Tributes to Kindertransport refugee and academic Otto Hutter, who dies aged 96

Vienna-born physiologist was the 359th out of 360 children to come to Britain on the first train out of Nazi-occupied Europe

By Jack Mendel November 23, 2020, 1:29 pm Edit

Jack Mendel is the former Online Editor at the Jewish News.

Tributes have been paid Professor Otto Hutter, one of the last sign-ups for the first Kindertransport out of Vienna, who has died aged 96.

The academic and educator, who regularly spoke about his escape from the Holocaust and his father’s arrest during Kristallnacht, arrived in the UK in 1938 and became a world-renowned physiologist.

The Association of Jewish Refugees said it was “deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Otto Hutter, who pioneered the HMD memorial lecture at Glasgow University.

“In his interview with AJR Refugee Voices he recalled being number 359 out of 360 children on the first Kindertransport from Vienna.”

The Kindertransport, organised by British philanthropist Sir Nicholas Winton, saved more than 650 mainly Jewish children from the Holocaust in 1938, bringing them to the UK.

Upon arriving in Britain, Hutter won a scholarship to the prestigious Bishop Stortford College, where he excelled in biology. He then moved to the research laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, where met his future wife Yvonne, who he married in a shtiebel in Great Portland Street.

After becoming UCL’s first post-war graduate in physiology, he moved to the USA through a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship, before returning to Britain to become Regius Professor in Glasgow, where he brought up his four children.

According to the Association of Jewish Refugees, he didn’t “miss anything about his life in Vienna and he felt no Austrian heritage”, having reluctantly revisited the city for the first time in 1963, to lay two ‘stumbling stone’ memorials (Stolpersteine) for his parents, who were thought to have been killed in 1943.