The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  More than six decades after the events in Konitz occurred, I was born in a small town in Germany and grew up in a small town in the United States—both places roughly the same size as Konitz. I thought I understood something of how, within narrow confines, good men and women could become angry and vengeful and turn on their neighbors. Yet, despite having also studied for many years the long history of German anti-Semitism, I was not fully prepared for the extent of prejudice that pulsed through the Christian community of Konitz. I was able to trace the abundance of rumor and malice in this town because of the remarkable archival legacy of the unsolved murder. The notes of the district attorney, along with reports of the county official (Landrat) and the trial records of people charged with perjury, became pieces of old x-ray slides, which, when put back together, rendered transparent a more complete picture than even the people of the town themselves saw. Remarkably, we can re-create the various pressures operating in a small German town in the throes of a murder investigation and the tumult of anti-Semitic violence. We can see how stories were manufactured, who told them, and why. And we can analyze the violence, a ritual in its own right.

  Now we can begin to see anti-Semitism at work. Sometimes, as we know, anti-Semitism remains abstract. In earlier eras, as well as today, people talked about “the Jews.” In Konitz, however, anti-Semitism became painfully concrete, as Christians denounced the Jews they knew. In a way hitherto impossible, we can hear the voices, follow the denunciations, and re-create the relationships, one neighbor to the next. Soon, a pattern emerges, and with this a process: of a small-town Christian community redefining itself, breaking bonds, and turning neighbors into strangers.

  Finally, the documents presented in the story of The Butcher’s Tale allow us to consider the murder case anew and to discern how a gallery of prejudices about Jews, class, sexuality, and the criminal mind skewed the investigation, possibly blinding both the police and the people to the identity, and the whereabouts, of the real killer among them.

  Portrait of Ernst Winter.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Murder and Retribution

  … a population with a penchant for brutality.1

  —BARON KARL VON HORN,

  president of the district of Marienwerder, on the people of Konitz

  We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

  —THE CHARACTER JULIUS OSTROVSKY

  in Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer

  I

  It was a cold Tuesday afternoon in the second week of March; the birch trees that lined the Flatow Allee remained bare after a long winter, the grasses still frozen and brown, worn and without life.2 Johannes Winter and his friend Hermann Lange, a baker, walked over to the basin of the lake, where the ice had melted. In the knee-deep frigid water, they saw a package, carefully sown shut and wrapped in strong packing paper. Lange fished out the package with a stick, and the two men tore off the paper and ripped open the sackcloth.

  “My God, this is my son,” Johannes Winter cried out.3 It was, however, only an upper torso—naked, pale white, cut off at the bottom of the ribs. It released a sickening combination of water and blood as the two men heaved it to shore.4

  News of this discovery flashed through the streets and taverns of Konitz, a somnolent West Prussian town where such grisly events were confined to works of fiction. Full of anticipation, the people gathered at the edge of the lake, the Mönchsee, and stared spellbound as Lange and Johannes Winter searched among the water grasses for more remains. The crowd did not have to wait for long. Almost immediately, the two men found another package. It was the lower torso—disemboweled, but with an intestinal sliver, the buttocks, and the penis still attached.

  There could be no mistake, Johannes Winter insisted. His son—missing since Sunday, March 11—was a tall, strong, robust eighteen-year-old, a swimmer, a gymnast, a dancer, and a bicycle rider.5 The police, the fire department, and a number of hunters with dogs now commenced a search for clues and body parts.6 They combed the woods on the outskirts of town.7 They made inquiries and investigated people’s houses. But it was not until Thursday, March 15, that a limb was found. In the early morning hours, the full white moon faint on the horizon, a fourteen-year-old boy stumbled upon the right arm in back of the small door flanking the main portal of the Protestant cemetery. The arm rested on top of a light blanket of snow that had fallen just the night before, and leading up to the arm were footprints small steps, a narrow gait.8 Five days later—almost a week after Lange and Winter’s original discovery another person found a left thigh, again in the local lake.9

  “The four body parts fit exactly together and come from one and the same human body,” the chief prosecutor, Max Settegast, reported.10 A comparison of the boy’s last meal (soup, pork, potatoes, and sour cucumbers) with the vomit traces in the alimentary canal conclusively proved the father right. The body parts belonged to his son, Ernst Winter.11

  Not much is known about Ernst Winter. Born in 1881 in Prechlau, a village about twelve miles northwest of Konitz, Winter was raised as the only son in a Protestant family with four sisters. His mother, whose name never appears in the town’s records, was a tall woman with high cheekbones, piercing wide-open eyes, and stringent black hair parted in the middle. We do, however, know more about his father, Johannes, who worked in construction.12 Sixty-three years old at the time of the murder, he was strong for his age and stocky and carried a full beard and mustache that rimmed his round face and inscrutable eyes. A simple man, he preferred his rough-shod, horse-drawn wagon to the comforts of the fast train.13

  In the normal course of events in Wilhelmine Germany, Ernst Winter would have followed in his father’s footsteps and learned a trade. Yet, at the age of twelve, he took the unusual step of entering the Konitz Gymnasium. A prestigious college preparatory school, the Gymnasium opened up a new middle-class world to the young boy and gave him a chance to live at a boardinghouse in the center of town, some fifteen miles away from his father, mother, and sisters.14 From then on, we know only what his friends and teachers reported: that Ernst Winter was gregarious and handsome and of middling intelligence. He enjoyed sports and was already a lady’s man, who liked to dress smartly and stroll up and down the street, from the Wilhelmsplatz down the Danzigerstrasse, then around the corner toward the marketplace, and back. This is where he was last seen, sporting a dark blue blazer with a velvet collar and a dark blue silk tie, and over that a lambskin coat and a blue silk scarf. He also wore a black felt hat, with gold buttons on its brim, and he carried a silver pocket watch.

  The police could not say when Ernst Winter might have looked at his silver watch for the last time. They believed he had been killed sometime between the late afternoon and the early evening. The evidence, however, conflicted. The vomit traces found in his alimentary canal had hardly been digested, suggesting a time of death early in the afternoon, and no later than 4:00 P.M, though witnesses claimed to have seen Ernst Winter later in the day.15 Anna Streuz, a store proprietor, saw him walking with a young man around 4:30 P.M; Hedwig Spohr saw him at the end of the Schlochauerstrasse an hour later; and Klara Spiegalski, who knew Winter from dance class, claims to have seen him twice, once at 4:30 P.M. on the Danzigerstrasse, and then just over an hour later on the street leading to the shooting club. Finally, two men, Max Meibauer, a dentist, and Albert Hofrichter, a schoolteacher, also claimed to have seen Winter later that evening. Hofrichter allegedly spotted Winter on the Danzigerstrasse as late as 6:30 P.M.

  The autopsy promised to shed more light. Although Winter’s head, left arm, right leg, and left shin and foot were still missing, two local doctors proceeded with the examination of the corpse. Forensic amateurs each, the county medical examiner, Dr. Müller, and the general practitioner, Dr. Bleske, concluded that “because of the nearly complete lack of blood … it is to be assumed that death occurred through loss of blood brought about by a cut throat.”16 A subsequent autopsy largely concurred with the conclusions of Müller and Bleske, but also not
ed the existence of petechiae, minute reddish spots, on the lung tissue, leaving open the possibility of suffocation.17 The way in which the body had been cut also seemed remarkable: the spine had been neatly severed at the first lumbar vertebra, and the incisions seemed precise throughout. Even the muscles in the limbs, head, and neck appeared cleanly separated. Significantly, no sperm traces could be discerned.18

  Further clues, however, were not quick to surface, and local investigators soon found themselves as bewildered as the crowd on the banks of the Mönchsee. The police could not fix the time of death. They could not conclusively show how the murder occurred. They had no obvious suspects, and no obvious motives. Moreover, major body parts were still missing, and, because of the crowds, the supposed scene of the crime—the edge of the lake—had been hopelessly contaminated from the start of the investigation. “Complete darkness still hovered over the deed,” an investigating official lamented.19

  Two long weeks had now passed with no additional leads. The days remained short and crisp, and the lake was still covered with a thin sheen of ice. With no solution at hand, the people became restless, and bewilderment soon gave way to suspicion. “Nearly the whole population of the town of Konitz as well as its hinterlands,” Baron Gottlieb von Zedlitz und Neukirch, the county official, wrote, “is convinced that Winter was a victim of a Jewish ritual murder.”20 In a letter to the Prussian minister of the interior, Zedlitz outlined the principal “facts” leading people to this belief: the body parts that had been found appeared bloodless; the murder had taken place a few weeks before Easter; credible witnesses had evidently heard a scream not far from the synagogue at 7:30 P.M. on the night of the murder; and still others claimed that a foul, burning smell had emanated an hour later from the same area.21 These spurious “facts” animated the local imagination, making Konitz, to the chagrin of Baron von Zedlitz, prone to “a daily increasing amount of all possible rumors, partly of the most ridiculous kind.”22

  Konitz soon became the scene of nightly demonstrations; teenage boys from the evening school yelled insults and threats against the Jews and sometimes damaged shop windows and doors. The evening school ended just after dusk, and the students would then begin tearing through the streets in great numbers, smashing windows with stones, and calling “hep-hep” (a popular anti-Semitic catchword) whenever they spied a Jew.23 By the end of March, the situation had already grown sufficiently disconcerting that Georg Deditius, the mayor of Konitz, issued a public warning: “It is not to be condoned,” he admonished, “that a great number of people are, as a result [of the murder], being misguided into harassing Jewish citizens and their religious authorities.”24

  By now, the people of Konitz were no longer alone, as the outside press began to antagonize the population with a barrage of sensational stories. Starting on March 27, the Berlin-based anti-Semitic Staatsbürgerzeitung ran a series of major articles suggesting that the murder in Konitz was a ritual murder carried out by local Jews. The newspaper also reported a battery of vague sightings and suspicious circumstances: that a barber named Doehring had seen two strange men on the Danzigerstrasse; that Maschke, a gardener, had observed two dark figures near the Mönchsee; that the Jewish cantor Heymann had suddenly and inexplicably left town on a trip; and that a Jewish butcher named Adolph Lewy had sharpened his saw two days before the murder.25

  As the Christian holidays approached, the din of rumor and denunciation became louder and more forceful. On Maundy Thursday, April 12, a local photographer, Max Heyn, began selling and distributing a picture of the deceased. In increasing numbers, people began to recall having seen Ernst Winter, typically in the company of Jews.26 The din became a roar on Sunday, April 15, the first day of the Easter holiday, when two children suddenly stumbled upon Winter’s decapitated head. Severed at the shoulder blades, the head lay covered in a ditch on the edge of a field lined by alder trees. Located just beyond the shooting club in the direction of Wilhelmshöhe, the ditch was near the border of the Dunkershagen farm, not far from the town park.’27

  Remarkably, the scalp buried in the dirt still seemed to remain intact, though the skin from the face had begun to peel, as beetles and other insects had already gone to work. The police could not say how long the head had been there. In the preceding month, temperatures in Konitz had rarely risen above freezing, and so it was conceivable, at least, that the head had been buried here all along. Perhaps, however, the killer had preserved the head in ice. There were other clues as well. Stuck to the remaining flesh on the cheek and at the crown of the head were pages of a Berlin newspaper, the April 29, 1896, edition of the liberal Tägliche Rundschau.28 Not far from the ditch, the police also found a handkerchief torn into four pieces, one of which bore the letter A.

  Then a witness suddenly materialized. Friedrich Fiedler, a provincial subaltern, came forward to testify that on Good Friday at 10:00 A.M. he had stood in front of the county courthouse and watched as Wolf Israelski, a skinner of animals, limped down the Rähmestrasse and, after passing him by, headed up the Schützenstrasse toward the Dunkershagen farm. Israelski, according to Fiedler, wore clean boots and carried on his back a sack with something round inside.29 An hour later the skinner returned, his boots muddied and the sack empty.30

  A fifty-two-year-old, down-and-out drunkard, Wolf Israelski was a bit deficient, a Jewish simpleton. When officials inquired about his whereabouts at ten o’clock that morning, he insisted that he had already returned home after going out for a shot of schnapps.31 But Israelski’s carping wife did not corroborate her husband’s story. On the morning of Good Friday, she told police, her husband had been drinking and was muttering to himself.32

  The police proceeded with the arrest and charged Israelski. who they believed had carried the head to the ditch, as an accomplice to murder. They incarcerated him in an isolated prison cell in the local jail, where behind double bars, and without kosher meals, he awaited trial.33 For the excited crowds throughout the region looking for someone to punish, all of this—the rumors, the head, the news of Israelski’s arrest—would suffice. They now took matters into their own hands and went after the Jews.34

  II

  They went after Jews who, though residents of Konitz, also belonged to a venerable German-Jewish community, perhaps the most integrated Jewish minority in all of Europe. With the founding of the Second German Empire in 1871, the Jews of Germany had attained full emancipation, and, although discrimination did not thereafter cease, they nevertheless achieved striking successes in a country governed by the rule of law, “a safe harbor,” as Raphael Kosch, a Jewish politician at the time, put it.35 As especially prominent markers of these successes, celebrated scientists, artists, and scholars immediately come to mind: Paul Ehrlich, the pioneer of chemotherapy; the young physicist Albert Einstein, who published his revolutionary paper on special relativity in 1905; the impressionist painter Max Liebermann; the expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler; or the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen.

  Given these successes, it is no surprise that German patriotism permeated the Jewish community. The name of the largest Jewish organization in the country, the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, underscored this sense of belonging. The Central Verein, or CV, as it was usually called, far overshadowed the nascent Zionist organization, founded in 1897, just as the numbers of Jews who imagined themselves part of a German-Jewish symbiosis significantly outweighed those who believed this to be a mirage.

  If Jews thought of themselves predominantly as Germans, they nevertheless constituted only one percent of the national population and were concentrated mainly in the cities: in 1900, half the Jews in Germany lived in urban centers with a population of over 100,000 people, and nearly a fifth of all German Jews lived in Berlin.36 They worked mostly in commerce and trade, ranging from wealthy businessmen to humble store owners, in the free professions among lawyers, doctors, writers, and journalists and as artisans. In public life and in the world of business and trade, Jews and Chri
stians interacted, though not always harmoniously. In private life, however, neighborliness was often less evident. As we know from Jewish memoirs, Christians rarely invited Jews into their homes.

  In spite of these divisions, by 1900 separation was troubling Jewish leaders less than the accelerated pace of integration. Mixed marriages, for example, were already at roughly 10 percent among Jews, and the numbers were increasing; in large cities like Berlin and Hamburg, they approached 20 percent.37 Conversion, while demographically not nearly as significant, was also on the rise, with an estimated 25,000 Jews baptized between 1880 and 1919.38 Assimilation was partly a religious problem and partly a matter of concern for Jewish identity. In this context, the decline in religious observance proved alarming as well. Especially in urban centers, a significant number of Jews had either become indifferent to religion or become “three-days-a-year” Jews, who went to synagogue only on the High Holidays.39

  As the twentieth century approached, though, old orthodoxies lingered, and there remained in Germany a vibrant religious community, especially in the towns and in the rural areas. Most Jews, roughly 80 percent, went to Reform (or liberal) services, which still included prayers recited in Hebrew and the separation of men and women. Regional pockets of Orthodoxy—especially in Alsace, Hessen, and Posen—also existed, but by 1900 the once sharp division between the two religious traditions had significantly softened, and many smaller Jewish communities, which could not afford religious divisiveness, had to work out a compromise.40 Konitz, sandwiched between Reform bastions in Pomerania and Orthodox strongholds in Posen, very likely had such a Jewish community of compromise, where Jews struggled to maintain their religious identity and traditions in a rapidly changing, sometimes threatening environment.