JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

The Murder of Hugo Bettauer
Martin Kitchen*
Hugo Bettauer, a journalist and highly successful author of countless
popular novels, was assassinated on March 26, 1925, by Otto Rothstock, an
Austrian nationalist and a dental technician closely associated with the Austrian
Nazi party. The murder was inspired by the Nazi press, which had
mounted a relentless campaign against this “scabiesious Talmudic soul,”
this “perverted sewer rat.” calling for him to be “eliminated” or “lynched.” 1
The assassin was ably defended by a prominent Nazi attorney, Dr. Walter
Riehl, who waived his fee and succeeded in getting his client acquitted on a
plea of temporary insanity. Riehl had been the leader of the German
National Socialist Worker’s Party (DNSAP), founded soon after the end of
the war, but as an opponent of the idea of Austria uniting with Germany and
an advocate of a broadly based people’s party, he had broken with Adolf
Hitler in 1923, and founded a new party—the German Social Association
(Deutschsozialen Verein). 2 Riehl’s defense of Rothstock brought him back
into favor among Nazis and other radical antisemites, but Hitler never forgave
him for his opposition to the idea of an Anschluss. He rejoined the
Austrian Nazi Party in 1930, but remained critical of the excesses of the
leadership. After he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1938 and released, he
sank into relative obscurity. Rothstock, a fervent antisemite, having followed
Riehl into the wilderness, enjoyed his brief moment of notoriety,
spent eighteen months in a psychiatric institution, and then vanished into
anonymity.
Bettauer, a provocative, disputatious, and publicity-seeking character
with a somewhat murky past, had survived bankruptcy in New York before
being expelled from Prussia, where, as a scandal-mongering journalist, he
had driven the director of the Hoftheater to suicide, before returning to
Vienna in 1910. 3 His novels, most of which were originally published as
serials, were hugely successful, while his journalistic activities gave him an
1. “Über Leichen,” Der Spiegel, February 15, 1982.
2. For details, see F. L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism, London 1982, and Fascist
Movements in Austria, London 1977; Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution:
A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism, Chapel Hill 1998; Rudolf
Brandstötter, Dr. Walter Riehl und die Geschichte der nationalsozialen Bewegung,
Vienna 1969.
3. Murray G. Hall, Der Fall Bettauer, Salzburg 1978; Beth Noveck, “Hugo
Bettauer and the Political Culture of the First Republic,” in Günter Bischoff, Anton
Pelinka, and Rolf Steiniger, Austria in the Nineteen Fifties (Contemporary Austrian
Studies, vol. 3), New Brunswick 1995; Magdalena Lueger, Die Funktion der Stadt:
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