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direction she’d just come from.
    Kargoll was worried because her train ticket only covered her originally intended ride from work to her home. If stopped by a ticket inspector, she would have to pay a fine for riding farther than she had paid for.
    There was a system in place in which a trip within the inner part of Berlin was one price, but the farther out one went, the more the ticket cost. By the time one reached the outer reaches of Berlin, it could be an expensive trip.
    A single trip in the inner area (known as the Ringbahn ) cost 30 pfenninge for second class. Pfenninge were the linguistic equivalent of cents, so 30 pfenninge meant 0.30 reichsmarks. To take this same trip in second class cost 20 pfenninge. 5 This is what Kargoll had paid for her trip.
    While many of the women that Ogorzow attacked on the train had weekly or monthly passes that saved them money compared to buying single tickets each day, Miss Kargoll had a single ticket. Ogorzow himself had a free pass to use the train, as he worked for the Reichsbahn .
    Miss Kargoll had already had her ticket checked once, when she entered her originating S-Bahn station. In order to walk inside the station, she handed her ticket to the person working in a small office that controlled entrance and exit from the train system. Here, a ticket inspector stamped her ticket with a one- to three-letter stamp that indicated the station where her trip originated.
    If she had made it to the end of her trip, she would have displayed her stamped ticket to the ticket inspector there before being able to exit her destination station. He or she would have looked at the origination stamp to figure out if the cost of her ticket was enough to pay for this trip. If not, Kargoll would have had to pay additional monies before she would have been allowed to leave the station. 6
    This meant that Kargoll would be safe as soon as she arrived at her original destination station, but while she was traveling back there, if a ticket inspector stopped her, she would face a fine for riding with a ticket that did not cover her trip. The worker at the ticket office at her final destination, however, would have no idea that she had taken this long route there.
    Given the two classes of available transport, second or third class, this system needed personnel to occasionally spot-check passengers in transit to make sure that their tickets matched the class they sat in. A pure honor system would not work for long, and it was not feasible to check every passenger on the train itself. This spot-check system was meant to make sure that people had not snuck onto the train without a ticket somehow, as well as that people did not pay third-class rates and then ride in second class. It was not meant to find people like Gerda Kargoll who rode too far on the train before retracing their trip to arrive at their desired station. But if someone stopped her, she could be subject to a fine nonetheless.
    Ogorzow, who was wearing his railroad uniform, could tell that this woman was distressed about something. He walked up to her and cordially asked what was the matter.
    Miss Kargoll explained her situation, as she took him to have some authority in such matters. In reality, as a signalman, tickets were not something that he had any business dealing with. Having him with her did make her feel safe, though, because if a ticket inspector did stop her, Ogorzow could partially back up her story, and his very presence as her traveling companion might deter an inspector from fining her, as a professional courtesy.
    Ogorzow told Kargoll that she would be fine riding with him. He invited her to ride with him in the second-class compartment even though she had a third-class ticket. Since he had a Reichsbahn uniform, she felt that he had the authority to provide her with this free upgrade. And she did not question his helpfulness.
    A typical Berlin S-Bahn train was divided into “quarter trains,” or four two-car units.