It is no surprise, then, that some of the finest citizens of Konitz now looked elsewhere. Baron von Zedlitz left the shoals of his native West Prussia to become a county official in Linden, near Hanover.84 Praetorius, the liberal-minded teacher, was transferred to a position in Graudenz.85 And Mayor Deditius applied to become the mayor of a community in Upper Silesia but then stayed on in Konitz, where he would remain in his post until the outbreak of World War I.
“Grass will thrive,” the poet Czeslaw Milosz tells us, but meanwhile the small world of Konitz became smaller, the streets narrower, and the pettiness of life stretched out that much longer.
Reward poster offering 20,000 marks for information about the murder of Ernst Winter. The A at the bottom right-hand corner is the letter embroidered into the hankerchief found near Winter’s decapitated head.
CHAPTER SIX
The Killer
Who used the words “ritual murder” to ignite the masses? We do not know. Perhaps the killer himself.
—BRUNO BOROWKA,
author of a local chronicle
We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
—SIMON SCHAMA,
Dead Certainties
The first month of the new year—which would be remembered in European history as the last days of the long reign of Queen Victoria, the grandmother of Kaiser Wilhelm II—began with a sensational find: Ernst Winter’s clothes, missing for ten months, suddenly appeared. On Tuesday, January 8, some children found his vest and jacket along with the remains of a handkerchief in the city forest; then, on Sunday, January 13, a custodian discovered Winter’s pants in the backyard of the Masonic lodge; and finally, on Tuesday, January 15, girls in school happened upon his black overcoat.1 The clothes, especially the vest, revealed the discolored stains of coagulated blood.2
The discovery of Winter’s bloodstained clothes set certain aspects of the case beyond reasonable dispute. The assumption, established by the county medical commissioner, Dr. Müller, in the first autopsy, that Winter had died from a cut to his throat could no longer be maintained, because the blood on his clothes, in this event, would not already have coagulated. As in the ritual-murder cases in Xanten and Polna, an erroneous initial autopsy had from the very beginning fueled the ritual-murder myth. That autopsy had also obfuscated the investigation, since the police wasted considerable time trying to establish whether the cut was made in the style of a kosher butcher (who slices the throat of animals in such a way that the vessels are quickly emptied).
But even before the clothes were found, there had been voices of dissent against what Inspector Braun called that “miserable” autopsy. In October, a professor of forensic medicine in Berlin, Dr. Puppe, had scrutinized the autopsy report and questioned its logic. Unlike Müller, Puppe placed considerable weight on the petechiae in the face and on the surface of the lungs as symptoms of suffocation. He also underlined the absence of blood suffusion on the skin in the area of the throat incision as an argument against a fatal cut to the throat. Like the other severances of the dismembered body, this cut had occurred postmortem. According to Puppe, suffocation, not fatal bleeding, was the probable cause of death. In a separate report, Müller’s son, who was also a doctor, refused to accept Puppe’s conclusions. Instead, he appealed to an old, if improbable, image of Jewish ritual murder: that the victims are hung by their feet as their throats are cut. “Petechiae are not necessarily symptoms of suffocation,” Müller opined; “they can also be caused by gravity when the victim at the time of death is hung up by his feet with the head pointing down.”3 But now there was new evidence, and it did not allow room for such erroneous speculation.
Furthermore, the police found semen stains: on the vest (just below the left pocket), on the jacket, and on the outside of the pants close to the zipper.4 The location of the stains revealed that Winter was killed, as a forensic report put it, “while attempting to have intercourse with his clothes on.”5
I
This new evidence proved startling. Yet, even before Winter’s clothes were discovered, some people had speculated about a sexual murder. From the start, and to the very end, Inspector Braun believed that Winter had been surprised by his killer while engaging in a sex act. Although Braun’s peers did not share his suspicions of Gustav Hoffmann in this regard, there were other possibilities. Perhaps Winter lived a double life and found his death in the underworld of a small town, whether at the hands of a “pederast” or in the house of a prostitute.
The first possibility, involving “pederasty,” centered on a rumor that a local tailor, Otto Plath, thirty-eight years of age, enjoyed the company of young boys and that he especially admired the tall and muscular Ernst Winter. Winter, for his part, spent considerable time at Plath’s house, playing cards and trading stamps. Rudolf Plath, Otto’s younger brother, also played with them.6 According to one of Winter’s best friends, the more intimate friendship was between the older tailor and the younger student.7 But Otto Plath denied this and claimed that Winter came to his house mainly because of Rudolf, with whom Winter had taken dancing classes.8 There was another reason for suspecting Plath, however. Winter’s torso had been found neatly wrapped in packing paper and carefully bound with string. Both the paper and the string came from Plath’s tailor shop.9 Moreover, the knot was fastidiously tied, as if by a tailor.
The suspicions, though, rested mainly on speculation. There was little evidence that Plath had what Wilhelmine society considered “perverse sexual inclinations.”10 He also had no obvious motive, and he had an alibi that could be corroborated. On Sunday, March 11, Otto Plath had spent the afternoon with the teacher Weichel. Between 1:30 and 3:30 P.M., they were in the park and at the shooting club; thereafter they went to Hunzel’s restaurant, where they stayed, having imbibed four bottles of apple wine, until sometime between 7:00 and 7:30, when, ill from the wine, Weichel walked home, accompanied by Plath. Plath then went to his own house for dinner and thereafter went out again, stopping for drinks in a number of pubs and not returning home until shortly after midnight.11
Other attempts to place Ernst Winter in the company ot persons the police considered “perversely inclined” proved unsuccessful. One possible suspect was the cigar dealer Fischer. As students from the Gymnasium congregated in his store on the Danzigerstrasse, some people concluded that the middle-aged Fischer reveled in their company far too much. Yet, aside from the fact that Winter had been in the store on Sunday afternoon, there was no particular reason to suspect Fischer. Moreover, the rumors about Fischer remained unconfirmed, and when the police searched his house and store, they could find no incriminating evidence.12 The same may be said of suspicions raised against Szymanski, a teacher who was employed in the girl’s school. In his case, the police could not even connect him to Ernst Winter, though Szymanski had allegedly spent much time with Winter’s younger roommate.13
Still, the second possibility seemed more likely: that, on the afternoon of Sunday, March 11, Winter had been with a prostitute. In the words of a high-level Prussian memorandum, “Ernst Winter could have been murdered in the apartment of a prostitute because he evidently had sexual relations with such women and was often seen in the company of people of the working class.”14 That Winter often visited local prostitutes was not just an invention of a constricted imagination: a close friend said as much and named “the black Dominika” as a possible example.15 Winter talked often about his sexual exploits, sometimes bragging about them. When asked about his “back pain,” he once replied, “You know, the women.”16 He often spoke about his “gallant adventures” and how he “tired the girls out.”17 He also told friends that he “masturbated often” and had already begun a few years ago to “masturbate almost every night.”18 At the end of the Victorian era, this was thought to be unnatural, and the police speculated that this practice weakened him and, in turn, helped explain how an otherwise strong and vital eighteen-year-old could be overcome in a struggle.19
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br /> The struggle, the police supposed, might have been with a local pimp, although “here in Konitz there are no pimps in the actual sense of the word.”20 Nevertheless, it was conceivable that Ernst Winter, “who allowed himself to be involved with women of the worst repute,” fell into an argument with a male protector, who strangled or suffocated Winter and later dismembered his body.21
Such speculations were not as far-fetched as they nowadays might seem. In Wilhelmine Germany, middle-class sons who attended the Gymnasium typically turned to lower-class servants and prostitutes for premarital sex.22 At the same time, sexual encounters with “well-to-do daughters” were not only strictly forbidden but sharply controlled. In Konitz, schoolteachers even attempted to discourage Gymnasium students from strolling up and down the Danzigerstrasse, because this only encouraged unsupervised contact between young men and women.23 There still were, of course, ample opportunities for contact. Winter, for example, met with girls in dance class—though only under the watchful eyes of the dance instructor and the stern gaze of the mothers sitting in attendance. There was also ice skating on the Mönchsee, meetings in the cafés, visits to the theater, and occasionally clandestine moonlight promenades. All of this, however, rarely led to sexual encounters and, if so, only under the strictest secrecy.
In search of sexual adventures, German Gymnasium students routinely turned to prostitutes. Although rarely acknowledged, this had become part of a Janus-faced sexual economy that allowed, in the words of one contemporary author, “the young men to maintain their health and good humor, and the young women from better families to maintain their virtue.”24 Yet some young men feared going to prostitutes, partly because of the high incidence of venereal disease, but also because it opened the door to an often brutal and violent underworld. This is where the police imagined Winter’s killer to be.
The police identified Wilhelmine Kammerov, a local prostitute with whom Winter had sexual relations, as a possible suspect and her lover, the mason Robert Zindler, as the man who might have murdered him. As a suspect, Kammerov seemed promising. In 1894, she had been implicated in the murder of Bluhm, an oarsman whose corpse, like that of Ernst Winter, had been dumped into the Mönchsee. Although witnesses claimed to have seen Kammerov with Bluhm near the railroad tracks on the day he was murdered, Kammerov was convicted neither of killing Bluhm nor of being an accomplice to murder. Yet, during the trial, she perjured herself when she swore under oath that she had not engaged in prostitution, and was sentenced to two and a half years in a local jail.25
On the day of Winter’s murder, however, she seemed to have an alibi. On Sunday morning, March 11, she had attended church in Konitz and in the afternoon worked on the Fettke estate in the village of Briesen, three miles southwest of Konitz. Similarly, her lover Robert Zindler spent the day shepherding cattle in the village of Mossnitz, south of Konitz. In both cases, it seems difficult, though not impossible, to imagine that they could have slipped into Konitz without their employers’ noticing their absence.26
Speculation about the possible role of a local prostitute also led the police to think that the scene of the crime might not have been the Mönchsee after all, but rather the “little red house” at the edge of town. Situated near the shooting club, and close to where Winter’s decapitated head had been found, the “little red house” had previously been occupied by “loose women” and enjoyed a bad reputation among the polite classes.27 Still, this house was not a particularly plausible location: it was more than a mile away from the basin of the Mönchsee—a long distance for the killer to carry the two halves of Winter’s torso. The house was also quite small, with six families, including dozens of children, living within its four walls.28 That no one noticed anything suspicious seems difficult to imagine. It was also unlikely that Winter had sought out a prostitute on the afternoon of Sunday, March 11: not only had he left his wallet at home, but, as Inspector Wehn determined by inquiring of local call girls, Gymnasium students who visited prostitutes almost always did so after dark.29 Winter, one may recall, died before 7:00 P.M, when it was still light out.
Undeterred, the police clung tenaciously to the notion that Winter may have fallen into the hands of a man from the Konitz underworld. From the perspective of good middle-class Wilhelmine citizens, this underworld was inhabited by the working-class proletariat in their minds, dangerous people, anathema to the comfortable order of things. Not only was the working class viewed as politically unreliable, its members were seen as irreligious, sexually promiscuous, brutal, and often criminal.
Investigators entered this dangerous world when they followed another lead involving Ernst Winter’s possible sexual encounters. A number of people had seen Winter on the afternoon of the murder walking with two men. For months the police had tried to trace their identity to no avail. Then they offered a reward, and suddenly people began to remember. A beer distributor named Arthur Steffan came forward to claim that Winter had had a surreptitious meeting with Johann Gast and August Pikarski on March 11 at 2:00 P.M. on the Danzigerstrasse and that Winter had sexual relations with Marie Sawischewski, once the lover of Johann Gast and a sexual partner for Pikarski. Steffan, for his part, claimed to know Sawischewski well, for he too had sexual relations with her.
Yet Sawischewski denied ever having had sexual relations, voluntary or otherwise, with Ernst Winter. She did concede that “here and there she had sexual relations with various men in Konitz … mostly under the open sky …” She did not, however, “demand gifts from them” and instead gave herself satisfied with whatever her men gave.”30 An intimate relation with Winter, she reiterated, was out of the question. “I never knew boys from the Gymnasium,” she said. “The men I had intimate relations with were mostly friends and acquaintances of Gast—mason apprentices and cobblers.”31
Johann Gast was Sawischewski’s fiancé. A twenty-two-year-old mason, he was one of the two men Steffan had allegedly seen walking with Ernst Winter on the afternoon of the murder. Sawischewski also had a child with Gast, but the child died on December 19, 1900, shortly before reaching its first birthday. Sawischewski could not say what caused the child’s death or exactly when she broke off her engagement to Gast, though she placed the breakup in March 1900. “Gast was a drunkard,” she told a police inspector. She also feared he would “bring about her condition again.” To have another child with Gast was the last thing she wanted: he had done nothing for the child and, when drunk, often turned violent, even having publicly mistreated her at Schmeichel’s dance bar.32 Tellingly, the next man she met was a gentleman, a musketeer in the army and the son of a well-to-do businessman. He even wanted to marry her and wrote her many letters, but she turned him down. Someone of his station, she convinced herself, “would not marry someone like me, a poor girl.”33
There was little doubt that Johann Gast was a violent man, but that he had killed Ernst Winter, or even that he knew him, was more difficult to establish. Though Sawischewski could not be sure, she did not think that Gast knew Winter, “since Gast spent time only with his own kind.”34 But the beer distributor Steffan had seen Gast together with Pikarski and Winter. Could Steffan have been mistaken?
August Pikarski, previously a mason, now a soldier, certainly claimed that this was so. But Pikarski nevertheless corroborated the view of Gast as a man capable of murder. “It did not come to a friendship between us,” Pikarski said of Gast, “because I had a certain aversion to this extremely raw and brutal man, who reached for his knife at the slightest provocation.”35 Clearly, Gast was cut of the right cloth to commit a violent crime, and Pikarski would have “made no secret of anything he knew” about Gast’s involvement in the death of Ernst Winter.36 But he knew of no such involvement.
In his own deposition, Gast also said that he had never met Ernst Winter. “How could I have,” he asked, “only workers and artisans go to the places I hang out…. Gymnasium students are not seen there.”37 Gast also denied other allegations against him. He denied that he was the father of Marie
Sawischewski’s child, claiming that, at the time of conception, they had not yet slept with each other. Sawischewski, moreover, never asked him for financial help or for any other kind of support for the child. “She obviously believed that I would someday marry her,” he said, but added that she was at the same time intimate with a number of other workers from the local power plant.38 Obviously, between Sawischewski and Gast, someone was not telling the whole truth.
An ex-convict, Gast had good reason to lie. For the afternoon of the murder, he had no alibi; when pressed, he said that he simply could not remember where he was that day. He did, though, remember that he was in Riedel’s pub on the afternoon that the torso was found in the Mönchsee. When an apprentice came in and told Gast and his drinking buddies about the corpse, they immediately walked over to the basin of the Mönchsee to see the sight of Winter’s dismembered body. Soon a crowd gathered, and people discussed nothing other than the question of who did it. Moreover, nearly everyone in Konitz stopped to consider where he or she was on Sunday afternoon, when Winter was last seen. Gast, however, had no recollection. Yet he was a mason, not a butcher, and Winter’s body, one may recall, was neatly severed in several places, almost every cut skillfully executed. Gould Gast, quick to reach for his knife, have cut the corpse so precisely? One piece of evidence points to this possibility. In January 1901, Gast was drafted into the army. In the course of evaluating new troops, his commanding captain asked the company who among them knew how to slaughter a cow. Eager to show off, Gast stepped forward. Perhaps he had nothing to hide. “I believe that I could kill an ox,” he later deposed, “but to slaughter him in the correct way as a butcher would carve him, that would be difficult for me.”39
Try as they might, the police could not place Ernst Winter in Gast’s company, and Steffan’s testimony, incorrect in a series of tangential details, proved too weak to support an arrest. An ex-soldier, Steffan was himself not beyond suspicion. In 1895, a military court had condemned him to six months in prison for falsification of documents, attempted fraud, abuse of office, and, in two instances, violence against subordinates.40 In the Konitz case, he proved an opaque figure. Some people thought that the Jews had hired him, and he was even accused of trying to confuse witnesses against Moritz Lewy by hiring a doppelgänger, an Ernst Winter look-alike.41 Yet the suspicions cut both ways. In one story, he claimed to have seen two men walking with Winter on the afternoon of the murder, and reported they were “not from here, and they were without doubt Jews.”42 With Steffan, one never knew. Perhaps he was after the reward. Perhaps he had been slighted by Sawischewski and was jealous of Gast.
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