The Butcher's Tale

by Helmut Walser Smith

"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 Hoff