The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (2002), a history/Judaica book by German American author Helmut Walser Smith, deals with a sensational murder case that took place in Konitz, a town in Prussia (Eastern Germany) in 1900. Ernst Winter, an 18-year-old student, was found murdered with his body parts dismembered and hidden in various places throughout the town. The residents of Konitz turned against the community’s Jewish inhabitants, accusing them of ritual murder.

This guide uses the W. W. Norton edition of the book, published in 2003.

Content Warning: The source material describes discrimination against Jewish people and antisemitic violence.

Plot Summary

Smith first details the history of what is known about the grisly murder. Winter, the son of a construction worker in what is now Poland, lived at a boarding house in Konitz and attended the local gymnasium (college prep school). On March 11, 1900, Winter disappeared after going for a walk following dinner at the boarding house. Four days later, Winter’s dismembered body parts started turning up around town. Initial suspicions centered around the town’s Christian butcher, Gustav Hoffmann, because the way the dismembering was done suggested a knowledge of anatomy, or at least a great deal of experience cutting flesh. Moreover, Hoffmann had discovered his daughter in the company of Winter, who was known as an overtly sexual young member of the community.

However, these suspicions soon fell by the wayside after antisemites saw the murder as an opportunity to drum up hate toward the Jewish population of Konitz. The rampant suspicion of local Jews was not limited to the town’s residents. Word of the murder reached Berlin, where one of that city’s antisemitic newspapers sent their editor, Wilhelm Bruhn, to live in Konitz in order to report on the events. Before long, Bruhn began to bribe and intimidate locals into testifying against their Jewish neighbors.

Witnesses claimed that they overheard various local Jews plotting the murder or saw them carrying the sack containing Winter’s head to the river. Particular suspicions began to surround Adolph Lewy, the Jewish butcher in Konitz—suspicions which Hoffmann was all too ready to encourage. Mostly, however, the testimonies consisted of far-fetched reiterations of the ancient myth of Jewish ritual murder.

Smith devotes a chapter of his book to recounting the history of the ritual murder charge, which dates back to the late Middle Ages. Christian townspeople often blamed local murders on the Jewish community, claiming that Jews killed Christians in order to use their blood in religious ceremonies. Despite there being no evidence for this preposterous claim, it persisted for centuries and was still being seriously discussed in print in the nineteenth century. From the 12th to the 19th century, Christians used the ritual murder tale as a pretext to enact violent riots against Jewish communities.

The Konitz affair had a profound effect on the town’s Jewish community, bringing widespread destruction to their homes and forcing many of them to migrate. It was just one episode in a resurgence of antisemitism in many parts of Europe around the turn of the century. In The Butcher’s Tale, Smith analyzes how people create “collective narratives” to justify vicious actions toward their neighbors. Smith captures the tragedy and frustration of the antisemitic events while also placing the affair in this historical and global context, occurring just a few decades before the Holocaust.