Translations


The Funeral of the Murdered

The Mournful Burial Hymn

German newspaper article supports
The "New Theory" of the Murders



Affidavits


Henry Layer Affidavit 1
    April 30, 1920

Henry Layer Affidavit 2 
    August 10, 1920

Henry Layer Affidavit 3
    December 17, 1920

Will Brokofsky Affidavit
    November 27, 1920

Lydia Layer Affidavit
     December 20, 1920

Prison Barber, Doctor Affidavits 
     October and November, 1920 

The 1921 Supreme Court Decision

What WAS the big story?

The same day that The Bismarck Tribune published the story about the neighbor farmer's confession to the murders of the Jacob Wolf family and their hired boy, the banner headline above the headline about the murder confession was about Attorney General Bill Langer receiving the Republican Party's nomination for governor.

Remembering a friend

Michael Rempfer
1950-2013

Michael Rempfer was a good friend and valued collaborator on some of the important research for The Murdered Family, the novel about the 1920 murder of the Jacob Wolf family in North Dakota.

A pharmacist by profession, Michael was also a student of the culture and heritage of Germans from Russia. So it was no surprise when he retired in 1993 and moved to Bismarck, North Dakota, that he became actively involved in the Germans from Russia Heritage Society that is headquartered there.

High on the list of his contributions to scholarship in this important area are his many translations, alone and with others, of important documents from the original German to English.

We became friends through a chance meeting at the North Dakota Heritage Center Library at the end of a research trip to Bismarck.

Michael developed an immediate interest in this project and provided some valuable translations of stories related to the murders, investigation, confession and appeals that had been published in the German language newspapers at the time.

Why were these translations important?

First of all, the Wolf family was murdered in April 1920, about a year and a half after the end of World War I. During the war, Germans living in this country experienced a bitter anti-German propaganda campaign that portrayed Germans as butchers and murderers.

Things began to improve after the war, but these old stereotypes were revived with the murder of the Wolf family and their hired boy, all German Russians, as was the man who was sentenced to life in prison for the murders.

As a result, the German language newspapers published in the area at the time often had more and different kinds of details in their stories about the murders than was found in the main-line newspapers.

Because their writers spoke German and were also Germans from Russia, they were trusted by German Russians in the area, which meant they had access to people and information that reporters for the other papers didn’t have.


Links to several of Mike's many translations for us about the Wolf family murders are at the top of this page on the column to the left.