The Once-a-Month Blogger

Guess I'm doomed to just blog in little unpredictable bursts. Apologies to those of you (all three of you?) checking in for occasional distractions.

I've been working somewhat frantically on a new book. It's about the so-called "Magdeburg Justice Scandal of 1926," in which the Jewish industrial Rudolf Haas was arrested and held on suspicion of killing his former accountant, Hermann Helling. Helling had disappeared on the day that he was to meet with a tax official concerning alleged tax fraud at Haas' firm. The police, the judge, and the tax officials believed that Haas and his co-conspirators, including officials in the Czech consulate in Magdeburg, killed Helling in order to stop the impending investigation.

The judge held by this conspiracy theory - and continued to hold Haas in prison - even after the Berlin authorities assembled an overwhelming amount of evidence implicating a different man, Richard Schroeder. Schroeder was a con man and petty thug with vaguely rightwing convictions. (He used to put a swastika on his letters, right next to his singature.) A Berlin detective, sent by the state government of Prussia, found Hermann Helling's body buried in Schroeder's basement and various bits of evidence that made clear Schroeder had shot Helling in a regular, unspectacular robbery/scam. Schroeder, however, quickly divined that the Magdeburg interrogators were after bigger fish, and cleverly fed the idea that he was just a small piece in a wider conspiracy.

The story is filled with fascinating characters and strange turns: if it were fiction, no one would believe it. The heroes in the story did everything one could hope for. Jewish groups, conscientious Prussian officials, and dilligent lawyers and policemen disproved the theory of the Jewish conspiracy again and again. Somehow, however, the conspiracy theory kept coming back. It was like the evil cyborg in Terminator II who keeps pulling himself back together piece by piece after Arnold blows him to bits.

Most of my scrounging for info has been in Berlin, where 45 files on the case have been preserved in the Prussian state archive, but now I've started going to Magdeburg too, a surprisingly pleasant city of 200k about 2 hours away by train.

But I'm too compulsive -- and too easily distracted -- to give up this blog entirely.