Hofrat Prof. Rudolf Otepka

Rudolf Otepka was born the son of a blacksmith. The family comes from Brezolup (district of Ungarisch Hradisch, Moravia; Brezolupy, Uherské Hradište, Czech Republic) and moves to Probstdorf after 1903 because the father is employed in the construction of the Crown Prince Rudolf Bridge (Reichsbrücke) in Vienna. Before 1907, the family moves to Stockerau because the father finds work at the Heid machine factory. Czech is spoken in the family. Because, as practicing Catholics, they took part in the Corpus Christi procession, the father is beaten up by Social Democratic work colleagues to such an extent that he is hospitalized for several weeks. Meanwhile, his citizenship certificate (Heimatschein) is confiscated by the then mayor of Stockerau, a great-uncle of the later SPÖ Minister of the Interior Otto Rösch.

Rudolf Otepka attends elementary school in Stockerau and then the first year of secondary school (Hauptschule). He then transferred to the Realgymnasium in Stockerau, where he graduated in 1925. During this time, Rudolf Otepka was accepted into the Herulia Stockerau secondary school fraternity. After graduating from high school, he began studying physical education and natural history (zoology, botany) at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna (teacher training examination in 1930 and 1931) and joined the Babenberg student fraternity.

As his citizenship certificate was revoked, Rudolf Otepka was considered a stateless person and enrolled as such. He only regained Austrian citizenship with the help of Emmerich Czermak, then a member of the Lower Austrian provincial parliament and Minister of Education from 1929. On September 1, 1928, he became an assistant gymnastics teacher at the grammar school in Hollabrunn and in Stockerau. On October 1, 1934, he was appointed a "real teacher" (secondary school professor) at the Federal Educational Institute in Traiskirchen (district of Baden, Lower Austria), and shortly afterwards, at the beginning of the 1934/35 winter semester, he was given a teaching position for "Gymnastics for Men" at the Institute for Gymnastics Teacher Training at the University of Vienna. On October 5, 1937, he was entrusted with the management of this institute.

After the Anschluss in March 1938, Rudolf Otepka was dismissed from his position, first by telephone in March and then in writing in June 1938. He was retired on March 29, 1939 on the basis of the Ordinance on the Reorganization of the Austrian Civil Service. As attempts to find work in the private sector failed, he attended a commercial course at a private training institute, which enabled him to work as a "helper in tax matters" in the Korneuburg tax district. A letter from the NSDAP district leadership in Korneuburg in this context describes him as a "fanatical opponent of the NSDAP".

However, Rudolf Otepka was drafted into the air force at the beginning of September 1940, where he was trained and deployed as a radio and radar mechanic, among other things. Towards the end of the war, he was in the Balkans, but was able to escape from there via Upper Austria, where he was briefly taken prisoner by the US, to Stockerau, where his family now lived.

In September 1945, Rudolf Otepka applied to the then State Office for Public Enlightenment, Education and Training (from the end of 1945 again the Ministry of Education) for rehabilitation, i.e. reinstatement in the position he had held until the Anschluss, namely the management of the Institute for Gymnastics Teacher Training. He was rehabilitated under civil service law on November 24, 1945, and on February 20, 1946, he was appointed head of the University Gymnastics Institute (UTA) by the Minister of Education, Felix Hurdes. This made him responsible for voluntary, general student sport on a full-time basis. At the same time, as before the war, he was given teaching assignments at the Faculty of Philosophy for apparatus gymnastics and swimming as part of the gymnastics teacher training program. On February 27, 1960, he was appointed director of the university gymnastics facility, which was equivalent to a high school director under civil service law.