House of Horrors. Nige Cawthorne
case that has got a psychological background is interesting,’ said Mayer. ‘We defence lawyers believe that there are good souls …’ He added that Fritzl was ‘a shattered and ruined man. He is emotionally broken.’
Fritzl showed no emotion when he was remanded in custody while the police continued their investigation of the whole grizzly story. He faces up to 15 years in prison, if convicted on rape charges, although he could be charged with ‘murder through failure to act’ in connection with the infant Michael’s death. That is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. A second murder charge could await if Kerstin did not recover from her critical state. However, Josef Fritzl is already 73 and unlikely to serve the full term of any sentence the courts might impose. There is no death penalty in Austria and, as he has managed to remain undetected for so long, he will effectively escape without punishment. Even if he could be executed, it would hardly expiate his crime. As it is, he is in a poor state of health and it is thought unlikely that he will live long enough to stand trial.
Josef Fritzl has said little to explain the brutal rape and incarceration of his daughter and the appalling maltreatment of at least three of their children. However, he has claimed to be a victim of his Nazi past, and there may be some truth in this.
He was born on 9 April 1935, in Amstetten, and was nearly three when his home town turned out to raise their arms in a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute as Adolf Hitler drove by in an open-topped car on 12 March 1938. The Führer was on his way to Vienna, where he was greeted by huge crowds celebrating the Anschluss – the German annexation of Austria. In the First World War, Austria had fought alongside Germany and, in defeat, lost its central European empire. Subsequently, the country suffered similar political and economic upheaval to its larger neighbour. The Nazi Party then grew in power in Austria and many Austrians, even those who were not Nazis, favoured a union with Germany. Hitler was, after all, a local boy, an Austrian who only took German nationality in 1932 at the age of 43, the year before he became German Chancellor.
Born in Braunau am Inn on the Bavarian border just 85 miles from Amstetten, Hitler spent most of his childhood in Linz, less than 30 miles from Fritzl’s home town. Linz remained his favourite city and he said that he wanted to be buried there. In his ‘Private Testimony’ written in the Führerbunker in Berlin on 29 April 1945, the day before he died, Hitler wrote, ‘The paintings in the collections which I had bought in the course of the years were never collected for private purposes, but solely for the gradual establishment of an art gallery in my home town of Linz. It is my heartfelt wish that this bequest should be duly executed.’
Fritzl was an only child. His mother Rosa was disabled and he grew up for the most part without a father as Franz Fritzl was in the Army. School friends remember a boy so poor that other parents gave his mother food. She lived by herself after divorcing Franz, a scandalous event in the small, traditional Austrian town.
‘My father was somebody who was a waster; he never took responsibility and was just a loser who always cheated on my mother,’ Fritzl said. ‘When I was four, she quite rightly threw him out of the house. After that, my mother and I had no contact with this man, he did not interest us. Suddenly there was only us two.’
It seems that Fritzl’s father was killed in the war. The name Franz Fritzl appears on the town’s war memorial, which also bears the carved image of a Nazi stormtrooper. Although after the Second World War, most Austrians claimed to have been unwilling victims of the Nazis, many were enthusiastic party members. It is known that Amstetten, particularly, was a hotbed of Nazism. Hitler’s visit in 1938 was greeted with wild excitement by the residents, and every house in the town flew the swastika. A local history book says of the visit, ‘The crowd was screaming and yelling and waving.’
Amstetten went a step further than other Austrian towns in its enthusiasm for the Anschluss and made Hitler an honorary citizen. The Führer sent a thank-you letter, saying the town’s tribute ‘filled him with great pleasure’. According to Fritzl, the Hitlerian past of Amstetten, where he grew up, affected him profoundly. ‘I grew up in the Nazi times and that meant the need to control and the respect of authority,’ he said. ‘I suppose I took some of these old values with me into later life. It was all subconscious, of course.’
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Amstetten found itself on a main rail line for troops and material heading for the Eastern Front. The RAF bombed the rail lines there repeatedly and the inhabitants, including the young Fritzl, would have regularly sought shelter in their cellars as the bombs were dropped. Throughout this time, slave labourers were brought in to help reopen the vital rail link that ran from Linz to Vienna.
Just a short walk from the cellar where Fritzl repeatedly raped his daughter and imprisoned their offspring is the site of a Nazi concentration camp, where 500 women were caged during the war. In Amstetten itself, there were two concentration camps – Bahnbau II, which held the women, and Bahnbau I, which held some 3,000 male slave labourers used to rebuild the railway lines. These two camps were branches of the infamous Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp 25 miles away. Although the camp had been initially designed for ‘extermination through labour’, in December 1941 it opened a gas chamber where inmates were murdered 120 at a time and Nazi doctors performed cruel experiments on their captives. Up to 320,000 people died there. While the camp officers indulged themselves with Austrian beer and women in Amstetten, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were being starved, tortured, raped and murdered close by.
Again, the Austrians enthusiastically embraced this most evil aspect of the Third Reich. Some 40 per cent of the staff and three-quarters of the commandants of concentration camps were of Austrian origin, and it was largely Austrians who organised the deportation of the Jews. Some 80 per cent of the staff of Adolf Eichmann, the logistics planner of the Holocaust, were from Austria. It is unlikely that, even as a child, Fritzl would have been unaware of the death camps near his home.
Even the clinic where Elisabeth and the Fritzl family were cared for by doctors and psychologists after their release has a Nazi past. Hundreds of patients were put to death at Amstetten’s Mauer clinic under the Third Reich’s euthanasia laws. At least another 800 were transported to other institutions to be killed.
A book called Amstetten 1938–1945, commissioned by civic leaders in Fritzl’s home town, includes a chapter on the Mauer clinic’s wartime atrocities. ‘The first step to eliminating inherited and mental diseases was sterilisation,’ it says, citing 346 cases in Mauer. ‘The last was euthanasia.’
The euthanasia programme officially began in 1941. It started with psychiatric patients, but moved on to those in nursing homes and homes for the elderly. In 1944, a notorious doctor named Emil Gelny visited the Mauer clinic to dispose of what he deemed to be ‘unnecessary mouths’. He killed at least 39 people with drugs such as barbitone, luminal and morphine, the book says.
It is not known how much young ‘Sepp’ – the Austrian diminutive of Josef – Fritzl was aware of, but he may well have been a member of the Hitler Youth. Enrolment was, by then, compulsory after the age of ten. However, local officials say the records were burned at the end of the war so, like those of many other Austrians and Germans from that era, his Nazi past was conveniently buried. That is not to say that having been a member of the Hitler Youth necessarily turns you into a monster. The current pope, Benedict XVI, had been enrolled in the Hitler Youth in 1939, despite being a bitter enemy of Nazism, believing it to conflict with his Catholic faith. But this was not a concern for Fritzl who, like most Austrians, was a Catholic. The conflict between Nazism and Catholicism did not bother Hitler either – he never renounced his Catholic faith.
By his own admission, Fritzl was affected by the politics of the era. He called his secret cellar his ‘Reich’ and he openly admitted that he got the iron discipline needed to live a double life from growing up under the Nazis.
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