Johann "Hans" Nelböck (May 12, 1903 – February 3, 1954) was an Austrian former student and murderer of Moritz Schlick, the founder of the group of philosophers and scientists known as the Vienna Circle.
The substantiation of the judgment of the Provincial Court for Criminal Matters of Vienna (dated May 26, 1937) summed up: On June 22, 1936, at 9.20 a.m., the defendant shot and killed Dr. Moritz Schlick, professor at the School of Philosophy, on the premises of the University of Vienna on the main stairway leading to the School of Philosophy when Dr. Schlick was on the way to his lecture.
In another version of the events Nelböck covered all political causes up and claimed, that he was motivated by jealousy over his failed attachment to the female student Sylvia Borowicka, leading to a paranoid delusion about Schlick as his rival and persecutor.
Nelböck was found guilty and sentenced, but in the event he became a distorted cause célèbre, around which crystallized the growing nationalist and anti-Jewish sentiments in the city.
Although a German Protestant from minor Prussian nobility, Schlick was subsequently characterized in the press as a pivotal figure in disaffected Jewish circles, and the murder was applauded by Vienna's austrofascists.