The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  Such incidents, many of which were never reported, were not confined to the far eastern corners of Europe. Seventy kilometers north of Konitz, in the town of Berent, a very similar event occurred. In April 1894, Mrs. Hermann, a Catholic widow, sent her son to sell a goat to a Jewish butcher named Werner. But when the son did not return, Mrs. Hermann marched over to the butcher shop, grabbed Mrs. Werner by the collar, and demanded that she return her child. Unfortunately, no child was forthcoming. Incensed, Mrs. Hermann ran down the street shouting, “The Jew slaughtered my child.” An angry crowd gathered and marched to the town hall and demanded that the mayor liberate the boy. The boy, it turns out, had taken a side street and sold the goat to someone else. When questioned by the police about her anti-Semitic outcries, Mrs. Hermann replied she had “often read such things in the newspaper.”123

  Ritual-murder charges also served to obscure the mistreatment of children and infanticide. This happened in Labischin, in the German province of Posen. In June 1894, the Kuniszewskis seemed to have lost their five-year-old boy, and he was found hastily buried in a nearby wood. The mother, it turned out, had badly maltreated her son and, as the autopsy later revealed, had buried him alive. The Jews, she had told both her husband and the authorities, had taken the boy away to be slaughtered.124

  Finally, ritual-murder accusations often deflected attention from an act that at once fascinated and disgusted turn-of-the-century European society: sexual murder. That Jews signified sexual danger was an old trope of anti-Semitic imaginings. In 1888, it had resurfaced anew in connection with the notorious case of Jack the Ripper. According to one theory, encouraged by Viennese newspapers, Jack the Ripper may have been an east European Jew who, in accordance with the injunctions of the Talmud, murdered Christian girls with whom he had sexual relations.125 If the specific charge did not convince London society at the time, the general idea nevertheless achieved considerable currency in the cultural milieu of central Europe.

  V

  Of the seventy-nine cases documented in Europe, one merits attention because it shows that not only the motifs but also the modus operandi of the ritual-murder charge followed a predetermined path. On the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, June 29, 1891, in the small Catholic town of Xanten, in the county of Mörs, a five-year-old boy was murdered, his throat slit from ear to ear, his body found in a barn. As if on cue, local Christians accused Adolph Buschhoff of the murder, a Jewish butcher who lived near the scene of the crime.

  The first to incriminate him was Heinrich Junkermann, the Catholic butcher. On the night of June 29, Junkermann had seen the fresh corpse lying in the barn; the next morning, at six-thirty sharp, he went to the mayor and urged him to arrest Buschhoff. The Jews need Christian blood, Junkermann said; his son, a medical student, told him so. As a butcher, he could also attest that the cut resembled a kosher slaughter.126 By noon, the people of Xanten had already begun to single out Buschhoff as the primary suspect. As people talked, the stories grew more elaborate.127

  A stonecutter, Heinrich Wesendrupp, Junkermann’s brother-in-law, contended that unless a narcotic was used, blood should have squirted out from the neck more vigorously than it did. Perhaps Buschhoff had collected the blood, Wesendrupp reasoned.128 His friend Hermann Mölders supported this view. A sixty-eight-year-old gardener who could neither read nor write, Mölders was mentally slow, and he enjoyed a few glasses of schnapps at daybreak. On the morning of June 29, his consumption quota already reached, Mölders witnessed an unusual sight at Buschhoff’s house. “An arm came out from a grown-up person” (“et kam en Arm von einem erwachsenen Minsch”), he said. “They dragged him in” (“Sie trock ihn herein”).129 The sightings and overheard conversations accumulated. Countless people now came forward to report that Buschhoff had been acting suspiciously, that he seemed upset, that his “color had changed,” that he often ignored people (he was nearly deaf), and that he reacted defensively to the accusations.’130 Mathilde Biesenkamp said that Buschhoff had told her to shut her mouth because she didn’t know anything about it (“Ji sallt man die Mul halde, ji weet von de ganze Sak nix von”).131 Others claimed to have overheard conversations: the servant girls Selma Roelen and Anna Moritz heard Buschhoff and his son saying, “If they can’t prove it, they can’t do anything to us,” and “As long as it doesn’t leak out.”132 According to other witnesses, local Jews were involved in the cover-up. “We have to keep it secret,” one Xantener Jew allegedly-said to another, “and take care that you don’t babble.”133

  It is a pattern we have seen countless times before: starting with an initial denunciation, accusations amassed and became more and more concrete. As time went by, it also grew safer to go after one’s Jewish neighbor. The pattern, moreover, was already evident to contemporaries. “The people make an image,” the state judge Brixus complained, “a few pieces of which they themselves experienced, then they gradually work themselves into the image, and to this is added what other people say.”134 The people, the judge pointed out, became more, rather than less, precise in their descriptions as time went by and as they believed in the images of their own imagination.135

  The initial accusers were local anti-Semites. Junkermann had spent the day of the murder at the beer festival on the Fürstenberg complaining about the Jews. “I can’t stand them,” he said; “the Jews are a bad people, the dregs, and a bunch of cheats.” When news of the murder came, his first reaction was to say, “Surely a Jew did it.”136 The same may be said of his brother-in-law Wesendrupp, hardly an upstanding citizen himself. A violent man with a bad temper, he beat his wife for many years, allowed his business to fall into ruin, and, after his wife’s death, placed his three children in an orphanage.137 He too hated the Jews, in particular Buschhoff, who had fired him on the Friday before the murder when he (Wesendrupp) showed up to work inebriated, as he often did. As he left Buschhoff’s premises, Wesendrupp threatened that he would fix things so that his Jewish neighbor “wouldn’t have another Sabbath.”138 The animosity Junkermann and Wesendrupp felt toward Buschhoff has even led one modern historian to speculate that they might have committed the murder themselves and subsequently directed attention toward Buschoff.139 For Wesendrupp, whose alibi was questionable and whom locals thought perfectly capable of committing such a heinous crime, there may even be something to that theory. Two years later in pubs in the nearby town of Kalkar, he allegedly confessed to the crime.140 But if it is easy to understand why Wesendrupp attempted to frame Buschhoff, it is more difficult to discern a motive for the murder in the first place.141

  From the start, the accusations were also supported by educated people, like Dr. Steinert, the medical examiner who first observed the corpse and against better evidence determined that blood was missing, or Junkermann’s son Carl, the medical student who thought Jews need blood for baking matzo.142 In Xanten, the local priest, Chaplain Bresser, also contributed to the baleful situation by gathering evidence against the Jews, especially among local children, and printing his findings in the Xantener newspaper, the Bote für Stadt und Land.143 He also wrote an essay for Junkermann, as Bruhn would do for Hoffmann, attesting that the cut on the neck resembled a kosher cut. Bresser then dictated the essay to Junkermann, who wrote it down, word for word, signed it, and published it as his own.144

  If initial accusations drew the support of the educated, they were also fostered by a dynamic of violence and community. In the weeks after the murder, there had been frequent demonstrations in the streets of Xanten. As these demonstrations gained momentum, and certainly by July 12, townspeople publicly engaged in rituals of “exclusionary violence” taunting Jews on the streets, smashing windows, smearing Jewish houses with anti-Semitic graffiti.145 Moreover, by July 12, an outside newspaper had intervened. The conservative anti-Semitic Das Volk reported that the boy’s body had been found “completely bloodless.”146 A few weeks later, an anti-Semitic newspaper published in Dortmund, the Westfälische Reform, wrote of an “authentic ritual murder.”147

  The
Jews of Xanten now recognized the precariousness of their position. With the help of Rabbi Horowitz of Krefeld, they wrote a formal letter on September 14 to the Prussian minister of the interior. “The disturbances increase daily,” they claimed; “only through the swift discovery of the evildoer can we be helped.”148 The government sent Inspector Wolff from Berlin. Like Braun in Konitz, Wolff quickly made an arrest, but he arrested the Jewish butcher, whose name, like Lewy’s, was Adolph. Buschhoff struck the boy in a fit of anger, Wolff reasoned, because the boy had damaged gravestones. When the five-year-old fell unconscious, Buschhoff, realizing what he had done, was seized by panic and asked his daughter to carry the boy to the barn under her apron; the father then followed and slit the boy’s throat.149

  Wolff’s theory rested on the veracity of Mölder’s testimony (“an arm came out from a grown-up person”). It was also supported by numerous statements that Buschhoff seemed to be in an agitated state, and it was buttressed by a declaration Buschhoff’s wife allegedly made to Wesendrupp: “She was happy and relieved that the child was not found at their house, because of their identity as Jews,” she supposedly said.150 For Inspector Wolff here was the motive that “must have moved them” to kill the boy in the barn.151 On October 14, he arrested and incarcerated Adolph Buschhoff and his family. The case was then turned over to Judge Brixus, who, after a two-month investigation, sensibly concluded that Inspector Wolff’s theory rested on unsupported suppositions and specious evidence. Mölders, for example, could not have seen what he claimed from where he was standing.152 With insufficient evidence for a prosecution, Brixus recommended that Buschhoff’s family be released. On December 23, they were free to go (though not home, since Xanten was no longer safe for them).

  With renewed vigor, the public debate started all over again. Not only the anti-Semitic press but also the Catholic press and that of the Conservative Party portrayed Buschhoff’s release as a travesty of justice.153 Suddenly, the Xanten affair became a national issue. It was even the subject of a debate on the floor of the Prussian Landtag, where a Conservative delegate from rural Saxony, “Krautjunker” Baron von Wackerbarth-Linderode, got up and explained to the assembled deputies that Jews did, in fact, commit ritual murder and that they were getting off scot-free because the Prussian judiciary was in their pockets.154 By early February, the time of the baron’s harangue, the national political climate had already forced local authorities to reconsider the case. In the process, the county medical examiner, Dr. Ferdinand Bauer, discovered something new: a tear in the boy’s shirt was caused by a notch on the blade of a knife found in Buschhoff’s home … knife number 13.155 State forensic experts dismissed the claim (many things could have caused the tear), but Bauer held fast to his evaluation. At this time, moreover, a series of new witnesses came forward and reported having seen Buschhoff in an agitated state. The police arrested Buschhoff and his family once again, and the case went to trial in Cleve District Court on July 4, 1892.156 The trial lasted ten days, at the end of which the jury reached a verdict of not guilty. It could hardly have done otherwise. By then, even the district attorney, responsible for the prosecution, admitted that the evidence against Buschhoff seemed specious, and he urged the jury to decide accordingly.

  For the anti-Semitic press, however, and the people in the area, no evidence could have exonerated Buschhoff. The decision sparked a hail of criticism and another round of violence.157 Over the next two weeks, incidents occurred in Neuss and Grevenbroich, south of Xanten, as well as in their hinterlands. In Grevenbroich, anti-Semites desecrated a Jewish cemetery, “tearing the gravestones from the earth and breaking them to pieces.”158 In nearby towns and villages, they also desecrated cemeteries and in at least two communities, Hemmerden and Gierath, people threw rocks smeared with blood through the windows of Jewish houses. In Grevenbroich itself, anti-Semites taunted Jews on the streets, smashed shop windows, and shattered the windows of the Grevenbroich synagogue, which later, in August, someone even tried to blow up. In Neuss, the situation was hardly better. Jewish houses were plastered with hateful placards and, on the night of Saturday, July 23, anti-Semites painted “large blood red crosses” on them.159

  As it had in countless cases of alleged ritual murder and host desecration, the violence in the summer of 1892 told a symbolic story of exclusion and expulsion. Xanten was not a hometown—not for the Jews. The violence was of course real, but blood red crosses also evoked centuries of Christian animosity toward Jews, a history of barely concealed enmity and the thinnest veil of conditional tolerance. And still, the worst was yet to come.

  By 1900, the vengeful anti-Semitic heart had behind it the full force of nearly a millennium of historical experience. Or to borrow from the historian Edward Muir: “Blood boiled not so much for natural as for learned reasons.”160 What was learned was not always already there, nor was it simply the flat screen of prejudice. Rather, the people had come to know a series of stories, a collection of murderous tales, which served as alibis for aggression.161 The stories also came with a familiar script, powerful in its specificity. People got to know characters and understand their roles. There was the down-and-out Jew walking around with a head in a sack. In Konitz, this was Wolf Israelski. But such a figure also appeared in a dream to a woman in Skurz in 1884. In her dream, the dismembered fourteen-year-old Onofrius Czybulla came to her, dressed in white, complaining that a Jew “carried him in a sack.”162 The topos was also present in Dormagen in 1819 and in Ravensburg in 1429. In the latter case, the Jews allegedly stole a Christian boy from a wedding, ritually slaughtered him, and carried his corpse around in a sack.163 The marginal Jew who reveals the secrets of the murder also constituted a recurring motif. Drunken Dumb Alex, in other words, was not alone. He had a counterpart at the trial in Trent in Giovanni da Feltre, a criminal, but also a convert, who claimed that his father had used Christian blood in Passover rituals.164 Then there was Reichart of Mospach, a star witness at the Regensburg trials in 1475. A thief, three times baptized, now a Jew, now a Christian, married thrice, he gave insider testimony that the Jews of Regensburg tortured the host.165

  On the Christian side, too, witnesses were not always cut of the finest cloth. “Liars, criminals, crazy people, or the feebleminded,” the scholar Wolfgang Treue has argued, “easily assumed the role of star witnesses in the trials against the Jews.”166 Thus the likes of Stutter Anton and Rosine Simanowski, to say nothing of Bernhard Masloff and his mother-in-law, took their place in the ritual-murder drama, as such people had often done in the past. The same may be said of Christian maids whose bodies were allegedly violated by bloodthirsty Jewish masters. Here the instances of denunciation involving women and girls who served in Jewish houses are too numerous to recount. Suffice it to say that the alleged rape of Mathilde Rutz reflected a recurrent theme, especially at the end of the nineteenth century. The women were not completely alone, however. The imagined touch of the Jew also sent shivers down men’s spines. In Konitz, the peasant Joseph Laskowski swore that Adolph Lewy had touched his arm muscles and hips in order to size him up for slaughter.167 But this, too, was a topos people had learned. In Xanten, eight years earlier, the father of the murdered boy felt a bloody hand when Adolph Buschhoff, the Jewish butcher, touched him on the back.168 Finally, there was the Christian butcher, perhaps the killer himself, who identified the incisions as the cut of his Jewish neighbor and fellow butcher. This is how it happened in Skurz. This is what occurred in Xanten. And this is the script that, at least in one sense, Gustav Hoffmann followed as well.

  Adolph Lewy’s house on the Danzigerstrasse.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Accusations

  They do not speak peaceably, but devise false accusations against those who live quietly in the land

  —PSALMS 35:20

  There is no doubt that witchcraft persecutions were made between people who knew each other intimately.

  —ALAN MACFARLANE,

  Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England

  I<
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  By August 1900, murder investigators had taken nearly eight hundred depositions from people who believed they had seen or heard something relevant to the murder of Ernst Winter.1 Even if one considers that some people were deposed more than once, the sheer number of people who volunteered information overwhelmed the police and produced a mountain of paper, with incriminations, mostly of Jews, filling eighteen separate binders.2 To make matters worse, most of the information was hardly credible, as witnesses came forward with all sorts of “stories, incorrectly overheard or misunderstood utterances, and dreams.”3 One person even claimed to have discerned the killer via spiritual communication with the dead.4 And then there were the sightings. How could so many people have seen the Jews of Konitz in incriminating circumstances?

  In Konitz overwhelmed in 1900 by fantastic claims about Jews who committed ritual murder the actual sightings can often be traced to individual motives. Although some of the files of the murder investigation have been lost, we can query the more than forty extant cases and ask questions that bring us closer to these individual motives: Who were the accusers, and what was their relationship to the Jews they accused? Under what circumstances were the accusations made? And what did the accusers hope to gain? No general formula governs the responses to these questions. It was not always the poor who accused the rich, or the harmed who denounced a perceived oppressor. Anti-Semitic ideology sometimes played a role, but not always. Some of the accusations were outright lies, but others stemmed from the confusions of distorted memory. Still, taken together, the accusations yield a pattern: they were a way for individuals in the community to exercise power over the Jews, and more specifically over the Jews they knew. The dynamics of community also shaped these accusations, defining who belonged and who “sings not with us today” as the Russian poet Mayakovski ominously wrote.