stations were outdoors, passengers had to wait in darkness for the trains to arrive at night. Even when trains arrived and people opened their compartment doors, only a little light flooded out because of the restrictions of the blackout.
    Although some of its parts were much older, the modern S-Bahn was formed in 1924, through the combination of various, mostly over-ground, commuter railways in and around Berlin. The system was electrified, with a third-rail power source, during the 1920s; some of the older trains had been run on steam, made from burning coal.
    The term “S-Bahn” may stand for “city fast train” ( Stadtschnellbahn ), but that is not certain. An expert on the Berlin S-Bahn, Thomas Krickstadt, described the confusion over what S-Bahn actually stands for. “There is no evidence what exactly ‘S-Bahn’ means, but the term ‘ Stadtschnellbahn ’ is the most probable explanation. To understand the story behind the name, you have to go back a bit. Until 1928–1929 the group of state-operated railway lines in Berlin had the name Stadt-, Ring- und Vorortbahnen , German for ‘City, Circle and Suburban Railways,’ which was rather an unwieldy name for a trademark. Then, with the electrification of the state-operated railway system, the trains got faster and had a modern touch. On one station a self-made logo ‘SS-Bahn’ appeared, which obviously stood for ‘ Stadtschnellbahn .’ Soon after, a new symbol (a white ‘S’ in a green gravestone like shape) was invented as a trademark and the term ‘S-Bahn’ became popular (in opposition to the city-operated underground railway system called ‘U-Bahn’ with a white ‘U’ in a blue square as its symbol).” 1
    There are two other popular explanations for what the “S” in “S-Bahn” stands for— Stadtbahn , the German word for “city train,” or Schnellbahn , German for “fast train.”