The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  The Jews need a Christian butcher on whom to pin their own guilt, Hoffmann averred, adding that he was disappointed in the Berlin inspectors for their inability to see through this Jewish machination. The inspectors did not even come up with the accusations by themselves; rather, they merely parroted what the Jews had already said.

  Gustav Hoffmann also proposed reasons why he could not have been the murderer: his house which was on the ground floor and consisted of the butcher shop, a living room, a kitchen, and four bedrooms was full of people: his wife, his grandmother, eight of his nine children (ages three to seventeen), a servant girl, a journeyman, and two apprentices. The servant girl slept in the kitchen, which remained the only exit when the door to the Danzigerstrasse was closed. In this crowded abode, furtive movements were impossible. Hoffmann also had a solid alibi. He had spent the afternoon in company down the street at the home of Ziebarth, a fellow butcher, until six, when he returned to his own house, along with Reymann, the pastor, and Fengler, a city official, who soon left to catch the 6:53 P.M. train. Hoffmann’s daughter, Anna, arrived shortly thereafter along with Fengler’s daughter, who around six-thirty also caught the carriage to the train station. Anna then went for a walk but returned home by seven to help prepare the evening meal, which was served a bit earlier that night because the journeyman Welke wanted to go to the theater. The family sat down to eat at around seven-thirty. The two apprentices, Clemens Misiekowski and Albert Longear, did not arrive until around eight and were scolded for their tardiness. Thereafter, all the family members remained at home; because of the tight quarters, they could not have left unnoticed.

  Other evidence against Hoffmann was mostly circumstantial. In the past winter, he had apparently seen his daughter talking to two young boys in front of the butcher shop when he called out, “Anna, come in! And if you louts don’t get out of here, watch out!” The two boys ran off as quickly as possible, so Hoffmann did not even see who they were. Supposedly, one of them was Ernst Winter. The Jews, the butcher wrote, also invented the story of the intestines in the manure pile. When the Jewish merchant Isidor Fleischer emptied Hoffmann’s manure onto his field (Fleischer gave straw for Hoffmann’s horse in exchange for dung for Fleischer’s field), he found human intestines.

  Thus far the butcher’s tale was about the “Jews” conspirators who planted evidence to ensnare the innocent Christian butcher and his family. Hoffmann did not mention specific names; he did not accuse. But like a knife the butcher’s tale turned. In Hoffmann’s words:

  Now that this has been told to me from an official standpoint, I am forced for my further defense to officially request that the real murderer be arrested. I maintain that the butcher Adolph Lewy and his son Moritz Lewy were present and active at Winter’s murder.

  Hoffmann then put forward twelve arguments demonstrating the guilt of the Jewish butcher and his son. They were as follows.

  First, on the day that the torso was found, Hoffmann went to the lake, where he could observe “the naked torso very precisely.” He concurred that the torso was bloodless and that the sack containing it showed “no traces of blood whatsoever.” Close examination of the body parts also showed that “they were completely bloodless.” On these matters, the Christian butcher considered himself an expert. He also knew about cuts. “The cut, through which the head was separated from the torso, was a real kosher cut, as the Jewish slaughterer [Schächter] does it.”

  Hoffmann proceeded to describe the method.

  As a butcher, I have repeatedly had the opportunity to watch the slaughter of animals. In previous times, the slaughterer used to butcher calves in such a way that they hung the live animal from its hind hooves so that the head hung toward the ground and was held steady. The slaughterer then cut through the throat of the animal with a sharp knife below the larynx. To judge from the characteristics of the torso, this is how I think Winter was murdered. The cut on the throat below the larynx and the complete bloodlessness of the body leave no room for doubt. Winter must have been suddenly attacked by a number of people, prevented from screaming by being choked, hung up by his feet with his head pointing downward, undressed, and finally killed by a practiced kosher butcher who cut his throat as he would an animal’s. The blood was carefully collected, and then the dismemberment of the body began.

  This was an operation, Hoffmann further reasoned, that could not have been performed by an ordinary butcher. It must have been someone who knew how to slaughter humans. “I mean,” Hoffmann clarified, “that the man who dismembered the body must have already killed and dismembered a number of Christian boys, so skillfully were the parts that I saw worked on.” It must have been done in a lighted room, and the whole operation must have taken hours, since the torso was also packed in a sack. Finally, from information concerning the autopsy that he had read in the newspaper, the Christian butcher deduced evidence that pointed to a Jewish butcher. In kosher slaughtering, Hoffmann opined, the butcher, after he has partly opened the stomach, cuts the diaphragm and reaches in with his hand to examine the lung. If the lung is healthy, it does not stick to the ribs; if it is stuck to the ribs, the animal is unclean and may not be eaten. This is how it was done with Winter. “If the autopsy really is accurate,” Hoffmann concluded, “then it is certain that Winter was slaughtered like a piece of cattle according to full Jewish ritual.”

  Second, the murderers or their abettors must have carried the wrapped torso to the Mönchsee; and because the torso was heavy, a number of people must have been involved. This could have happened only at a place hidden from the eyes of the night watchman or the glances of passersby. “When one walks past the row of houses in the Maurergasse, the Lewy house alone seems suitable for carrying out such a murder without being seen.” In fact, Hoffmann continued, it was the only place “in the whole area in which the above-described hour-long work of killing and dismembering could have been done by light.”

  Third, the sack that contained the torso came from Plath, a tailor; every three weeks, Adolph Lewy’s sister bought rags from the tailor, or rather from his helper, a Polish woman named Frankowski. In this way from Plath via Frankowski to Lewy’s sister the sack made its way to the Jewish butcher. “It can be assumed with certainty,” Hoffmann maintained, “that the butcher Adolph Lewy received this sack from his sister and used it to pack the body.”

  Fourth, Hoffmann also accused the Jewish butcher’s first son, Moritz Lewy, then twenty-eight years old. Here are Hoffmann’s words:

  The son Moritz Lewy was friends with the deceased; they were the same age and were often together. In all probability, Winter’s penchant for the female sex was used as a lure by which Moritz enticed Winter into the back shed, where the murder victim was met not by womanly arms but by the fists of the murderers lying in wait.

  Fifth, a day laborer who brought Lewy a cow was in Lewy’s house on the Sunday afternoon of the murder, and the Jewish butcher allegedly touched and poked him and said to his wife, “He is pale, he has too little blood.”

  Sixth, the lady who cleaned for Adolph Lewy, Mrs. Ross, came by on Sunday evening between seven and eight and heard strange noises from the cellar. A few days later, she found a watch chain in the living room. When Mrs. Ross took the chain in her hand, Mrs. Lewy supposedly ripped it away from her and screamed, “The chain belongs to my son Moritz.” The chain, Hoffmann reported, is now missing.

  Seventh, the son-in-law of Mrs. Ross, Bernhard Masloff, walked by Lewy’s at about eleven Sunday night and heard murmuring in the cellar; he went around to the back and saw Lewy come out with a light; later, three more men came out, one of them Moritz Lewy, carrying a heavy package to the Mönchsee.

  Eighth, Wolf Israelski, the Jewish skinner, buried the head just beyond the shooting club, showing therefore that Lewy had help and “that the murderer is really only to be found among the Jews.”

  Ninth, a number of people must have participated in the murder, as the transportation of the arm and the head shows. Also, according to Hoffmann, th
e fact that a 20,000-mark reward did not bring forth a traitor pointed to a Jewish cabal.

  Tenth, Jews from the outside had come to Konitz in the week of March 4 to March 11. They left thereafter because the “slaughter of Winter was a success.”

  Eleventh, in the shop of the Jewish merchant Meyer, a conversation was overheard by Mrs. Wiwjorra, the wife of a cabinet maker. She heard the name Winter, whereupon Meyer’s daughter said to her parents, “No, let that go, that’s pure murder.”

  Twelfth, a relative of Lewy’s from the village of Bad Polzin allegedly visited him on March 11. A servant girl listening in the next room reported that when the man returned home his wife asked him, “How was it? Was he very strong, very powerful? Did he defend himself? Was it worth it? Did you bring me something?” “He was very strong,” the husband replied; “six men had to hold him; but with time he became weak; it was worth it, and I brought you this.” He then presented his wife with a bottle of blood.

  Hoffmann concluded his tale with general complaints: that the Berlin police neither trusted nor listened to the Christian witnesses; that right after the murder the Jews had formed a committee that influenced the testimony of witnesses, sometimes through bribery; and that if the government would only send different investigators, the crime could be solved. But for now, Hoffmann, an innocent man, had to defend himself and the honor of his innocent daughter.

  The butcher’s tale, officially the “Petition of the Konitz Butcher Gustav Hoffmann Pertaining to the Matter of Winter’s Murder,” was published both in the newspapers and as a pamphlet with a print run of 50,000 copies, making it perhaps the most widely read piece of writing in all of West Prussia that summer.18 Almost certainly, however, Hoffmann, a modestly educated butcher, did not write the tale alone, if, in fact, he wrote it at all. Its tone, style, and diction, and the felicity with which it mimicked the expressions on the streets and the printed word of the press, all point to the possibility that it was composed by one of the anti-Semitic journalists, probably Wilhelm Bruhn. The collusion began with Hoffmann’s summons. “That’s what we’ve been waiting for,” Bruhn may have said.”19 When, in the morning hours, the police came to Hoffmann’s door, Bruhn leapt into action, bringing Bernhard Masloff, the counterwitness, to his room in Kühn’s hotel, where Bruhn pressured him to “tell the whole truth” so that he could “save the Hoffmann family from misfortune.”20 This was a day of great excitement and activity, with Kühn’s hotel as the “flashpoint of social life for many Konitz residents and citizens.”21 That evening, Bruhn met Hoffmann for the first time. Hoffmann’s lawyer, Carl Gebauer, who would emerge as the “center of the anti-Semitic movement in Konitz,” set up the meeting.22 Gebauer asked Bruhn to “represent the interests of Mr. Hoffmann, who has been unjustly attacked from all sides, in the Staatsbürgerzeitung.”23 The substance of the conversations between Bruhn and the butcher cannot be reconstructed, but Bruhn eagerly complied with the lawyer’s request. “That’s what we did,” Bruhn later said, “and in this sense the petition has to be understood.”24

  Upon Gebauer’s request, Bruhn probably wrote the petition, or at the very least dictated it, and Gustav Hoffmann signed it.25 The Christian butcher claimed authority, and the people perceived it as his statement. “Many now say that Hoffmann brought forward proof for a ritual murder in Lewy’s house,” the county official Zedlitz recorded on June 17.26

  At first glance, the butcher’s tale suggests the power of Berlin-based print over local, oral communication in the generation and dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas. Yet this conclusion alone remains too facile, failing to account for the stories within the butcher’s tale—points five to twelve of the petition which, based on fantastically dubious hearsay, widened the accusation against Lewy and the Jews.27 More important, this one-dimensional interpretation rests on a false dichotomy between oral and print culture that ignores the mutual influence of these forms of communication at the turn of the century. Anti-Semitic journalists like Bruhn who penned these stories for the papers also spent their evenings in the pubs and on the streets drinking beer and wine with the townspeople; they listened to and coached them in their storytelling; they lived on rumors and propogated them. To understand this process, it makes more sense, as Robert Darnton has written, to discern how “two forms of communication worked together, defining, transmitting, and amplifying messages.”28

  More than mere messages simple vehicles for transmitting information stories took hold of and transfixed the population of Konitz. Stories are fundamental to the way we understand ourselves and our world. When they are imaginary, they ask us, as Coleridge pointed out, to engage in a “willing suspension of disbelief”; when they are “real,” we think of them as true. In either case, stories invite people to see from a certain perspective: through the eyes of the narrator, or from the point of view of a character, sometimes both. Readers and listeners come to understand, even share in, the way the events of a narrative are framed. In this sense, the narrative act is necessarily social, particularly when many people actively participate in the production and dissemination of the narrative when they become, to use Barbara Meyerhoff’s felicitous phrase, “authors of themselves.”29 In Konitz, the anti-Semitic journalists drew from a cauldron full of stories the people in the town had already told each other. In this sense, and especially with respect to the latter parts of the butcher’s tale, it was the townspeople who provided the primary ingredients. They thickened its plot, deepened its cast of characters, and stirred in more and more damning detail.

  II

  The accusation that the Jews murdered Ernst Winter surfaced soon after the boy’s torso was pulled from the lake. Already the next day, the market hummed with gossip and speculation, traders and store owners, passersby and cleaning ladies exchanging news more feverishly than their wares. Well before Wilhelm Bruhn arrived in Konitz, many people had come forward to tell disparaging stories about Adolph Lewy and other Jews. Of these stories, the most influential was the intricate yarn spun by Bernhard Masloff and his mother-in-law, Anna Ross.

  Masloff, a twenty-four-year-old bricklayer, came to the police on March 20, nine days after the boy’s murder. Supposedly, he had seen a flickering light and heard strange noises emanating from the house of Adolph Lewy on the night of the murder. But because a 2,000-mark reward had been posted, the police were wary. “The manner in which he gave the whole testimony,” one inspector said, meant that “from the beginning I gave it little weight.”30 But the bricklayer proved tenacious. A month later, on April 25, when the size of the reward had increased tenfold, Masloff returned to offer the following story.31

  He claimed that on the night of the murder he had drunk four glasses of beer at Sänger’s pub and three glasses of schnapps at his in-laws’. As he ambled home, he passed Lewy’s house on the Danzigerstrasse and accidentally dropped the cork to his snuffbox. When he bent down to pick it up, he suddenly saw a light in Lewy’s cellar and overheard people in the basement uttering sounds—“ho, ho, hoho!”32 Curious, Masloff crouched on one knee and put his ear to the window. After about fifteen minutes of straining to hear, he went around to the back, took off his boots so that he could make a quiet escape, and, for two hours, listened. Eventually, he heard voices “murmuring” and saw a small man “in the shape of the elder Lewy” come out and warily look about. “Nothing shall be known,” Masloff heard Lewy say.33

  Masloff told this story in late April in an atmosphere of deepening enmity after the first wave of violence. Perhaps he thought its reception would now be more favorable. Among the police, it was not. But six weeks later Masloff’s day finally came. When the police summoned Gustav Hoffmann on May 29, the anti-Semitic journalist Bruhn persuaded Masloff to try again. Masloff now amended his story a third time.

  To start, he had far less to drink: two glasses of beer, one shot of schnapps. He also had a new reason for kneeling down at the door of Lewy’s back court for such a long time. Having eyed a slab of meat in the cellar eight days before, he n
ow resolved to steal it. Masloff pulled the slab of meat down from the rack and, his boots in one hand, the five-pound piece of meat in the other, made his way home. More important, Masloff now claimed that not one but three men exited the cellar, among them Moritz Lewy: two men were carrying a heavy package, the third lighting the way to the Mönchsee with a kerosene lamp.34

  Masloff brought forward a remarkable testimony, a detailed eyewitness account unequivocally incriminating the Lewys. But if his rough-hewn story of kneeling in his socks behind Lewy’s house seemed to stretch credulity, it was more than matched by the complicated tale spun by his mother-in-law.

  A forty-three-year-old woman, Anna Ross ran a maid service in Konitz, sometimes cleaning houses herself, sometimes coordinating the services of others. She had cleaned and washed for the Lewys for eight years.35 She had also hired out her two daughters … the elder, Auguste Berg, and the younger, Martha, Bernhard Masloff’s wife.36 Both had cleaned for the Lewys as well.

  At seven o’clock on Sunday night, March 11, Anna Ross went to the Lewys in order to set up maid service. While talking with the lady of the house in the living room, Ross heard “muttering whispers” from the cellar. Frightened, she was about to leave when Helene Lewy (Adolph’s niece) supposedly came up the stairs with a kitchen lamp, which she blew out the second she noticed Ross. Three days later, and the day after the torso had been fished from the Mönchsee, Ross went to the weekly market to look for domestic help for the Lewys, but she could find no one, since the women of the town were so convinced of the culpability of the Jews. Ross told this to Pauline Lewy, Adolph’s wife, and said that it would be easier to find help when the police discovered the killer. “The [killer] will never be discovered,” Pauline Lewy supposedly replied. “The Jewish community is very rich,” and “that Winter is not worth all the commotion.”37