Konitz murder affair

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The Konitz murder affair occurred in 1900 in Konitz , the county seat of most of Poland inhabited district Konitz the Prussian province of West Prussia . Triggered by the violent death of 18-year-old high school student Ernst Winter escalated from the Middle Ages, traditional, anti-Jewish blood libel to pogroms . These were accompanied by intensive domestic political debates between anti-Semitic and Christian- conservative as well as social democratic and liberal politicians, citizens and journalists. Anti-Semitic agitation led to the fact that in Konitz and the entire region, Jewish homes and businesses were damaged for months, Jewish citizens were threatened and injured, and the Konitz synagogue was almost completely destroyed. Who killed Ernst Winter is still unclear.

timeline

Corpse discovery and first examinations

On Sunday, March 11, 1900, the 18-year-old high school student Ernst Winter disappeared in Konitz. Two days later, the father found his son's torso on a lake near the city that was still frozen at the time. The mayor of Konitz , Deditius, as a representative of the local police authority, the first public prosecutor Settegast and the district physician Müller arrived at the site for an initial assessment . A preliminary autopsy showed: Ernst Winter's arms and legs were "skillfully detached from the joints with sharp cuts, the spine was severed with a fine, sharp saw" (The individual body parts, like the clothes of the murder victim, were in and around for a long period of time Konitz found scattered). From the investigators' point of view, this suggested that (as in a similar case that occurred in Skurz near Danzig in 1885) a master butcher must have committed the murder. The district physicist, who was not qualified for a professional autopsy, drew the conclusion from the significant bloodlessness of the torso that Ernst Winter had been killed by bleeding to death.

Anti-Semitic suspicions arise

The publicly disseminated, initial investigative findings fueled the suspicion in large parts of the population that a ritual murder perpetrated by Jews could be present. This suspicion was reinforced by the anti-Semitic Citizens' Newspaper , which is now reporting from Konitz . In addition to the Christian butcher Hoffmann, the family of the Jewish butcher Lewy also came under suspicion. But the house searches of both families did not incriminate the suspects. Hoffmann, who, as an Old Lutheran, belonged to a minority in the village and was not very popular, tried to cast suspicion on Lewy soon after the suspicions against his person and family became known.

Shortly after the murder, numerous alleged witnesses came forward whose stories, some of which were based on misunderstandings, rumors, gossip and hearsay, and some of which were fictitious, hindered the investigation rather than promoting it, mainly because they had a great influence on public opinion. A smaller part of the statements were directed against Hoffmann or his youngest daughter, who despite her youth was said to have had a dissolute love life, including with Ernst Winter as a playmate, but mostly against the Jews living in the village in general or the Lewy family in the Special. For example, the worker Massloff stated in various interrogations that he had noticed abnormalities in the house of the Jewish Lewy family on the night of March 11th to 12th at around 11 p.m.: light in the basement, confusion of voices, “whimpers and moans”.

Second phase of investigation

Because the local investigative authorities, later often criticized as incompetent, were overwhelmed by the multiple testimonies, missing concrete traces and the increasing hysteria in Konitz, which was also forced by the fact that body parts and pieces of clothing from winter appeared in the village again and again, from the perpetrator or other people were deliberately placed, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior sent two experienced detective officers to Konitz on March 25, 1900. One of the two was Johann Braun, one of the most prominent criminalists in Prussia at the time. After several weeks of independent investigations in Konitz, Braun assumed that Winter must have been the victim of an act of affect that resulted in death. According to this, the butcher Hoffmann may have caught Winter in an intimate situation with his younger daughter and killed Winter with the intention of teaching him a lesson. The cross-examination of Braun, during which he hoped to obtain a confession from Hoffmann and / or his daughter, failed, among other things because news of Hoffmann's arrest led to tumultuous protests by supporters of the ritual murder theory in front of the building in which the interrogation took place . Braun speculated that the audible protests in the building had encouraged Hoffmann to sit out the matter and remain silent.

As the local police forces increasingly lost control, Braun, who feared for his safety, left the city a little later. A journeyman Hoffmann, who had given his master an alibi and who left the city for an unknown destination shortly after his testimony, and who therefore classified Braun as an accomplice or at least an accomplice, could not be located. From Braun's later known notes and those of his Berlin colleague, it emerges that the local investigative authorities apparently made countless inexcusable mishaps in securing evidence in the days after the crime. Various pieces of evidence at the place where the corpses were found were carelessly thrown away, traces were trampled, witness statements were sometimes not recorded, house searches were carried out extremely superficially. Braun took the view that if the case had been properly investigated, the perpetrator could have been caught in the first 48 hours after the crime.

At about the same time as Braun's investigations, respected Konitz citizens set up a subsidiary investigation committee. They were convinced that the investigative authorities were too slack to investigate the Jewish Lewy family, who they believed were guilty. Two teachers from Konitz were among the leaders of this commission. The work of the commission later culminated in an expert opinion, which could be broken down into the recommendation that Jewish witnesses should not be believed in principle, since two premises were assumed: that Jews had committed the act and that all other Jews were at least indirectly involved in it. The anti-Semitic mood in Konitz received new fuel in April 1900. After the severed head of the victim was found near the village, the messenger master of the district court of Konitz stated that he had seen a Jewish rag collector with a sack in which he had transported something round the size of a human head. The rag collector was arrested immediately, but the later trial against him ended in his acquittal.

Anti-Semitic riots

Despite intensive investigations and an increase in the reward for catching the perpetrator to the exceptionally high amount of 20,000 marks (around 140,000 euros) by the Prussian interior minister, the suspicions could not be substantiated against the butcher Hoffmann, the Lewy family and alleged supporters. Rather, after continued agitation by the anti-Semitic media, associations and private individuals, an anti-Semitic popular anger erupted in Konitz and the surrounding area, which initially spurred young workers in particular, but later also spread to the educated classes and led to a violent mob of several thousand people. Windows of Jewish houses were demolished, doors kicked and shops looted. Many Jewish residents did not dare to leave their barricaded apartments for weeks, others fled. A fire set near the synagogue, which threatened to spread to the church, was extinguished in good time. The fire brigade was pelted with stones by young people. When the riots continued to escalate and even many supporters of the ritual murder theory began to fear the uncontrollable crowd, the interior minister called military personnel to Konitz twice. The second time the state of siege was declared and around 500 soldiers took up positions in public places and in front of Jewish houses. This ensured the restoration of public order. At this point, however, the synagogue was largely destroyed.

Correction of the cause of death

At the same time as the investigation in Konitz, doubts arose about the report by the Konitz district physician. The Medical College in Gdansk came to the following conclusion, which the renowned Berlin doctors Virchow and Bergmann shared at a later point in time: “1. Ernst Winter died from suffocation . 2. The assumption that the neck cut found on the dismembered corpse of Ernst Winter was carried out during Winter's lifetime and caused the bleeding death lacks scientific justification. 3. Death occurred on March 11th within the first six hours after the meal he had eaten [this was the midday meal, so death must have occurred in the early evening hours]. 4. The evidence of sperm stains on the outside of trousers and vest makes it probable that Winter carried out or tried to have sexual intercourse shortly before death. ”The expert reports therefore showed that bleeding to death by Ernst Winter was not a serious cause of death.

Legal consequences and follow-up

In particular, the medical reports refuted the testimony of one of the main witnesses against the Lewy family. On the late evening of March 11th in the Lewy family home, Massloff could not possibly have heard the whimpering of Ernst Winter, as he had always tried to suggest, since Winter was long dead by then. These and various other false statements led to a two-year prison sentence for perjury.

Moritz Lewy, the son of the Jewish butcher von Konitz, was also convicted of perjury in another trial. He had claimed not to know Ernst Winter, but this was doubted by witnesses. The court followed your instructions. The trial itself and the verdict were extremely controversial, as the testimony, according to Lewy's defense lawyers, but also according to independent observers, did not develop any significant evidential value and was based only on shaky interpretations. It was also pointed out that "acquaintance" is a very vague quantity in a small town and that the question cannot be compared in any way with the lies of a Massloff directly relating to the crime. In this regard, the obvious suspicion was expressed that the plaintiffs would at least have wanted to "wipe out" the Lewy family in this way in the absence of evidence for the ritual murder legend.

Ernst Winter's murderer was never caught and held accountable for his deed. The existence of the Lewy family in Konitz was destroyed. The final trial against the publisher of the anti-Semitic citizen newspaper Wilhelm Bruhn and his editor in charge ended with their conviction for breach of the peace .

Four years after Ernst Winter's death, a report by an unknown author caused a stir again. The author believed he could prove that Bernhard Massloff, who had only been questioned as a witness and not as a suspect, killed Ernst Winter, a high school student. Contrary to what was initially assumed, a trained farm hand like Bernhard Massloff would have been able to dismember a corpse as skillfully as was the case with Ernst Winter. But the public prosecutor's office was no longer interested in reopening the case.

Parliamentary debates

From February 4 to 7, 1901, the Reichstag and on February 8 and 9, 1901 the Prussian House of Representatives debated the Konitz ritual murder charge. Previously, anti-Semitic members of the Reichstag had sent the brochure Der Blutmord von Konitz to the members of the Reichstag and the Prussian House of Representatives and tried to support the “legend of the Jewish blood murder” with propaganda.

In the debates that the Anti-Semitic People's Party (AVP) had initiated, it justified that Konitz reveals another example of the excessive influence of Judaism on the investigative authorities and clearly shows that the ritual murder suspicion that is fermenting in the people against Moritz Lewy, who in their eyes was complicit being pursued too little.

The Social Democratic members of the Reichstag, Joseph Herzfeld and Arthur Stadthagen, vigorously protested against this line of argument . They called the ritual murder legend "a stupid, silly fairy tale" and held the AVP members responsible for spreading the ritual murder allegation. In the Prussian House of Representatives, the left-wing liberal MP Heinrich Rickert , who was chairman of the " Association for Defense against Anti-Semitism " between 1895 and 1902 , decidedly condemned the pogroms in Konitz. In his eyes, the anti-Semites had a major part in causing these pogroms through their “subsidiary investigation commission”. He also emphasized that the judicial authorities had behaved too leniently towards the anti-Semitic slander.

In the Prussian House of Representatives, only the "small" parties took part in the debate about the Konitz ritual murder charge, while the large parties such as the Center and the Conservative Party did not comment.

Role of the media

Gustav George, who had followed the Konitz affair and its escalations on site, stated that the anti-Semitic party had achieved media dominance in Konitz with its agitation. He justified this, among other things, with the fact that the Konitzer Landbote , who initially reported neutrally and objectively, gradually used anti-Semitic arguments.

The anti-Semitic Citizens' Newspaper , the pamphlet Der Blutmord von Konitz by Reichstag member Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg and the Christian conservative newspaper Das Volk published by Reichstag member Adolf Stoecker made no attempt to publicize the Konitz murder as a ritual murder committed by Jews. They achieved that - especially in the phase of intensive investigations by the authorities - the anti-Semitic notion of ritual murder was promoted.

Journalistic processing in the new millennium

In 2002 two independently written books by two historians appeared on the events of that time. The Düsseldorf history professor Christoph Nonn concentrated in his work-up on the presentation of the origin and nature of the rumors that shaped the affair, as well as the personal backgrounds of those who spread them. He came to the conclusion that the anti-Semitic riots had their origins in a counter-public in which, above all, social outsiders, members of socially disadvantaged groups or those who, from a subjective point of view, were wrongly denied or insufficiently granted social advancement was, would have excelled. Out of an urge to gain recognition, these people invented or embellished stories which, on the one hand, grew out of their own prejudices and, on the other hand, were consciously tailored to the interests and needs of the addressees. The nature of the rumors was always aimed at the "fascination of the bizarre", as well as the fear of the Konitz citizens of the unknown, the state authority and their ignorance of Jewish life due to inadequate education. Many instinctively had used the tools of political and social agitation .

The American historian Helmut Walser Smith placed a focus of his reappraisal on a historical continuity of the legend of the ritual murder that he assumed. Smith saw the Konitz murder affair as a link in a chain that ultimately led to the Holocaust . Unlike Nonn, who saw the pattern of anti-Semitic agitation primarily in the individual addiction to recognition, and thus anti-Semitism alongside general xenophobia, projections of sex and violent fantasies, voyeurism and other motives as one of the symptoms, not as the cause, Smith, the Konitz citizens, emphasized assumed a familiar pattern of action that was latent in the collective memory and activated by the events. Only the different forms and formulations of the ritual murder legend are of an individual nature. What happened in Konitz, in contrast to the fictitious Jewish ritual murder, is the actual Christian-German ritual: here, unlike later in the Third Reich , the murder of Jews is not carried out directly, but through the symbolic humiliation and exclusion of the Jews ritually carried out by society in word and deed.

literature

  • To the perjury trial against Moritz Lewy in Konitz Westpr. Defense speech by the lawyer Hugo Sonnenfeld in Berlin, with a foreword by the Justice Council Dr. Erich Sello in Berlin. HS Hermann, Berlin 1901 ( PDF; 3.6 MB ).
  • Bernhard Vogt : The "atmosphere of a madhouse". A ritual murder legend about the murder of the pupil Ernst Winter in Konitz , in: Michael Brocke , Margret Heitmann , Harald Lordick (eds.): On the history and culture of the Jews in East and West Prussia . Hildesheim: Olms, 2000, pp. 545-577
  • Johannes T. Groß: Accusations of ritual murder against Jews in the German Empire 1871–1914. Metropol, Berlin 2002, ISBN 978-3-932482-84-7 . Humboldt University, Diss., 2001
  • Christoph Nonn : A city is looking for a murderer. Rumor, violence and anti-Semitism in the empire. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 978-3-525-36267-9 .
  • Helmut Walser Smith: The story of the butcher. Murder and anti-Semitism in a small German town. Wallstein, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 978-3-89244-612-5 (Paperback: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3-596-15765-5 ).

Web links

Wikisource: George, Gustav: Revelations on the Konitz murder affair . Based on our own investigations and observations, Georg Koenig, Berlin 1903.  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg: The blood murder in Konitz . With highlights on the constitutional position of the Jews in the German Empire, 11th edition, Berlin 1901.  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jürgen W. Schmidt: No case of "ritual blood drawing" - the criminal trials against the rabbinate candidate Max Bernstein in Breslau 1889/90 and their sexual psychological background. In: Specialized prose research - Border Crossing 8/9, Deutscher Wissenschaftsverlag, Baden-Baden 2012/2013 (2014), ISSN 1863-6780, pp. 483-516, here: p. 483.
  2. ↑ Jürgen W. Schmidt (2012/13), p. 483.