When a young boy is found brutally murdered in a small Prussian town called Konitz, once part of Germany, now part of Poland, the Christians residing in the town lash out by inciting riots and demonstrations. Citing the incident as an act of Jewish ritual murder, better known as blood libel, Christians rendered blame on the Jews. Helmut Walser’s Smith, The Butcher’s Tale, details the murder account and the malicious consequences of superstitious belief combined with slander and exaggerated press propaganda. Foreshadowing the persecution of Jews which would take place three decades later, Smith analyzes and explains the cause and effect of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany at the turn of the century. Utilizing Smith’s book as a primary source, …show more content…
Tragically, the butchered upper-torso of Winter’s once-robust body was stumbled upon by his father, who had noticed the absence of his son since Sunday, March 11 (Smith 2002, 25-26). Unsurprisingly, an investigation occurred to obtain the identity and whereabouts of the murderer. When the various pieces of the body are found in differing areas of the town, theory begins to formulate that the murder was conducted by one of the two butchers in town; Adolph Lewy, a Jew, and Gustav Hoffman, a Christian, due to the precision of the cuts made upon Winter’s body (Smith 28). As fragile relations between Konitz-residing Christians and Jews increasingly began to deteriorate, rumors and speculation that Winter had fallen victim to ritual murder by local Jews, set the ball in motion for a virulent anti-Semitic nature characteristic of Imperial Germany. This anti-Jew sentiment would further be sensationalized by rumors, political movements, and the biased, fabricated newspaper reports of the …show more content…
This radical find would provide important details that would exonerate the Jewish community in Konitz of the accusation that Ernst Winter had been killed in order to use his blood as an ingredient in their Passover matzah bread. Later that year, in October, Dr. Puppe, a forensic medicine professor in Berlin, would re-examine and evaluate the original autopsy report. Upon close examination of the lungs and face, as well as the absence of blood on the skin surrounding the area of the throat incision would testify against the notion that Winter had died from a fatal cut to the throat. Thus, Puppe concluded that fatal bleeding did not lead to the death of Winter, rather, suffocation was the probable cause (Smith 2002, 188). When police found new clues to Winter’s demise, “semen stains: on the vest (just below the left pocket), on the jacket, and on the outside of the pants close to the zipper,” the location of the stains confirmed that Winter had been killed, “as a forensic report put it, while attempting to have intercourse with his clothes on” (Smith 2002, 188). These articles of evidence thereby rendered the countless stories of witnesses merely a tale of slander intended to dehumanize and prey upon the hopes of Konitz
“The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died. Nobody cared. His son searched him and took the crust of bread”. But then two men saw the boy and killed him to for the crust. The people in the cattle car were no longer people, but animals who only cared for food. The people outside the cattle car also painted a dark picture of human nature. People gathered around the cattle car to have a glance at the fights happening over the piece of bread. Soon the spectators continued to toss bread inside the cattle car and watched the effects of their action with great interest. They observed those monsters who were ready to kill for a crust of bread. The circumstances that allowed this dark side of human nature to emerge was the instinct to survive. The Jews did everything to survive and no longer cared about anyone else. They went through so much suffering that they didn't listen to their conscience and didn't care if they killed somebody. The people outside revealed their dark side too because they enjoyed watching people kill each other for food and they encouraged the fight instead of stopping it. They watched in awe because at that time Germans didn't see Jews as humans. They enjoyed seeing the Jews
Jan T. Gross introduces a topic that concentrates on the violent acts of the Catholic Polish to the Jewish population of Poland during World War II. Researched documentation uncovered by Gross is spread throughout the whole book which is used to support the main purpose of this novel. The principal argument of Neighbors is about the murdering of Jews located in a small town, called Jedwabne, in eastern Poland. During this time, Poland was under German occupation. With an understanding of the that are occurring during this era, readers would assume that the Nazis committed these atrocious murders. Unfortunately, that is not the case in this book. The local
This essay will review Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial moral inquiry, ‘A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair’, published in 2002. Goldhagen attended Harvard University as a graduate, undergraduate and assistant professor until he was denied tenure in 2003; this possibly indicates his limited status as an academic. Goldhagen notes that he is ‘indebted’ to his father, a Holocaust survivor, for some of his findings on the Holocaust. This personal connection to the Holocaust on the one hand allows Goldhagen to write more passionately. On the other hand, it obscures his ability to view evidence objectively, evident in this book under review. Goldhagen status rose to notoriety due to the controversial nature of his first book, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ published in 1996. This received much criticism and perhaps more importantly to Goldhagen, plenty of publicity. The contentious assertions of the book, whether academically valid or not, established the relative novice amongst historians. This is evident in the abundance of secondary literature that comments on Goldhagen’s work including that edited by F. Littell and F. Kautz. Goldhagen’s credentials as a controversial author explain the extremist content of his second book, ‘A Moral Reckoning’. Goldhagen’s academic background in political science is evident in the books emphasis on the church as a ‘political institution’ and the pope as a ‘political leader’ (p. 184). . This limits his work as a historian as he fails to fully examine the role of the individual.
Massacre in Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. The massacre that Edwidge Danticat describes in The Farming of Bones is a historical event. In 1937, the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ordered the slaughter of Haitians on the border of the two countries. Twelve thousand Haitians died during the massacre (Roorda 301).
Throughout The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town, the murder of Ernst Winter in Konitz is very much a reflection of the overall attitudes of many Europeans during the early 20th century. It was clear that once the anti-Semitic attitudes started to become prominent in society, they spiraled out of control and started to take over entire communities. The Jewish people were blamed for crimes they did not commit, were excluded from society, and suffered from acts of violence and hate speech. Wild stories began to be spread all over town and people started to believe everything they heard, even if there was no substance behind it. This caused lots of problems in Germany, as well as Europe in general, since many people got
Reading the book “The Trial of Tempel Anneke” raises interesting questions, and details the clashing of anxieties that took place within Early Modern German communities, both in economic and religious justification. Some central questions posed by myself is proposed below.
One of the first writers to express the racial anti-Semitic view was Wilhelm Marr, who it is believed invented the word “anti-Semitism”. He, like other Germans had grievance with the Jews on the basis that a universally successful Jew had pushed them out of getting a good job. Marr himself was fired from his job as a journalist at a paper owned by Jews. He wrote “Der Sieg des Judentums uber das Germanentum”. In other words Jew was not contrasted with Christian, religiously but with German, racially. In 1879 he founded The Antisemiten-Liga, its purpose was in short to bring together all non-Jewish Germans into a common union which strives to saving the Fatherland from the Jewish influence. Marr was the first to appreciate the possibili...
The major focus of the book focuses on reconstruction of the events this group of men participated in. According to Browning, the men of Police Battalion 101 were just that—ordinary. They were five hundred middle-aged, working-class men of German descent. A majority of these men were neither Nazi party members nor members of the S.S. They were also from Hamburg, which was a town that was one of the least occupied Nazi areas of Germany and, thus, were not as exposed to the Nazi regime. These men were not self-selected to be part of the order police, nor were they specially selected because of violent characteristics. These men were plucked from their normal lives, put into squads, and given the mission to kill Jews because they were the only people available for the task. “Even in the face of death the Jewish mothers did not separate from their children. Thus we tolerated the mothers taking their children to the ma...
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
4 "The Jewish Peril," "Not a Single Jew," and "Law for the Protection of German Blood
An exploration of Jewish mixed blood status in Nazi Germany renders a brief history of anticipatory racial conceptions leading up to the Third Reich. The use of Mischlinge as well as other labels intended to denote mixed blood naturally evolved out of well-established racial conceptions central to Germany and the Third Reich ideology. This ideology, which existed as “an uneasy fusion of different strands of racial elitism and popularism,” defined persons as according to not only their Rasse or racial identity, but also membership of the German people or Volk (Hutton 15, 18). The idea of the Volk denoted not only shared language and heritage as well as right of citizenship, but the ordained right to inhabit German lands. Above all, this idea concerned triumphant unification of a German people perceived to be under threat of dissolution by ethnic and religious groups such as the R...
Norton, James. The Holocaust: Jews, Germany, and the National Socialists. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2009. Print.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
...ellow Spots’ expository analysis of “the persecution of Jewish people in Germany” demonstrated the anti-Jewish violence as a larger, systematic campaign to annihilate Jews in the process of creating the Volksgemeinschaft. This clearly emphasises that people in Britain from 1936 were aware of the barbarism and cruelty of the Nazi regime, which was subsequently validated through the Holocaust. Furthermore, the book’s challenge for a “vocal and insistent protest of the civilised conscience against the Nazis” evidently suggests that particular Britain’s grasped the extensive horror of the Nazi totalitarian regime and implored that the population opposed the Nazis. Thus, the publication of ‘The Yellow Spot’ suggest that people in Britain had a significant insight into the maltreatment and prosecution of the Jews which was permeated to the core by Nazi’s racist ideology.
Anti-Semitism reached to extreme levels beginning in 1939, when Polish Jews were regularly rounded up and shot by members of the SS. Though some of these SS men saw the arbitrary killing of Jews as a sport, many had to be lubricated with large quantities of alcohol before committing these atrocious acts. Mental trauma was not uncommon amongst those men who were ordered to murder Jews. The establishment of extermination camps therefore became the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question”, as well as a way to alleviate the mental trauma that grappled the minds of Nazi soldiers. The following essay will examine various primary and secondary sources to better illuminate the creation, evolution, practices and perpetrators of the extermination camps wherein the horrors of the Holocaust were conducted.