At Xanten, Presiding Judge Kluth found himself obliged to halt proceedings in order to correct the newspapers. It had been reported that the stains upon the sack seized from Adolf Buschhoff were blood, and that the straw discovered within matched that found in the dead child’s hands. Three butchers had testified to the contrary regarding the former point; the schoolmaster Kögel and Burgomaster Schleß had disproved the latter. In an affair wherein rumor had already designated a culprit before the evidence was ever weighed, such corrections were no mere squabbles among journalists. They touched the very heart of the trial.
On June 29, 1891, Johann Hegmann, known to his kin as Joanchen, was five and a half years of age. The little boy was playing in the Kirchstraße with other children. The account of Hugo Friedländer records that he was seen for the last time about ten o'clock in the morning. He returned neither for luncheon nor for the midday meal. A search was mounted through the streets and neighboring houses; toward half past six that evening, he was found dead in Küppers’s fruit barn. The trial established that he had been murdered, but the question of the perpetrator remained precisely what the court was summoned to resolve.
The earliest explanations were diverse. There was talk of a childish game gone awry, of a drowning in a millstream, or of the deed of an unbalanced mind. Among those suspected was Clemens Knippenberg, the child’s maternal uncle, who had vanished for several days; his examination, appended to Friedländer’s narrative, shed no light upon the matter. Yet another suspicion soon took precedence. The boy’s throat had been cut; it was asserted that there was too little blood upon the scene and that the incision resembled a ritual slaughter. Buschhoff, a Jewish butcher and former slaughterer, became the target of this accusation.
This tale of ritual murder was an antisemitic falsehood, not an investigative lead to be weighed by history against the facts. The ancient blood libel had long served to foment persecutions against the Jews; at Xanten, it transformed an unexplained homicide into a collective accusation. The account describes outrages committed against the property of the Buschhoff family: shattered windowpanes, splintered furniture, torn prayer books, and the words “murder house” and “kosher butcher” scrawled upon the walls. On the day of the judicial inspection, the dwelling resembled a ruin. The mob had arrived at its certainty long before the court convened.
The first impulse of the investigation led to the arrest of Adolf Buschhoff, his wife, and their daughter on October 14, 1891. The former examining magistrate, Brixius, related at the trial that they had also been incarcerated because their personal safety appeared in peril. Brixius testified that the three had been set at liberty on December 23, the inquiry remaining open; however, Friedländer’s introductory summary gives the date as December 24. The account consulted does not resolve this discrepancy. Subsequently, an expert report by Dr. Bauer concerning a knife seized from Buschhoff led to the latter’s re-arrest on February 9, 1892. His wife and daughter were not committed for trial; Buschhoff alone stood indicted for murder.
The proceedings opened at Cleves on July 4. Over the course of ten days, the court heard physicians, neighbors, children, police officers, and magistrates; it also revisited newspaper articles, several of which had distorted the witness statements. Presiding Judge Kluth multiplied his public rectifications, reminding the jurors that they must abide strictly by what was established within the courtroom. The case had gained renown far beyond the province, but its fame did not render human memory any more reliable. It made all the more pressing the separation between what a witness had seen, what he had heard, and what he fancied he understood.
Among the weightiest accusations was that of Mölders. He claimed to have seen an arm reach out from the Buschhoff house and pull the child inside. Yet he had spoken of this scene only after a considerable delay, and the details shifted over the course of his depositions: the distance from which he claimed to have watched grew ever longer. Magistrate Brixius had ordered the physical feasibility of this action tested; a counter stood near the doorway, and the trials had shown the movement to be almost impracticable under the described conditions. During the on-site inspection, experiments proved that a child could indeed be pulled inside without the person drawing him being seen, but failed to prove that this had occurred on that day. What was possible remained unproven.
Mallmann’s testimony offered another image: that of a sack carried toward the barn by Hermine Buschhoff, the accused’s daughter, and of a man gesturing to her in the garden. Yet Mallmann had made no mention of this alleged observation when questioned on July 1, nor when Buschhoff complained that Mallmann had called him a murderer in the street. He did not report it to the authorities until July 22. Later, the woman he cited as a witness, Frau Winthuis, explained that she had seen an unidentified boy, without noticing any signal whatever. The presiding judge was again obliged to correct the press: three butchers had judged the stains on the sack to be smoke rather than blood; the straw in the sack differed from that found in little Hegmann’s hand.
Other late-arriving testimonies contradicted one another. The boy Heister recounted his recollections only several weeks after the murder, when Mölders’s version was already common talk. The examining magistrate concluded that the children might have been influenced by adults and by the prevailing agitation. One woman repeated a conversation she claimed to have overheard in a train; others reported anonymous phrases attributed to Jews. In court, several witnesses denied the remarks imputed to them, or specified that they had not seen what they were purported to have observed. Rumor was never short of heralds; it lacked only independent confirmation.
The medical experts examined the corpse, the blood, and knife number 13 discovered at Buschhoff’s house. Dr. Bauer had opined that the blade might have served the deed; this opinion had contributed to the second arrest. But the other experts did not share it. They declared the knife ill-suited to produce the wound, which bore no mark of a ritual incision, and concluded that it might have been inflicted with an ordinary knife. The volume of blood found in the barn, they explained, was consistent with the body’s possible losses; it did not support the story of a ritual draining. Neither the straw nor the stains upon the sack established any further connection to the crime. The conclusions reported by Friedländer are those of the experts heard at trial; they point to no murderer.
The prosecution did not rely solely on these exhibits. It had to answer Buschhoff’s alibi, supported by witnesses who accounted for his movements on the morning of June 29. The hours had been reckoned in particular by the chiming of church services. On July 13, Chief Public Prosecutor Hamm urged the jury to return a negative verdict: despite the credit he accorded the witness Mölders, Buschhoff’s alibi prevailed. The following day, Senior Prosecutor Baumgard expanded upon this alibi, which he deemed of singular strength, and likewise entered a plea for acquittal. It did not follow that the court had discovered who killed the child; it followed that the charge against Buschhoff could not stand.
On July 14, after a deliberation of roughly half an hour, the jury answered “no” to the question of whether Adolf Buschhoff had willfully and with premeditation killed Johann Hegmann. The presiding judge pronounced his acquittal and ordered his immediate release. Buschhoff wept. The record relates that the gallery greeted the verdict with cheers; it does not say that the murderer was ever found. Uncle Knippenberg, the belated witnesses, the knife, the barn, and the sack had occupied whole days of argument, but the judicial decree had a narrower and firmer scope: this man was not guilty of the deed laid to his charge.
Thus ended the trial, though not the mystery of the murder. Friedländer’s account shows how an investigation may be led astray when prejudice provides the answer in advance, forcing every detail to conform to a preordained narrative. The calumny of ritual murder cast no light upon the death of Johann Hegmann; it merely fueled violence against his Jewish neighbors and clouded the examination of the evidence. The jury restored Buschhoff to his freedom, but the hearings yielded no culprit's name. The historian's duty is to preserve both conclusions together: the acquittal is established; the identity of the murderer, in the record consulted, remains unknown.