The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  In these villages, Jews carried on a life marked by the rhythms of religious orthodoxy and the grinding routine of hard work. The days began and ended with prayer, the weeks strung out from one Saturday to the next, and the years accumulated according to the calendar of Israel. Work, too, molded days and shaped people. In 1827, the local officers in charge of military conscription complained that the village Jews living near Konitz were “with few exceptions unfit for the military … since through their trade they are forced to carry heavy burdens and are overly strained, causing their chests to weaken.”78 For most of the nineteenth century, trade remained the primary occupation of Jewish men. In 1846, a Konitz county official wrote that little had changed, and that most Jews drew their livelihood from trading and peddling.79

  The daily life of Jews had changed, however, especially as they moved in increasing numbers to the towns and cities, not least of all to Konitz. At the outset of the century, the Jews of Konitz, few in number, had gathered for holy services in a barn on a small side street. But by 1829 the Jewish community already comprised thirty-three families, enough to merit a synagogue of its own, and in the following year construction of a modest temple began. Coming from the surrounding area, these Jews were mainly traders, though the census of 1850 also lists two tanners, a cigar maker, a tailor, a rope maker, a butcher, a baker, and a soap maker.80 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the population continued to grow, and by the 1880s the Jewish community in Konitz had increased to five hundred members.81 It soon began to diminish, however, though not because of conversion or intermarriage, both of which often occurred in the big city but rarely ever in Konitz or Konitz County. Rather, the community in Konitz declined because Jews left for larger cities—for Danzig, Breslau, Stettin, sometimes for New York, most often for Berlin.82 In those years, the largest part of Berlin’s Jewish community had come from the small towns of the east. Certainly for young people of the time, Berlin was where so-called real life began.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, the Jewish community of Konitz seemed tired and worn, and in this sense had come to resemble Adolph Lewy, the aging resident of Danzigerstrasse 26. Lewy tended to his two grown sons and to his butcher business and cattle trade. He passed the twilight hours at Falkenberg’s pub watching his friends play skat.

  This is where he was on Sunday afternoon, March 11, the night of the murder. After closing a deal out on the Hennigsdorferstrasse, Adolph Lewy retired to Falkenberg’s pub from four o’clock to seven o’clock. He then walked back across the marketplace and went home for his evening meal, returning to the pub an hour later and staying until ten.83 His sons had likewise been occupied that afternoon. Moritz, his eldest, had been at the Dunkershagen farm buying a calf until seven in the evening, when he also returned home for supper. After dinner, Moritz visited Elise Freitag, with whom he had something of an amorous relationship, and did not come home until after ten, when he looked after the horses and went to bed. Hugo, the younger son, had been away since ten o’clock in the morning, tending to business in various villages outside of Konitz until seven-thirty that evening. After a long day, he ate supper with his family and retired to bed at nine-thirty.84

  Despite Lewy’s alibi, people started to suspect him, and by April his customers, save for some Jews, ceased to come by.85 The threats terrified him, and we can imagine old man Lewy, a “timid and anxious shadow of a man looking on” through the slits in his wooden shutters, to the violent streets below.86

  The anti-Semites had high hopes that the inspector would swiftly solve the crime and arrest the Jewish butcher, who they were convinced had murdered Ernst Winter.87 They had good cause for optimism, for Braun’s reputation preceded him. Raised in the Russian Caucasus, Johann Braun was a different class of investigator from the hapless Settegast or the simpletons of the local police force. A member of the Berlin homicide division for more than thirty years, he had developed a keen sense for the modus operandi of cold-blooded killers. “Whoever Braun arrests is the one who committed the murder,” the detective supposedly said of himself.88 Braun would soon disappoint the anti-Semites, however. For the notion of Jewish ritual murder, he had nothing but scorn—a shameful dark-age shibboleth, he thought, a product of ignorance and fanaticism.89

  On May 29, Braun instead summoned and interrogated Gustav Hoffmann, the Christian butcher. Along with Inspector Wehn, he also interrogated Hoffmann’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Anna.90 Braun suspected that Ernst Winter had tried to seduce young Anna Hoffmann and that the father had discovered Winter in the act. Enraged, Hoffmann murdered Winter, as Braun’s theory went, and later carved up his corpse as only a trained butcher could, disposing of it piece by piece.

  Local officials found this theory utterly improbable.91 A devout member of the Old Lutheran church, Gustav Hoffmann had been a town councillor for eleven years and the president of the butchers’ guild for fifteen. By all accounts, he enjoyed a good reputation in Konitz. The father of nine children, he was, according to police reports, “a man of means,” “a strict man,” in whose house one could find “warm patriotism and real piety,” who “with his family led a solid, reserved life,” and “who was seldom to be seen in the taverns, and then only in those taverns in which the better society meets.„92 He had a stately, comfortable carriage, ample cheeks, a carefully waxed, wide-winged mustache named for the previous emperor, and a countenance that revealed a self-satisfied ease. That he had killed Ernst Winter seemed, as one official later put it, “psychologically almost unthinkable.”93 Moreover, Hoffmann did not act as if he had killed someone, the daughter did not seem especially distraught, and the Christian butcher had a perfectly good alibi.94

  More important, the alibi could be corroborated. In the early afternoon of March 11, Hoffmann had guests for Sunday dinner; at three, he accompanied his guests to church, where they participated in communion. From church, he joined a group going to his friend Wilhelm Ziebarth, another butcher, who lived close to Schlochau gate. Hoffmann stayed at Ziebarth’s until after 6:00 P.M. and then left with the other guests to return home, sitting down to his evening meal at 7:30. Half an hour later, two of Hoffmann’s apprentices arrived. “In accordance with his strict ways,” Hoffmann chided them for their tardiness and sent them off to bed.95 At the butcher’s house, lights went out at 9:00 P.M., a bit earlier than usual. That he might have left his house later to carve up the body seemed inconceivable, since neither his apprentices nor his maid heard anything out of the ordinary.96 Even Hoffmann’s dog slept quietly that evening.97

  The relationship of Anna Hoffmann with Ernst Winter also appeared less salacious than Inspector Braun suspected. According to witnesses, it was “hardly more than a harmless flirtation,” which Anna’s father did not even know about.98 As one of the officials involved in the investigation later put it, “It is already difficult to imagine that a girl, hardly fifteen, who seems morally upstanding, would have sexual relations with an eighteen-year-old high school boy. But if one wanted to assume this, then it could have happened only in a moment of passion and at a special opportunity, never as a result of previous arrangement on a cold March evening in a wooden shed in the space of barely a quarter of an hour.”99

  Inspector Braun began to wonder: perhaps he had gotten it wrong.100 Hoffmann comported himself like a reasonable man eager to cooperate with the investigation. When the interrogation was over, Hoffmann patted Braun on the shoulder. “Had you been here from the start,” Hoffmann said, “the killer would have long since been discovered.”101 Later that evening, Hoffmann’s demeanor would grow more defensive and more sinister.

  First, however, news of the summons of Hoffmann and his daughter “spread throughout the town like wildfire,” galvanizing the antiSemites.102 Some of them were locals, like the men from the citizens committee; others were journalists from Berlin who had taken up quarters in Konitz, partly to report on the affair and partly to drive events forward. Although outsiders, the journalists ingratiated themselves with local personal
ities, like Ernst Winter’s mourning father, and Julius Lehmann, the new editor of the local newspaper, the Konitzer Tageblatt.

  Throughout the upheavals, the Konitzer Tageblatt had been a neutral newspaper. But on May 13 its editor and publisher, Friedrich Roehl, died, and the newspaper fell into the hands of his assistant, Julius Lehmann. Roehl was an educated and refined gentleman of an older era. A conservative journalist, he was committed to the enlightenment of the people. Julius Lehmann embraced a different kind of journalism, one more attuned to the popular pulse and the prejudices of the age. But something else also separated the two generations. Roehl had married a woman named Martha, whose maiden name was Caspari, a prominent Jewish family in Konitz. In the summer of 1900, Lehmann also fell in love with a woman named Martha. Strong willed and actively anti-Semitic, she was nineteen years old, the eldest daughter of Gustav Hoffmann.103 When the police summoned her father, her fiancé’s newspaper waxed indignant.104

  The anti-Semites did not stand idly by. The citizens committee summoned its own witness, Bernhard Masloff, whom Wilhelm Bruhn, the publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Die Staatsbürgerzeitung, had persuaded to testify. A crude, barely literate worker, Masloff told the citizens committee that on the night of the murder he had been lying in the alley behind Lewy’s house waiting to steal a slab of meat. While there, he had observed Lewy and two other men walking (two in front, one in back) to the Mönchsee, carrying a heavy package, presumably containing Winter’s upper torso.105 Masloff thus offered a counterstory to inspector Braun’s theory, and this counterstory, which centered not on the Christian but on the jewish butcher, set the stage for violent conflict.

  IV

  Around half past ten at night, cartloads of peasants, artisans, and workers rode into town.106 The journalist Bruhn had set up the “main camp” for the anti-Semites in Kühn’s hotel, where he was staying, and there was a constant procession into and out of the rooms he had rented. According to one of Zedlitz’s contacts, the anti-Semitic organizers had even passed out cigars and schnapps.107 Outside the hotel, a rumor began to spread among the crowd that Hoffmann would be arrested at one o’clock in the morning. This inflamed the crowd, which now included more than a thousand people.108 Some tried to storm Lewy’s house; others tried to break into Jewish homes along the side streets. Most contented themselves with yelling anti-Semitic epithets and tossing stones, first at Jewish houses and shops, then at local officials. The mayor tried to calm the people; when he could not, the gendarmes eight men on horses, two on foot drew their swords and, around three o’clock in the morning, dispersed the crowd. Later on, Zedlitz learned that a group of anti-Semites had banded together and, armed with sticks and clubs, prepared to liberate Hoffmann in the event of an arrest. “No one doubts,” the county official reported, that “lynch justice against the Lewy family would have followed.”109

  The riots on Tuesday evening unsettled the authorities, and when it appeared that they would begin again the next morning, a market day in Konitz, Zedlitz no longer felt secure relying solely on his gendarmes. He requested that the Thirty-fifth Division of the Prussian army, stationed in nearby Graudenz, send a company (roughly 150 men) to ensure order. The government complied, and at half past four, troops boarded a special train headed for Konitz, each soldier armed with thirty rounds of live ammunition and emergency medical supplies.110 Meanwhile, the mayor and the city council issued a plea to the citizens of Konitz, urging them to stay at home after sunset.111 The police issued a similar plea, adding that further violent actions would be met with the use of firearms.112

  The plea failed to impress. Throughout the day, local police received warnings that the crowd would go after Mayor Deditius, who they thought was overly protective of the Jews. They would satisfy their lust for “lynch justice” by dragging Lewy from his house. Moreover, a newspaper report in the evening edition of the anti-Semitic Staatsbürgerzeitung further inflamed the public by stating that the police had ordered a medical inspection to ascertain whether Anna Hoffmann had been deflowered.113 A fabrication, the report nevertheless sharpened the animosity of a crowd already angry at the submission of a solid Christian citizen to the indignity of an interrogation.

  The demonstrators began to gather at eight-thirty that evening. To their surprise, they were soon confronted by the Eleventh Company of the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment. The crowd grew nevertheless. Increasingly nervous about the confrontation before him, the company commander, Captain Hesse, ordered his soldiers to present their rifles. Meanwhile, someone had set off fireworks, and some people mistook the sharp crackle for rifle fire. “The detonations,” according to Zedlitz, “aroused terror and bitterness.”114 But within a short time, Captain Hesse and his soldiers cleared the streets, dispersed the crowd, and roped off the marketplace.115

  A threshold had nearly been crossed, not only by the Prussian army but also by the citizens of Konitz. “The threats to beat the Jews to death and to set fire to all four corners of the town are to be taken very seriously,” a local Jewish lawyer reported.116 Increasingly anxious, Baron von Zedlitz provided the Prussian minister of the interior with a résumé of the situation in Konitz: “For three months the population has been roused against the Jews with all the weapons of fanaticism. Many really believe that they are doing a good deed and protecting their children from the fate of Winter if they beat a Jew to death.”117 The soldiers of the Eleventh Company stayed in Konitz for six days, until Tuesday. When they withdrew, there was also a brief respite from further violence. But a few days later, rioting started anew.

  The third wave of violence began in an atmosphere thick with anticipation. Zedlitz feared that any new and unsuspected turn in the murder investigation would incite local riots all over again.118 Partly, that turn came when Inspector Braun arrested Bernhard Masloff and his mother-in-law and charged them with perjury. Both had been key witnesses in support of the accusations of the citizens committee against Adolph Lewy. Now the anti-Semites and their increasingly large following became ever more convinced that the Prussian police were in the pockets of the Jews. The matter did not rest there, however. As had already happened when rumors circulated of Hoffmann’s rather unlikely arrest at one o’clock in the morning on May 30, the anti-Semites fabricated another pretext for violence. On Thursday, June 7, the Konitzer Tageblatt reported that the police intended to pursue the investigation into Hoffmann’s actions with renewed vigor.119

  By eight o’clock on Thursday evening, there was already talk in the pubs that later that night the synagogue would be burned.120 Around nine o’clock, women “who knew that something was about to happen” gathered in the center of town.121 Then, at half past ten, a group of anti-Semites began to set fires to the fence that sealed off the synagogue, as well as to a number of nearby sheds, one of which belonged to Gustav Hoffmann. Since the sheds were extremely dry, the fires spread quickly, and the fire department did all it could to control the flames and to dampen the synagogue, the main target of the arsonists.122 Local people, moreover, were loath to help put out the flames. When the fire department asked them to lend their draft horses in order to pull wagons of water, the people refused; and as the firemen tried to extinguish the flames, anti-Semitic demonstrators hurled stones at them.123

  The next day, on June 8, the Staatsbürgerzeitung reported that the Jews had started the fires in order to expunge evidence against them. The sheds that burned, the paper claimed, were the sheds in which the Jews dismembered the body and drew the blood of Ernst Winter.124 The newspapers also reported that two Christian boys, eight and thirteen years of age, had been missing for over a week; the following night, on June 9, the rioting started once again.125

  The pattern was already familiar. After dusk on Saturday night, a crowd gathered on the Danzigerstrasse, where Lewy and Hoffmann lived. After shouting epithets and insisting that Masloff and his mother-in-law be released, the rioters hurled stones and bricks at the houses of the Jews. Wasting no time, the police and the gendarmes charged throug
h the streets, six men abreast, and dispersed the crowds.

  But the clashes had only just begun. The next morning, anti-Semites rode their bicycles and went by train to neighboring towns and villages to round up farmers and rural laborers and anyone else who wanted to join the protest. According to one report, people came not only from the area around Konitz but also from the surrounding counties of Tuchel, Schlochau, and Flatow. Mayor Deditius even claimed to have seen a group of men with axes arriving by train from the east.

  The situation appeared ominous. Crowds of angry workers and peasants, men and women “with a prayer book in one hand, club in the other,” gathered at the marketplace in front of the Protestant church.126 When a Jewish man walked by the crowd, a Christian gestured by sliding his hand across his neck: today, he signaled, throats would be cut.127 But the Jews had already been warned the night before. Two women had told a Jewish merchant, “Watch out on Sunday, all the Jews are going to be beaten to death.”128 By eleven on Sunday morning, thousands of people had assembled in the marketplace. In addition to the usual anti-Semitic tirades, the demonstrators demanded the release of Bernhard Masloff and his mother-in-law, Anna Ross. The police arrested one of the troublemakers among them, Theodor Knievel, but the rumor soon spread that Hoffmann had been arrested. Irate, the throng pressed on to the town hall and threatened Mayor Deditius, who barricaded himself inside the building. The police and the gendarmes drew their swords. It would not be enough. For a moment, Zedlitz considered giving the order to present firearms and shoot. But he was hesitant. Women and children were everywhere in the crowd, and the sight of them lying face down on the ground, their hands over their heads, was too much for him to countenance. He also worried that a resort to violence would unleash a “storm against Jewish houses, especially in the side streets,” and that the authorities could not offer the Jews sufficient protection.129