Death Rode the Train

The hunt for a serial killer who terrorized Berlin at the height of Nazi rule.

In 1940-1941, a figure known as the S-Bahn murderer killed eight women by throwing them from the trains of Berlin's commuter rail system. Wartime Berlin was a dark place, with blackouts instituted to hinder Allied bombing. But the darkness bred spikes in crime and fear that threatened the wartime effort, including among the working women who rode the S-Bahn and staffed German munitions factories. The Nazi authorities became desperate to capture the killer, spawning the largest police investigation Berlin had ever seen.

The main players in the investigation include the head of the German police and a main architect of the Holocaust; the chief of Germany's criminal police, who pioneered the use of forensic science to racialize and criminalize undesirable populations before joining the anti-Nazi resistance; the brilliant anti-Nazi detective who ultimately caught the killer; and the killer himself, a Nazi Stormtrooper and long-time party member.

Benjamin Carter Hett draws out the history of German criminal science in the decades before the war, which he persuasively argues laid the groundwork for the Holocaust by painting ordinary criminals as a separate race requiring extermination. Murder in the Blackout is a taut true crime narrative, teeming with richly realized characters, and a revelatory new take on one of the most thoroughly excavated historical events of the twentieth century.