Cain and Abel Case Again in Berlin: Menasseh Friedlaender Who Murdered His Brother and Friend Two Ye

Menasseh Friedlaender, the eighteen-year old youth (he is now 20) who was sentenced to six years imprisonment in the summer of 1929, for shcoting dead in January of that year his younger brother Valdemer and Valdemar’s friend Tibor Foeldes, the only son of the well-known author, Arthur Foeldes, both boys being 17 years of age at the time, was to-day found not guilty by the Revision Court, two mental experts, Drs. Herzberger and Deppman, of the Lunatic asylum where he is now confined, certifying that the youth must have been insane already when the crime was committed.

Menasseh Friedlaender’s parents are Jewish emigrants from Russia living in Berlin. He himself was born in Petrograd, now Leningrad, where his parents had a big clothing business before the Revolution. The Revolution had impoverished them, and the father, in his evidence, told the Court that he is now a poor man, working fourteen hours a day without the time to be able to look after his children properly. Menasseh, he said, was deeply religious, and used to get angry with the rest of the family for not observing strictly the Jewish religious customs. At first the two brothers had been very fond of each other. Valdemar had thrashed some antisemitic boys who had insulted the weakly-looking Menasseh. Afterwards Tibor Foeldes had come between them, however, and had estranged them. His mother and I, he said, favoured the more capable Valdemar, and Menasseh was thrown entirely upon himself, becoming a solitary, brooding figure.

After the murder, Menasseh Friedlaender went to the police station and gave himself up voluntarily, declaring that he had killed the two boys in a fight, in which he had been compelled to shoot in self-defence. He told the court that when his parents came to Barlin, he had been taken away from school, and put to work in a newspaper photographic office, but he had lost this post. His parents favoured the younger, physically stronger and better-looking Valdemar, who used to bully him and maltreat him. At the time of the shooting, he said, Valdemar had been behaving badly to him and had been threatening to beat him. Blind with fury and resentment, Menasseh said, he had seized the revolver and shot at Valdomar and then at Tibor Foeldes who had shed up.

The Court questioned Menasseh very carefully about his relations with his parents, in connection with his allegations that they had favoured his brother at his expense, even to the extent of his mother standing by without interfering when the stronger Valdemar had flogged him. Asked how he had come to be in possession of a revolver, he explained that he had bought it to explore “underground Berlin”. In view of all the circumstances, he was charged only with manslauhgter and not with murder.

No special Jewish issues were involved in the trial and the affair was treated in the German Press as purely a tragedy of adolescence and the nervous tension under which the German youth of to-day is living.