An Echo of the Hilsner Blood Libel: Death of Investigating Judge Fo Sacrificed His Judicial Career T

Dr. Otto Baudisch, who was the investigating judge before whom the Hilsner ritual murder affair first came, and who sacrificed his judicial career to take his stand with professor Masaryk, now President of Czecho-Slovakia, because he was convinced of Hilsner’s innocence, has died at Koeninggretz, in Bohemia.

Then the case came before him, Dr. Baudsich emphatically declared his disbelief in the accusation brought by the State Attorney against Hilsner, and insisted that Hilsner was innocent and should be released. He was subjected to much persecution because of the stand which he had taken in the affair, and even after Hilsner was released in 1918, Dr. Baudisch was unable to obtain the advancement in his judicial career which he had forfeited by his championship of Hilsner.

Leopold Hilsner died in Vienna in January 1928, at the age of 51.

Since his release in 1918 from prison where he was confined for some years by the Austrian Government on the ritual murder charge, Hilsner had been living in Vienna earning a precarious livelihood as pedlar. Speaking with the J.T.A. representative in Vienna some time before his death, he complained that he was starving, and often he had not enough money to buy his small stock of wares. R#sid, Hilsner, who was lifted into world notoriety by his trial, was a vagrant in his early days and not a very intelligent person capable of Baking a good salesman.

Since Dr. Bloch (Dr. Joseph Samuel Bloch, who played an important part in the Hilsner trial, writing a series of articles in which he exploded the blood accusation theory) and the Jewish of the older generation died, Hilsner complained in the interview, I seem to have been forgotten. The Jewish communal organisation in Vienna gives me a little assistance, but often I have not enough to pay the rent for my lodging.

He also explained that he did not go to Czecho-Slovakia because people were afraid that his name there might resurrect the old antisemitic outcries. Sometimes some Jews in Bohemia sent him a little money.

It was on April 1st., 1899 at Polna in Bohemia that the body of a nineteen year old Christian girl named Agnes Hruza was found in the forest near the town. Leopold Hilsner, a vagrant, then twenty-three years of age, was charged with the murder. A search in his house showed nothing suspicious but he could not establish a perfect alibi. The same year he was sentenced to death by the court at Kuttenberg for participation in the murder. The Public Prosecutor, Schneider-Swoboda, and Advocate Dr. Baxa contended that it was a ritual murder. The Medical Faculty of the Czech University of Prague, however, demonstrated that no blood was missing. After the Court of appeal at Vienna had quashed the first verdict, Hilsner was condemned a second time in October 1900 by the court at Pisek. Antisemitic agitators thereupon started a ritual murder campaign. The “Vaterland”, a a###ding clerical organ, repeated the blood accusation; in various places political feeling pan high and anti-Jewish excesses with bloodshed took place. Hilsner was meanwhile accused of another murder of a girl named Maria Klima in 1898. He was tried for both murders in Pisek in 1900. #itnesses asserted that a knife which the claimed to have seen in Hilsner’s possession was such a knife as was used in ritual slaughtering. Antisemitic newspapers throughout the world sent special agitators to the trial. The verdict pronounced Hilsner guilty of the murder of both Agnes Hruza and Laris Klima. He was sentenced to death on November 14th., 1900, but the sentence was commuted by the Emperor Franz Josef to imprisonment for life. Professor Masaryk for a long time conducted a campaign to prove Hilsner’s innocence, but all efforts to this end were futile. In 1918 Hilsner was released by special order of the Government of the then Austrian Empire.