The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town

On Sunday, March 11, 1900, a murder was committed in the West Prussian town of Konitz, in present-day Poland. The body parts of the victim began to turn up in various sections of town two days later, each cut neatly and wrapped in packing paper. Many of the townspeople immediately blamed the murder on the town’s Jewish community. The accusation hearkened back to a centuries-old myth that Jews carried out ritual murders of Christians in order to use their blood to make matzo for their Passover meal.

The murder accusation led to an outbreak of violent riots against the town’s Jewish population, with the Prussian army called in to keep order. This antisemitic tumult foreshadowed the events of the Holocaust some 40 years later, yet it was seemingly not in keeping with recent German history. After the abdication of the authoritarian chancellor Otto Von Bismarck in 1890, Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II had pursued more democratic tendencies. The German economy, literacy rates, and educational system improved. Yet antisemitism remained a menacing undercurrent in German society. Pushed to the fringe, it festered and would eventually emerge with full force in the Nazi era.

Speaking in the first person, Smith explains how he was born in a small town in Germany and grew up in a small town in the United States, how he came to understand the social