"Jener furchtbare 5. April 1933"

Recounts the events, and presents photographs and documents, pertaining to the Rotter Affair, the abduction by Liechtensteinian and German Nazis of the German Jewish theater entrepreneurs, the brothers Alfred and Fritz Rotter (born Schaie) in April 1933. The Rotters were Germans who obtained citizenship in Liechtenstein in 1931. They suffered a major bankruptcy in Germany in January 1933, caused by an already nazified Berlin court, and fled to Liechtenstein; the goal of their kidnappers was to hand them back to the Germans. The brothers managed to escape from their kidnappers who drove them through the Liechtenstein Alps, but Alfred and his wife Gertrud fell off a cliff and died. Fritz got away and ended up in France, where in 1939 he was arrested for passing fake checks; he died soon afterward in prison. The four Liechtensteinian perpetrators, all of them from prominent families, were viewed by the local criminal court as having been seduced by German Nazism and were given mild sentences. The German Nazis were sentenced to four months in prison by a German court. In Vaduz, the Rotter's Swiss Jewish defense lawyer, Wladimir Rosenbaum, was prevented from delivering a speech he had prepared on antisemitism as the cause of the attack. Presents Rosenbaum's speech, as well as material discussing Liechtenstein's reluctance until recently to deal with the Rotter Affair and with antisemitism in general. The Affair received renewed attention when Norbert Haas and Hansjörg Quaderer gathered all available material and organized a series of public events in 2003. Pp. 5-35 contain a graphic novel by Hannes Binder, entitled "Der Tathergang", depicting the attempted abduction of the Rotters. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)