Butcher's Tale Murder & Anti-Semitism in a German Town

'In 1900, in Konitz, a small town in the eastern reaches of the German Empire, a Christian boy was found brutually dismembered, the blood seemingly drained from his limbs. The crime resembled the traditional blood-libel accusations against the Jews, the kind dramatized in Bernard Malamud's classic novel The Fixer. Without evidence, local Christians -fueled by a dangerous mixture of slanderous gossip and historical fasehood - quickly accused their Jewish neighbors of ritual murder. Within weeks of the murder, the town was engulfed in violent anti-Semitic riots and demonstrations.' In The Butcher's Tale, the historian Helmut Walser Smith places the accusations, and the ensuing maelstrom of violence, under a microscope. Though the Konitz police never caught their killer, they scrupulously recorded each indictment, each shred of evidence, however flimsy, made by drunkard and town official alike - the most memorable being the long disclosure, published in a local newspaper, of Gustav Hoffman, the town's Christian butcher, in which he accused his next-door neighbor, the Jewish butcher Adolph Lewy, of conspiring with other Jews of the town to commit the crime. Based on fantastic rumor, hearsay, and outright fabrications, the article stirred anti-Semitic fervor in the town, forcing the government to call in the Prussian army and drawing national attention to the case.