FÖRSTGEN, Germany — They struck at dawn and left a trail of blood and body parts.

There were six, maybe seven perpetrators. One had calmly passed Annett Hertweck’s car as she was speeding down the forest path to the scene of the massacre near the eastern village of Förstgen, Germany. Only then did she see the bodies. Dozens of them.

“It was horrific,” she said.

The culprits were wolves, descended from Polish forebears. The victims were German sheep, 55 of them.

Extinct for the best part of a century, Germany’s most notorious fairy-tale baddie is back.

Wolves have been slipping across the Polish border for years, gradually settling into rural Germany. There are only a few hundred of them.