Dad said I was to fetch Farmer Sterzer, because he wasn’t going over to that farm on his own.

So I went on, over to the Sterzers in Upper Tannöd.

Farmer Sterzer’s Dagmar was outside in the garden with her mother. Working on the garden beds.

I shouted to them way before I got there, I was in such a state. Asked if Farmer Sterzer was home, and he came out of the door right that moment. I told him there was something wrong up at the Danner place. No one was in, and the dog was whining and all that, and the cattle lowing in the shed. And I said my dad said to fetch him to go over there with my dad. Because my dad didn’t want to go alone.

So Farmer Sterzer called Alois right away. Alois is the farmhand at the Sterzer place, he’s going to marry Dagmar.

Then I went over to Tannöd and the Danner farm with Farmer Sterzer and Alois.

It was just before we reached the house we met my dad. He’d been waiting for Farmer Sterzer there. Then he went on up to the Danner farm with us.

And then we found them.

Well, not me, because my dad wouldn’t let me go into the house. He said I was to stay outside.

And after Farmer Sterzer and Alois came out of the barn again, white as chalk they were, I was really glad I hadn’t gone in with them.

My dad told me to go down to the village. “And tell them they’d better call the police from the mayor’s house.” So that’s what I did.

I fetched my bike and went over to the village, I went to the mayor’s, and I shouted out how they were all dead at Danner’s. All of them murdered dead. I shouted it in everyone’s face, even the mayor’s.

Johann Sterzer, age 52, farmer in Upper Tannöd

I was sitting in the living room. I saw young Hansl through the window. He was waving his arms around, and he kept on shouting something.

Right away, I guessed something had happened, but I thought it must be at the Hauer place.

So I came straight out of the house. Hansl says to me, “Dad sent me because there’s nothing stirring at the Danners’.”’

He, that’s Hansl, he’d been to look around on their farm today, he said, and there wasn’t anyone at home and the dog was whining terribly. And the cattle were restless too.

“But Dad doesn’t fancy going there alone,” he told me, so I called Alois and we went over to the Tannöd farm with Hansl.

I’d noticed myself there was nothing stirring there. When I was plowing on Saturday, in the field next to Danner’s land, I didn’t see anyone at all the whole time.

It was odd, yes, but I thought no more of it.

They’ll be in the woods, that’s all it is, I thought to myself.

Hauer was waiting for us just before we got to the house. We all went up to the farmyard together. I saw at once that the door of the machinery shed was open.

Hauer knows his way around the farm since that business with Barbara. He was in and out of the place a lot back then.

“We can get into the barn through the shed. There’s a door into the cowshed from there, and we can go on into the house from the cowshed,” he said to me and Alois.

He told Hansl he’d better stay outside. That was all right by Alois and me, so it was just the three of us went into the shed. Sure enough, there was a little door there. On the back wall of the shed, but it was fastened shut with a hook or something on the other side.

I was going out again to see if there wasn’t some other way into the house.

But Hauer took my sleeve. “That door’s so flimsy we can just push it in,” he says.

Alois agreed with him, so the three of us braced ourselves against that little door.

After a while, yes, it did give way, and there we were in the barn.

It was very dark inside. The only daylight came in through an open door on the left-hand side of the barn. On the right-hand side hay was stacked up, and the other stocks of feed, and there were piles of straw everywhere against the back wall and the left-hand side. But we couldn’t really see much in that dark barn. It was more like guesswork.

The bellowing of the animals in the cowshed was getting louder and louder.

“There’s a cow there!” Hauer saw her first. The cow was standing right in the doorway.

“Come on, come on, she must have torn herself free.”

Hauer went over to the cow in the doorway. My eyes weren’t really used to the darkness in that barn yet. I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t like being left behind on my own either. So I followed Hauer. Looked like Alois felt the same. But as he started off after Hauer he stumbled. Managed to catch himself up in time, though.

I’m about to tell Alois he’d better watch where he was going, and then I see this foot in the straw.

Alois grabbed my arm. Grabbed it tight.

We both stood there just staring at the heap of straw. We didn’t neither of us move, not Alois and not me. We simply stood there.

My heart was beating like it was fit to jump right out of my chest. The ground under my feet wouldn’t hold me up anymore, I was so weak at the knees. I clung onto Alois with all my might, and he clung onto me.

It was all so hard to grasp, it was unspeakable.

Then Hauer pushed the straw aside. Freed them of the straw, one by one. Danner. Little Marianne, her grandma, and last of all Barbara, too. They were all covered with blood. I felt such dread, I couldn’t really look at them.

Everything around me was ghastly. Like in a nightmare. Like the Trud was sitting on you squeezing the air out of you. I wanted to get out of there, away from that place.

When I turned to go out, Hauer barred my way.

“We have to look for Josef,” he shouted at me. But I pushed him away. Hauer tried to keep on holding me. “We have to look for the little boy. Where’s the boy? Where’s Josef?”

But I just left him standing there. I went out into the open air, so I could breathe.

Out there I found Alois outside the machinery shed. He was pale as a ghost. Couldn’t even stay on his legs anymore. He’d slid down to the ground outside the shed with his back to the wall. I sat down beside him.

But Hauer—he’d followed me out of the barn—he kept at us. We must try to get into the house from the barn, he said.

I couldn’t do any more, I was exhausted and trembling all over. I felt unspeakably awful.

Hauer still wouldn’t let it go. He kept at us, badgering us the whole time.

“We have to get inside the house. We have to find out what happened.” He kept repeating it. Alois and me, though, we just stayed there sitting on the ground. So in the end Hauer went back into the barn alone.

From there, so he told us later, he went through the cowshed into the farmhouse.

A few minutes later we heard the door of the house being unlocked.

Meanwhile we’d pulled ourselves together enough to feel we could stand.

Hauer called to us again to go into the house with him. And now that we didn’t have to go through the barn and past all the dead family, we finally did as he wanted and went into the house with him.

There was still a glass sitting on the kitchen table. It looked like the family had only just left the room. Like one of them would come back into the kitchen any moment.

We looked around the room. The door to the little room next to it was ajar. Hauer threw the door wide. We found a woman’s dead body, it was half covered by a quilt. There was blood all over the place around her.

I didn’t know the woman, I’d never seen her before in my life.

Still Hauer kept on urging us to search the other rooms in the house.

And at last we found little Josef in his cot in the bedroom. He was dead too.

Alois Huber, age 25

Supposing I hadn’t stumbled, maybe we wouldn’t have found them so soon—who knows? There was no light to speak of in that barn. The daylight coming in through the open cowshed door wasn’t enough to make the place any brighter.