JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] THE MURDER OF HUGO BETTAUER 241
trict (Gau) of a greater Germany. In such a context, Bettauer’s murder was
a significant portent.
The murder was soon forgotten, however, as Austria was rent apart
amid escalating violence. The murderer and his defense council vanished
from the stage. Hitler never forgave Riehl for his Austrian nationalism and
his refusal to bend to his will. Himmler failed to repay the debt he owed to
Herwig Hartner-Hnizdo—who, after the Anschluss, found a niche in the
propaganda ministry’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in
Frankfurt after publishing a scurrilous book on Jewish swindlers; while at
the Institute, worked on a new edition of a standard textbook on the Jewish
question. 41 Bettauer’s novels were placed on the Nazi index, but they
enjoyed a modest revival after the war, when scholars began to turn their
interest to trivial literature. In December 2009, the crossroads at the Lange
Gasse and the Josefsgasse in Vienna’s Josefstadt was renamed the Hugo-
Bettauer-Platz.
*Martin Kitchen is professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His
most recent books are A History of Modern Germany, 1800-2000, Rommel’s Desert
War: Waging World War II in North Africa, 1941-1943, and The Third Reich:
Charisma and Community.
41. Herwig Hartner-Hnizdo, Das jüdische Gaunertum, Munich 1939; Theodor
Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, Leipzig 1943.