Konitz affair
Although jealousy was later determined to be the probable motive, anti-Semite leaders were quick to turn suspicion against the Jewish inhabitants, and encouraged and bribed locals to testify against the Jews.This included anti-Semitic publications in Berlin such as Staatsbürgerzeitung, whose editor Wilhelm Bruhn permanently settled in the Konitz area to report about the events and to cajole and bribe locals to testify against the Jews.Among the grounds for dismissal, the court held that the deed must have been perpetrated by several people and according to a premeditated plan, indirectly supporting the accusation of ritual murder.A highly respected citizen, Jacob Jacoby of Tuchel, was sentenced to confinement for one year in the penitentiary for perjury (October 10), because he had sworn that he had called some boys who had shouted "Hep-Hep!"This sentence was so repugnant to public opinion that the emperor commuted it to six months in jail, and revoked that part by which the convict was deprived of civil rights (March 1901).The former, whom a court afterward adjudged insane, delivered in various cities violent anti-Semitic diatribes declaring that Jews must be clubbed out of the country and that the Christians must wade in Jewish blood up to their ankles.In the Reichstag, where this case was made the subject of an interpellation (February 8–9, 1901), Prussian minister of justice Schönstedt limited himself to a defense of the authorities against the charge of shielding the Jews.A society for the investigation of the murder was formed, and spread false statements that the coroner's commission had not searched the ritual bath near the synagogue, and had left undisturbed a room in the house of butcher Adolf Lewy in which his wife was supposed to be sick.In fact, all the rooms in Lewy's house and every nook and corner in the synagogue been searched, and the commission had even taken a sample of the blood of chickens from the yard which was used for killing fowl (see Shehilah).Wolf Israelski, a Jew, was arrested as he had been seen walking on April 13 in the direction of the place where Winter's head had been found, with a sack on his back in which there was a round object.Although he denied the fact, and the state of the head proved conclusively that it must have been in the ice for more than two days, Israelski was kept in prison for nearly five months, until his innocence was proven at trial on September 8.This opinion, rendered September 7, 1901, was confirmed by the highest medical authority, the Wissenschaftliche Deputation für Medizinalwesen (state board of health), January 15, 1902.It was evidently for political reasons that the appeal of Winter's father to the superior court (German: Oberlandesgericht) of Marienwerder was considered sufficiently well founded to be made the basis of a trial, which was held June 4, 1902, and which proved the baselessness of all the accusations against the Jews.Bruhn, the publisher, and Bötticher, the editor, of the Staatsbürgerzeitung, which paper had from the beginning accused the police and the courts of shielding the perpetrators of the crime because they were Jews, were sentenced for libel, the former to six months and the latter to one year in jail (October 11, 1902).