The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  Perhaps, too, the police were looking in the wrong milieu. Ernst Winter was, after all, a Gymnasium student and, as such, ostensibly a member of the middle class. The police, it is true, found it more difficult to imagine that a solid member of the German middle class could have committed such a brutal crime. Yet important clues pointed in this direction. In particular, they pointed to a pillar of Wilhelmine society: the schools.

  II

  The first clue had already surfaced on Easter Sunday, 1900. In the ditch in which the head was found, there was a handkerchief, torn in four pieces, one embroidered with the letter A.43 Upon examination of the handkerchief, the chemist Bischoff found traces of blood, on one piece “definitely,” on another “with great probability.”44 Not knowing whose handkerchief it was, the police placed an announcement in the local newspaper imploring the owner of the handkerchief to report to the station. For two weeks, no one came forward. Then, fortuitously, Mayor Deditius found a very similar handkerchief in his own house. But it did not belong to him; rather, it belonged to Auguste Rhode, the wife of the superintendent of schools for Konitz County. She had been to Deditius’s house for a soiree and had left it there unwittingly.45 She was also a regular customer of the butcher Gustav Hoffmann, and, according to her former maid, Auguste Rhode often left her handkerchiefs lying around.46 When confronted with the handkerchief, Rhode immediately recognized it as her own. When asked about the handkerchief in the ditch, she confessed that it, too, belonged to her.47 Why had she not reported the handkerchief before? Inspector Wehn asked. “Because the Jews did it,” she replied, and “she did not see the point of getting her handkerchief and her name and her person mixed up with the murder.”48 The murder, Rhode supposedly added, was a ritual murder. Confounded, Wehn shook his head: “this ridiculous tale.”49

  It was a tale that Auguste Rhode had helped to tell. She reported that she and her husband, along with the master mason Rudolf Hermann and his wife, Marie, had left the Masonic temple at eleven on the night of the murder. When they stepped onto the sidewalk of the Rähmestrasse (which led directly to the synagogue), Auguste Rhode allegedly said, “It smells here like burned woolen rags.” She also noticed a light in the synagogue, about a hundred yards to their right.50 Whether true or not (her husband and the Hermanns only partly corroborated her story), Auguste Rhode’s observation about the flickering light in the synagogue and about the smell of burned rags made its way into popular lore and provided specious evidence for plot lines involving a Jewish cabal convening in the synagogue after the ritual slaughter of Ernst Winter.

  The mystery of Auguste Rhode’s handkerchief remained unsolved. She herself had no idea how it could have landed in the ditch close to Winter’s decapitated head. She suggested that maybe her former maid (who had said that perhaps Mrs. Rhode left the handkerchief in Hoffmann’s butcher shop) had stolen the handkerchief.51 More plausibly, Rhode’s son claimed that he had torn the handkerchief in four back in the fall of 1899 when he was in the woods and had to relieve himself. But like truth generally in the Rhode family, this recollection took its time to surface; the boy did not arrive at his epiphany until mid-January 1901, a full eight months after the handkerchief had been found.52 Oddly, and despite the blood on the handkerchief, the police accepted his statement and closed the investigation. Indeed, they never took Auguste Rhode as a suspect seriously. “That she was involved in the murder,” a ministerial memorandum stated, “seemed completely out of the question.”53 She was a woman and a member of the bourgeoisie, in every way an upstanding citizen.

  A second set of clues pointed to Weichel, the teacher. A close friend of Otto Plath’s, Weichel had corroborated Plath’s alibi that on the afternoon of the murder they had walked in the park and visited the shooting club before going to dinner at Hunzel’s restaurant. Sometime between seven and seven-thirty, Weichel fell ill and, accompanied by Plath, walked home.

  Yet, when the murder became known, Weichel began to act strangely. On the morning after the torso was discovered in the Mönchsee, he boarded the 11:43 train for Berlin in order to inquire about a medical condition: a sore larynx, of all things. Unfortunately, the police did not ask why he needed to go to Berlin or when he had made the appointment. Moreover, despite a thorough medical examination, the throat specialist in Berlin could find nothing wrong with Weichel’s larynx.54

  When Weichel returned to Konitz, however, he pursued the details of the murder investigation with uncommon passion, quickly taking up company with every new journalist, private investigator, and reward seeker who came to town. He also proved a nuisance to the police. In late May, Chief Prosecutor Settegast complained. “For weeks Weichel passes his days in the pubs, ingratiating himself with every correspondent writing about the murder, talking ceaselessly about the deed, and calling the Jews the murderers.”55 That Weichel blamed the Jews was not in itself remarkable, but on the evening of May 29, the day that Gustav Hoffmann was apprehended and Bernhard Masloff interrogated by the unofficial citizens committee, Weichel had one too many drinks and began to brag that he, in fact, had killed Ernst Winter and that the people in the pub would one day remark that they had sat at the same table with the killer. He then tried to wrest a revolver away from one of the guests, ostensibly to commit suicide.56

  The police hardly took Weichel seriously, for he had no evident motive for murder. Yet other circumstance rendered Weichel a more plausible suspect than the police supposed. When he was sixteen years old, he lived in Skurz, where the murder of fourteen-year-old Onofrius Czybulla had been turned into an alleged ritual murder. Weichel had seen the dismembered body of the young boy, and his father, a local teacher, had been involved in the murder trial. Weichel therefore learned the ritual-murder script firsthand, as a young man. Moreover, during military maneuvers he had been employed in a military hospital and therefore had at least some anatomical knowledge. Weichel himself confirmed this, bragging, soon after the murder, that he could carve up a body with ease.57

  On the surface, the teacher seemed to lead an ordinary life. Married with three children, Weichel held a secure job and was, along with Superintendent Rhode, the chairman of the local veterans organization. He also served as the church organist. Once we peer behind the veneer of small-town satisfaction, however, we see a more startling picture. Not entirely stable, Weichel was a powerfully built man with a drinking problem and a violent streak. Constantly arguing with his wife, he had beaten her and had threatened her with a knife.58 There were also rumors that he had pulled a gun on her and that she had filed for divorce. Weichel’s wife denied both charges, conceding only that she had separated from him for a brief period when she suspected him of being unfaithful to her.59 At the time of the murder, however, they were again living under the same roof, even though Weichel had not really changed. He spent much of his time hanging around with a shady character named Gustav Georg, who had been sentenced to twelve years in prison for breaking into people’s houses and stealing from them.60 Weichel was also chronically in debt, not least to his friend Otto Plath.

  Yet Weichel had an alibi confirmed by independent witnesses. He and Otto Plath had been at Hunzel’s restaurant from 3:30 P.M. to 7:00 P.M. He then came home to his wife shortly after 7:00 P.M. As his wife testified, Weichel was indeed ill from too much apple wine, and he stayed in his bed for the rest of the evening.61 Weichel therefore had as a good an alibi as any for the afternoon and the evening of the murder. He also could not have distributed the body parts, for if he did indeed leave Konitz for Berlin with the 11:43 A.M. train on Thursday, March 14, he could not have thrown Ernst Winter’s left arm over the gate of the Protestant cemetery that night or the next morning.62 Weichel may have been an “irascible,” sometimes violent, if “lethargic,” man “devoid of character” and “prone to drink.”63 That did not, however, make him a cold-blooded killer. More likely, it made him a person who screamed for attention; his drunken admission of guilt, his theatrical play at suicide, could be seen as pathetic attempts to place himself
at the center of the whirlwind that hit this small town in the summer of 1900.

  III

  Still, the local police could not say who killed Ernst Winter, and for this reason a new chief investigator was appointed, the much celebrated Inspector von Kracht, a famous detective in the Rhineland, traditionally a fertile soil for the ritual-murder tale.64 Unlike Inspector Braun from Berlin, Kracht, who came to Konitz in January 1901, entertained the blood libel charge and believed that in the past Jews might have slaughtered Christian children in order to use their blood. He had studied the material on the “ritual murders” in Skurz and Xanten, as well the “scholarly” literature on these cases. He “had no reason,” he claimed, “to side with one or the other opinion.” Nevertheless, he considered it his duty to look at the documentary material closely and impartially. “A very large part of the population of Konitz and of the German people do not consider a ritual murder or a murder for blood to be out of the question,” Kracht opined.65 “People high up in Konitz society,” he added, “assume this to be the case.”66

  Inspector von Kracht wished to appease these people. He also genuinely suspected that the Jews were hiding something. “When the Jews are interrogated,” he complained, “they assiduously deny everything.”67 He also believed in the real possibility of a Jewish conspiracy. Upon arriving in Konitz, he began his investigation by going back and tracing all the telegrams sent and received by the Jews of Konitz between March 1 and March 16.68 Not surprisingly, he found nothing, except a lot of business communiqués.

  Inspector von Kracht also fixed his attention on the Lewys. Three clues, he believed, pointed to their complicity. The first involved the testimony of Bernard Masloff, which Kracht, following the trial jury, found credible. The second clue came from Moritz Lewy, who, in Kracht’s eyes, had committed perjury by hiding his previous association with Ernst Winter. The very act of lying about this detail constituted “evidence of guilt,” the inspector from the Rhineland reasoned. Finally, Kracht theorized that “with great probability” the sack in which the torso of the deceased Winter was found had made its way from the tailor Otto Platt via a since deceased Polish maid into the hands of Lewy’s sister, the rag dealer, who then gave the sack to her brother Adolph.69 Thus, Kracht thought, one of the central riddles of the murder—how the sack got into the hands of the killer—was solved.

  Unfortunately, as Kracht himself had to admit, “this material was not sufficient for successfully indicting Lewy.”70 The same, he also had to admit, proved true of the other Jews he suspected: Lewinski, whose house on the Danzigerstrasse “seemed much better suited than Lewy’s” for carrying out the deed; or the butcher Hamburger from Schlochau, who was denounced, nearly a full year after the deed, by a Christian meat inspector as the one who had probably cut Winter’s throat; or Cantor Nossek, who on the evening of the murder had picked up six Jews at the train station and brought them to Lewinski’s house. Kracht lacked concrete evidence for all of these suspects. “The suspicions raised against the Jews remain insufficient to proceed in any definite direction,” he wrote.71 The single-minded focus on the Jews did more than lead to a dead end; it damaged the investigation irreparably. Intelligent observers understood this well. In a memorandum dated November 11, 1900, the Prussian minister of the interior, Baron von Rheinbaben, and the Prussian minister of justice, Baron von Schudt, blamed “in no small measure” the “impassioned agitation” unleashed by the ritual-murder legend for the failure of the investigation.72

  The police also failed to reconsider assumptions in the light of new evidence. Since the initial investigation, three important new facts had emerged: first, the petechiae found on the lungs of the deceased, strongly suggesting that Ernst Winter died not of bleeding but of suffocation; second, the time of death, which forensic specialists now put as late as 7:00 P.M.; third, the semen stains found on Winter’s pants and vest. Since evidence showed that Winter had suffocated, it was no longer necessary to assume that the murder had been committed in cold blood. Since the murder may have occurred as late as seven in the evening, some alibis no longer held. Finally, since the murder certainly involved a sexual motive, this aspect needed to be investigated with renewed vigor.

  Even without the semen stains, the evidence tentatively pointed to an earlier suspect. On December 17, 1900, Chief Prosecutor Wulff of the district of Marienwerder suggested that investigators consider the case of Gustav Hoffmann anew. It was, on the one hand, “unthinkable” that a man of Hoffmann’s stature would commit such a crime, since he was “universally admired” and led an “immaculate life.”73 On the other hand, his alibi was not as airtight as it had first appeared. The time between 6.00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. remained unaccounted for. Perhaps the investigation had been closed too hastily. “It is not entirely inconceivable that Hoffmann was the killer,” Wulff cautiously speculated.74

  Local inspectors, as well as Kracht, thought otherwise. Hoffmann had been interrogated before, to no avail. An upstanding citizen, Hoffmann did not appear to be someone capable of murder when police had first interrogated him. He even made a good impression on Inspector Braun. It is true that Hoffmann had denounced Adolph Lewy without a shred of incriminating evidence. He also affixed his signature to a printed pamphlet containing fanciful statements masquerading as facts. Yet the denunciations did not so much as dent his reputation: as the citizens of Konitz so often maintained, Gustav Hoffmann was a good man.

  One official remained skeptical. In July 1901, District Attorney Lautz, a prosecutor in Marienwerder, penned a detailed memorandum arguing that Hoffmann no longer had an alibi.75 He also thought it unusual that Hoffmann should know nothing about his daughter’s friendship with Ernst Winter, when in fact the two young people had been seeing each other every Sunday for a long time. Anna Hoffmann also denied the relationship, yet at the trial, her older brother conceded that Winter “had been courting his sister.”76 Lautz also pointed to the suspicions voiced early on in the murder investigation by Ignaz Praetorius, the liberal-minded high school teacher. Praetorius recounted that when the sack that contained the torso was unraveled, Hoffmann had torn from the sack a scrap of paper that had pieces of meat stuck to it and thrown it back into the lake.77 Praetorius also noticed that Hoffmann acted strangely that day. The killer stood before him, Praetorius thought for a moment.78 The next day, both men, Hoffmann and Praetorius, looked through Hoffmann’s ice cellar and sheds for clues, coming up empty.79 The police took Hoffmann’s vigilance as evidence that he could not have committed the crime. As Lautz pointed out, however, the evidence could cut the other way, and one could imagine a man anxious to make sure no incriminating evidence remained.

  To be sure, such suspicions rested on weak conjectures. Yet, combined with an alibi that no longer held, Hoffmann’s previous mendacity, and his choleric temper, it was at least conceivable that Hoffmann had killed Ernst Winter in the evening of March 11, 1900. According to Lautz, the following was the scenario.

  Evidently waiting for someone, Ernst Winter had been promenading up and down the Danzigerstrasse in the late afternoon. Meanwhile, Anna Hoffmann was at the home of Wilhelm Ziebarth, the butcher, whom she and her family had visited that day. Anna Hoffmann left the Ziebarths around 5:45 P.M., and her father returned home fifteen minutes later. For some reason, he had cause to go to his shed near the lake, where he caught Winter with his daughter in flagrante delicto. She immediately fled and therefore had no idea of what happened next.

  Given the ruined reputation that could result if her virtue had been damaged, her father was beside himself with rage. A large man, Gustav Hoffmann threw the boy to the ground and, in the heat of the tussle, strangled or suffocated him. Perhaps Hoffmann did not mean to kill Winter, but he quickly understood the gravity of what he had done. He must hide the body, he thought, and the obvious occurred to him. He would get rid of the body as he got rid ot the rest of the meat in his shop: that meant cutting up the corpse, wrapping the parts in packing paper, and binding the packages with a string. The
string had always constituted an important piece of evidence. It came from the shop of the tailor Plath, and this fact pointed to a killer who lived or worked in Konitz. Of equal importance, the packages were neatly wrapped and the knot elegantly tied. Hoffmann had many customers outside Konitz and sent meat to them, wrapped in packing paper and tied with a string.

  The wrapping would take time, so Hoffmann first returned home, where he sat down with his family to a meal. At this point, Anna Hoffmann did not know what had happened to Ernst Winter. Hence she later that evening asked one of the apprentices to say hello to him in the theater. Filled with dread about his own deed, the father said nothing at the table. Instead, he sent the apprentices to bed early, ordered lights out earlier than usual, and, when the rest were asleep, left the house, fetched his tools, packing paper and string, and went to work.

  Hoffmann carved up the body several hours after the murder, which explains the coagulation of the blood. Because the moon was full that evening, he could easily see where to cut. Still, this process took longer than he had expected, and at some point he panicked, changed plans, threw the larger pieces in the lake, and hid the others, taking them only later to the places where they were eventually found.