ARTICLE: Murder, Sex and a Lot of Anti-Semitism

It feels like the world is losing its mind at the moment, but this isn’t a new phenomena. If you’re remotely interested in history, you’ll know that there is nothing new when it comes to people. They’ve always been the same, and they’ve always done inexplicable things. I want to take you back to Germany in 1900, where a whole town full of Prussians in one town lost their sh*t in epic fashion and started pointing fingers at a minority group in their midst decades before Hitler was a household name…

Konitz is now in Poland, but in March 1900 it fell within Germany’s borders. At the beginning of that year, Ernst Winter was 18 years old. An only son, he was raised with his four sisters in a working class, Protestant family outside of the town proper. His father Johannes was a robust figure; a powerful construction worker. Ernst had done his parents proud; receiving his education amongst the sons of the middle-class at the Konitz gymnasium and boarding in town; faring well enough in his studies. He excelled, however, at sports and was swimmer, a cyclist, a dancer, and a gymnast. In his spare time, he did that age-old teenage thing of hanging out in town; no particular purpose, just socialising, passing the time. Ernst was popular with the young ladies of Konitz, and he could often be found promenading from the Wilhelmsplatz, along Danzigerstrasse, around to the market place and back again; smartly dressed.

This, in fact, was where he was last seen on Sunday 11th March, wearing a dark blue blazer with a fancy velvet collar, a dark blue silk tie, a lambskin coat and a silk blue scarf. On his head he had worn a black felt hat decorated with gold buttons. Various witnesses put him in town, walking with another young man, perhaps two, idling at the end of one street or another, until 6:30pm. Then, Ernst Winter disappeared.

48 hours later, Johannes Winter was searching for his son on the edges of a thawing lake called the Mönchsee with a baker named Hermann Lange, when they spotted a package bobbing in the water, wrapped up tightly in thick paper. They used a stick to poke it to within reach, and began ripping off the layers of packaging. They might have wished they hadn’t, because inside was part of a human torso oozing blood and water.

Winter was utterly convinced that it was his son. As he and Lange waded about in the long grass at the edges of the lake, a crowd gathered to watch. Police and fire officials assembled, joined by hunters with dogs and they began a meticulous search for the rest of the body and any clues as to the boy’s demise. Almost immediately, Winter and Lange found another package. Inside was the other part of the torso, still attached to the pelvis; though the victim had been disembowelled.

The victim, Ernst Winter (historiachojnic.pl)

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That was it, for now. It was another four days before a local boy finally stumbled across an arm; sitting by the town’s Protestant Cemetery on some freshly fallen snow; and afive days more before the lake turned up a left thigh. It was established that the parts all belonged to the same individual, and Johannes Winter was proven right almost straight away. The victim’s digestive tract bore traces of his last meal: soup, pork, potatoes and sour cucumbers. Without a doubt, this tallied with the last thing Ernst had been seen eating. Key to the burgeoning investigation was the fact that the food was hardly digested. That meant that the young man had barely survived past those last sightings, but what, on earth could have happened to him?

The autopsy revealed a little more, despite the lack of a head, an arm, and a leg, and despite the fact that the men carrying it out were provisional doctors and amateurs in forensic science. Noting the lack of blood, they suggested that the cause of death might have been a cut throat, and they also noted the extreme precision with which the dismemberment of the body had been done. That, however, was about it. If the lakefront was the scene of the crime it had been completely contaminated by the locals rubber-necking and helping with the search for the rest of the corpse. With no explanation as to  exactly what had happened, and who was responsible, the people of Konitz began to fill the void themselves. And that, is where the trouble really began…