HETZER or HAETZER, LUDWIG (d. 1529), Swiss Anabaptist, was born at Bischofszell, Switzerland, and studied at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. By 1523 we find him in Zurich, where he published Judicium Dei, a small tract against the religious use of images. In 1524 he brought out a tract on the conversion of the Jews, and published a German version of Johann Bugen hagen's brief exposition of the epistles of St. Paul (Ephesians to Hebrews) . He was expelled from Augsburg, where he had been working as corrector of the press for Silvan Ottmar, in the autumn of 1525, and made his way through Constance to Basel, where Oecolampadius received him kindly, and then to Zurich. He had gone to the length of rejecting all sacraments, and his relations with Zwingli were difficult ; he therefore returned to Basel, and then went to Strasbourg, where, in 1526, he fell in with Hans Dengk or Denck, who collaborated with him in the pro duction of his opus magnum, the translation of the Hebrew Prophets, Alle Propheten Hach hebraischer Sprach vertuetscht (Worms, 1527; Augsburg 1527 and 1528). It was the first Protestant version of the prophets in German, preceding Luther's by five years. Denck died at Basel in Nov. 1527, and Hetzer was arrested at Constance in the summer of 1528. After long imprisonment and many examinations he was beheaded on Feb. 4, Hetzer's papers included an unpublished treatise against the essential deity of Christ, which was suppressed by Zwingli ; the only extant evidence of his anti-trinitarian views being contained in eight quaint lines of German verse preserved in Sebastian Frank's Chronica. The discovery of his heterodox Christology (which has led modern Unitarians to regard him as their proto martyr) was followed by charges of loose living, never heard of in his lifetime, and destitute of evidence or probability.
See Breitinger, "Anecdota quaedam de L. H." in Museum Helveti cum (1746) , parts 21 and 23 ; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography (185o) ; Dutch Martyrology (Hanserd Knollys Society) (1856) ; Th. Keim, in Hauck's Realencyklopihdie (1899) .