Deputy Otto Hellmuth, a Hitlerist member of the Bavarian Parliament, was acquitted to-day on the charge of spreading ritual murder agitation.
Speaking at Manau, in Bavaria, after the discovery there in 1929 of the dead body of Christian boy of five named Karl Kessler, Deputy Hellmuth had said that the child was a victim of a Jewish ritual murder, and had gone on to describe circumstantially how Jews use Christian blood for ritual purposes. He also circulated among his audience picture postcards depicting Jews committing ritual murder, and he further published an article in the local Hitlerist paper, the “Stuermer” to similar effect.
Skelterling himself then behint the Parliamentary immunity which he enjoyed as a Deputy, he refused to appear in court for months, to answer the charges against him and meanwhile the witnesses, owing to the lapse of time, became confused regarding the sequence of events and made statements conflicting in some respects with their previous evidence, and the judge thereupon acquitted Deputy Hellmuth.
The murder of the boy was investigated by the Bavarian police at the time, and the Bamberg District Court before which the case came, issued an official statement in April 1929 declaration that there was no ground whatever for the ritual murder allegation. The official enquiry has shown, the statement said, no sign of any blood having been drawn off from the child or any method of ritual slaughtering having been applied.
The matter gave rise to a big debate in the Bavarian Parliament in which Deputies of the Socialist and People’s Party protested vigorously against the blood libel as an insult to their Jewish fellow citizens, and the Minister of Education and Public Worship declared that the ritual murder agitation which was being conducted in the Mahau district constituted a real danger to the lives of the Jewish population of Bavaria. I have ordered the Schools Adminstration, the Minister said, to instruct the teachers to explain to the children in the schools how baseless the ritual murder agitation is and to make it clear to them that our Jewish fellow citizens are Germans just the same as we are, with exactly the same cultural outlook and incapable of such barbarism as ritual murder. One of the Deputies of the Bavarian People’s Party said in the course of the same debate that for 700 years people had repeatedly brought up the ritual murder allegation against the Jews but not on one single occasion had it been proved that any Jew had ever practised ritual murder.
We feel ashamed that Jews still have to defend themselves at this late day against the ritual murder lie, the Conference of Bavarian Rabbis, which was in session at the time, declared in an official statement in connection with the affair. We declare solemnly, the statement went on, that the sources of Jewish teaching are innocent of blood. There is no Jewish sect whatever which practises ritual murder, and we are prepared to prove this statement in any court of law.
Even in Berlin the police authorities are constantly receiving reports of suspected ritual murder cases, the Vice-President of the Berlin Police Force, Dr. Weiss, who is himself a Jew, stated at the time in connection with the protest movement started by the Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith against the Manau ritual murder agitation. Berlin police headquarters are constantly getting complaints from people who state that they believe that ritual murder has been committed by Jews, he said. Recently, he continued, complaints came from a large number of women that night after night they had heard children crying in the Jewish school and had smelt something suspiciously like that of burning bodies, and would the police investigate, because it was certainly ritual murder. The police investigated, Dr. Weiss added, and found that the children who cried belonged to a house near by and the supposed smell of dead bodies was that of an asthma cure being inhaled by an asthmatic old man in the neighe bourhood. Of such, he said, are ritual murder accusations made.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
