The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

  The killer, Lautz reasoned, must have been clever, and he must have had time to think. A mere ruffian would have thrown the body, clothes and all, into the lake. Moreover, the parts were cut as if by a butcher and packed as such. Hoffmann was a smart man. He had intended to disperse the body parts, each part neatly packaged, but time ran out.80

  Time ran out for Lautz as well. In June 1901, he asked that the possibility that Gustav Hoffmann had killed Ernst Winter be considered anew. “Against the task of tracking down the circumstances of the murder,” Lautz wrote, “the concern about possible unrest in the population must be put into the background.” Lautz implored. The new chief prosecutor refused. His name was Schweigger (“silencer”). The case against Hoffmann, Schweigger replied, was closed, and he recounted the reasons why: the police had found nothing in Hoffmann’s home; the interrogation had turned up no incriminating circumstances; the evidence of a sexual liaison between Anna Hoffmann and Ernst Winter was scant; Gustav Hoffmann did not even know of a liaison; and he was a good man, respected and revered by the community.81 Lautz never responded to Schweigger’s arguments, though he no doubt thought them threadbare, especially in light of new evidence. But exactly what he thought we will never know. Soon after he wrote the memorandum, Lautz passed away, a victim of a sudden and inexplicable aneurism. Schweigger continued with the investigation, and he “tended to the opinion that the killer is a person who had never been suspected before….”82

  IV

  Did Lautz get it right? Looking back, it no longer surprises us that an eighteen-year-old boy might have seduced a fifteen-year-old girl from an upstanding family on a cold night in a shed. It is no longer inconceivable that a respectable man could commit a horrible deed. More confounding remains the charge of ritual murder itself, as if the charge were a blanket, concealing the truth about the killing of Ernst Winter, just as it pulled a cover of silence over the history of Christian violence against Jews. Although significant violence continued well into the modern period, in Konitz in 1900 it assumed the insidious character of a reenactment, of speech and act that did, in fact, perform its own version of ritual murder, stressing now the first word rather than the second.

  Much as we would like to solve a crime now one hundred years old, we cannot interrogate Gustav Hoffmann again or return to the crime scene so hastily contaminated by the citizens of Konitz. In this sense, indeterminacy is the historian’s lot. “We are doomed,” as Simon Schama has written, “to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”83 But even if we do not have the “dead certainty” to hang a man, we can see that in this West Prussian town, although there was only one corpse, there was more than one crime. And through the long forgotten story of Konitz, we can come closer to understanding the episodic recurrence of a crime that all too often has moved the bards of the Jewish community to lamentation. Less then forty years later, indeed not so far off the horizon, the virulent streams of anti-Semitic hatred would again rise, this time in a river of blood greater than the most pessimistic prophet had ever dared imagine.

  “Greetings from Konitz in West Prussia.” The Mönchsee with a view of the town in the background.

  Epilogue

  Who today does not know the name Konitz?

  —WÜRZBURGER GENERALANZEIGER,

  25 October 1900

  Death is a master from Germany his eye is blue.

  —PAUL CELAN

  I

  In March 1901, a full year after the murder of Ernst Winter, a local committee was busy erecting a monument to the deceased. “Here rests in God Ernst Winter, slaughtered [geschlachtet] by malicious hands,” the epitaph read. Just beneath the cross were the words “Death has been transformed into victory” and on the pedestal “Make no mistake, God does not let himself be blasphemed.”1

  If the references on the monument were thinly veiled, the same cannot be said of the postcards distributed throughout the empire and beyond. One pictured the family Löwy (sic) as lions gnawing on the bones of Ernst Winter. Another showed a picture of the town along with Max Heyn’s photograph of Winter, a copy of the reward poster, and a crying angel. There was even a postcard with a scene of the murder taking place in Lewy’s cellar. “Remember the 11th of March 1900,” the postcard admonished. “On this day the Gymnasium student Winter in Konitz was sacrificed to the knife of a kosher butcher.”2 The postcard not only showed the act itself, including the draining of Winter’s blood, but featured Moritz Lewy as well, clearly identifiable, sporting a pince-nez, standing in the middle of the picture holding Winter’s leg. The hunchbacked Wolf Israelski is holding a rope, and a man is walking toward the stairs, checking to make sure the coast is clear. “Watch over your siblings, those who are unmarried,” the postcard also warned, and “protect your children.”3

  Despite these crude efforts at propaganda, the conviction among Germans that the Jews had murdered Ernst Winter began to ebb. In October 1903, Kaiser Wilhelm II even pardoned Moritz Lewy, who had already served two long years in prison. Whatever his personal opinion of Jews the—kaiser had made more than his share of anti-Semitic remarks he nevertheless understood that Lewy had been the victim of a community in the throes of anti-Semitic passion.4 When the recently released Lewy arrived at the train station in Berlin, there was no crowd, angry or otherwise, to greet him. The police thought it necessary to station guards at the home of his father, the Jewish butcher Adolph Lewy, who would now live out his days at Linienstrasse 11, not far from the splendor of Berlin’s grand Reform Synagogue. But when Moritz arrived at his new home, no incident occurred.5 Even in Konitz, where enmity was still pervasive, the belief that the Jews had killed Ernst Winter had begun to recede. “With few exceptions,” a report of May 1904 stated, “the people are convinced that the suspicion of the Jews is unfounded.”6

  II

  Yet the notoriety of the case ensured a steady stream of continued speculation, much of it fanciful, about the identity of Winter’s murderer. Among the many solutions to the crime advanced by journalists, reward seekers, and both amateur and professional detectives in the decade after its occurrence, one compels our attention and leads us back to the scene of the crime and the original actors in the drama. Leaked to a Berlin journalist in 1904, the solution stemmed, in all probability, from the wily and persistent Inspector Braun, who now believed Bernhard Masloff to have been the killer.7

  By his own indiscretions, Masloff damaged his alibi. Originally, he claimed that he had been at home in his apartment in Hohe Höfe, a working-class street on the outskirts of the town, until 7:00 P.M. on the night of the murder. Masloff, it turned out, had actually been in town since 4:00 P.M., when he had coffee with his mother-in-law, Anna Ross, in her apartment at Postallstrasse 162.8 The address is important. Ross lived in a dimly lit side street in a small two-bedroom apartment with a window looking onto the back of Hermann Lange’s house, where Ernst Winter rented a room. Masloff and Ross knew Ernst Winter, and Winter knew their apartment because he had slept with the daughter of the previous occupant, a girl named Elisabeth Senske, who had since moved to Berlin. It is not clear that he knew the women who currently occupied the apartment. We do know, however, that Martha Masloff, Bernhard Masloff’s young wife, came to the apartment sometime that afternoon, though exactly when is difficult to determine. We also know that she was very angry with her delinquent husband. Meanwhile, Anna Ross claimed to have gone to the Lewys at 7:00 P.M., but later evidence placed her at the Jewish butcher’s house closer to 9:00 P.M. Why did Bernhard Masloff and Anna Ross lie about their whereabouts? And why was it so difficult to get the true story from Martha Masloff?

  If one follows the corrected testimonies of Masloff and Ross, there was a window of opportunity to commit the crime sometime after 5:30 P.M. on Sunday. This is when, according to Braun’s theory, Ernst Winter came to the apartment and seduced Masloff’s frustrated, angry wife. When Bernhard Masloff and his brother-in-law, Johann Berg, unexpectedly returned from Sänger’s pub, Masloff
saw Winter with Martha. The men went after Winter, and one of them knocked him senseless with a blow to the head, then suffocated him, and later that evening cut up his body in the dark cellar beneath Postallstrasse 162.

  Initially, this charge rested purely on speculation no more or less convincing than similar suspicions brought against Gustav Hoffmann. In light of further evidence, however, a convincing case against Masloff began to take shape.

  A scrap of a liberal newspaper, the Tägliche Rundschau, was found stuck to Winter’s head in the ditch near the Dunkershagen farm. In the immediate vicinity of Konitz, only twelve people subscribed to the Tägliche Rundschau, and one of them was Borrmann, a farmer from the village of Paglau. Before coming to Konitz, Bernhard Masloff and his father had worked on Borrmann’s farm, and they may well have had old newspaper wrapping left over from their previous employment. Masloff’s work for Borrmann also helps explain the seemingly decisive issue of the butcher’s cut. Clearly, a man who knew what he was doing had severed Winter’s body parts, and the inspectors at first never believed someone like Masloff to have been capable of such precision. But other clues suggested a less than masterly exactitude. When trained butchers sever the intestinal cord of a cow, they usually cut it out whole, but in the original sack with the upper torso found in the Mönchsee, the authorities also discovered an intestinal sliver about ten centimeters in length. This was the kind of journeyman’s mistake one expected of people who slaughter animals on occasion, as farmhands often did. When Masloff worked for Borrmann, he slaughtered sheep.

  Two more unanswered questions of the investigation involved the sack from the store of the tailor Plath and the string, which was neatly tied. Naturally, the inspectors thought of butchers who both cut and pack their meat, as both Gustav Hoffmann and Adolph Lewy did. But here, too, evidence appeared that points to Masloff and his family, in particular his mother-in-law. Anna Ross not only sent her hired girls to clean at the tailor Plath’s; she also washed and cleaned there herself. Furthermore, when she was in prison, a Berlin inspector asked her to sew a seam, and the knot she used closely resembled the knot with which the package containing the torso was fastened.

  It was an article of faith to investigators that the crime had occurred on the banks of the Mönchsee, or very close to it. The police assumed this because they could not imagine a man carrying a torso across a busy town, but the upper and lower torso were wrapped, and why would one wrap body parts and bind them neatly with a string if only to throw them into the lake? More plausibly, those parts were carried, perhaps by more than one person, from Postallstrasse 162, a quiet, nearly windowless building in a dark street. Getting to the Mönchsee from there entailed walking only through dark alleys, save for a quick crossing of the Danzigerstrasse. The route to the Mönchsee was, then, no more precarious than it would have been for either Gustav Hoffmann or Adolph Lewy, and the cutting could more easily have been done in isolation, in the cellar.

  In addition, the curious comings and goings of Bernhard Masloff and his wife in the days after the discovery of Winter’s torso need to be explained. On Wednesday, they had taken their child in a carriage and walked back into town from their apartment in Hohe Höfe in order to stay the night with the Bergs and Anna Ross. “It was spooky,” Masloff supposedly said, as if “a hand were twitching at the bed.” The path from Hohe Höfe to the Postallstrasse led past the Protestant cemetery, where one witness apparently saw the Masloffs and where, we may recall, the left arm was found. There were footprints in the freshly fallen snow, a narrow gait the footprints of Martha Masloff? On the Tuesday after Winter’s death, Anna Ross and Martha Masloff, who had been sick on the day after the murder, walked to the village of Klein Konitz to pick up meat, and in order to carry the meat they took their baby carriage with them. The path to Klein Konitz led past the Hohe Höfe, the Jewish cemetery, the shooting club, and the Dunkershagen farm, where the head of Ernst Winter was buried.

  With Masloff at the center of the story, the pieces interlock more forcefully than in previous scenarios, and the inspectors in Berlin believed that the material more than sufficed to go ahead with an indictment. Repeatedly, they wrote the district attorney in Konitz, urging him “to publicly and sharply proceed against the family of Masloff-Berg-Ross.”9 But Chief Prosecutor Schweigger, who had refused to reopen the case against Hoffmann, stubbornly declined. Inspector Braun thought that Schweigger should be forced to act. Even people in Konitz did not “consider the suspicion unjustified.”10 If Schweigger was unwilling, Braun was unrelenting. Three years later, in 1907, he followed a lead in Halberstadt, the city in Saxony where Masloff and his family now lived. A neighbor had overheard the Masloffs incriminating each other in the heat of one of their many violent arguments. According to Inspector Braun, the grounds for an arrest were now “fundamentally more compelling.”11 Convinced of the plausibility of the charge, the authorities called in a district attorney from the nearby city of Halle. But rather than support Braun’s suppositions, the district attorney argued that the neighbor who denounced Masloff was herself of ill repute, and the possibility that back in March 1900, Martha Masloff, a married woman, would have slept with a Gymnasium student in her own mother’s apartment on a Sunday afternoon, when her husband was only a few blocks away at a local pub, remained absurd. The attorney who weighed in on the case had just been promoted to his new position in Halle from a provincial outpost in West Prussia, and he had prior knowledge of the case. The new prosecutor was none other than the erstwhile Schweigger.12

  III

  The town settled down in the years following the investigation, and even prospered to a degree. But because Konitz was located in the east, it stood exposed to the coming crosswinds of history. After World War I, Konitz fell just across the border into the so-called Polish Corridor and became the town of Chojnice. The German population, including Jews, declined precipitously, as the vast majority migrated westward to the cities and towns of the Weimar Republic. By 1921, only 3,500 Germans were left in a town of 10,500 people.13 Both the majority of Poles and the minority of Germans rallied around their respective banners of nationality, with social and even religious life reduced to the cultivation of ethnic identity. “In the opinion of leading figures in the community, the value of the Protestant church essentially lies in its being a stronghold of Germandom,” a church authority justifiably lamented.14 In the course of this polarization, the Jews unmistakably sided with the Germans. This was already evident in 1919, when the Association of Jewish Communities in West Prussia issued a declaration against any measures “sacrificing their Germandom.” “They would find it especially terrible,” the Jewish communities of West Prussia declared, “to be at the mercy of Polish arbitrariness and intolerance.”15 Evidently, anti-Semitism remained ubiquitous throughout interwar Central Europe, and Jews perceived that it was worse among Poles than Germans. It also seems that their worst fears proved innocuous when compared with the murderous violence that rained down on the Jewish community just two decades later.

  When German armies rolled across the Polish border on September 1, 1939, at the commencement of World War II, the Germans of Konitz, who were organized into “national self-protection societies,” turned on their Polish and Jewish neighbors. According to the researches of Christian Jansen and Arno Weckbecker, the killing started on September 26, when 40 Poles and Jews were shot. On the next day, in the nearby village of Krojanke (Krojanty), at least 3 more people were killed, one of them a Polish priest from Konitz. Taking their lead from the Nazis, who were now planning to eliminate thousands of mentally ill Germans, members of the national self-protection societies massacred 208 patients in a psychiatric ward in Konitz on September 28. The river of blood began to overflow. Between September and January, local Germans, supported by the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht, massacred 900 Poles and Jews from Konitz and the outlying villages. In October and November, 200 more patients of a psychiatric ward in outlying Kamin (Kamien Krajenski) were also killed.16

  The Holocaus
t arrived early in Konitz. The violence in that fatal fall of 1939 began before the Jews of Poland were packed into the first ghettos, waiting stations for worse to come. The local slaughters also preceded the more organized massacres of the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, which began systematic genocide in the summer of 1941. Given the opportunity, ordinary men, the Germans of Konitz, willingly murdered their neighbors.

  Chojnice is now a quiet Polish town where the events of the wider world barely create a stir. It has grown in size. But there is no Jewish cemetery anymore, nor is there a Protestant graveyard. The synagogue near the Mönchsee and the Protestant church on the marketplace have disappeared as well, replaced by the drab contours that frame this all-but-forgotten town. Even the lake has been drained. Yet the house of Adolph Lewy still stands, three doors down from Hoffmann’s, both in the shadows of the Catholic church, which for centuries nurtured the ritual-murder tale.

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AZJ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums

  BLHA Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam

  CVdSjG Central Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens

  DZ Danziger Zeitung

  GStAPK Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem

  IdR Im deutschen Reich

  JP Jüdische Presse