House of Horrors. Nige Cawthorne
I am from the old school. I was brought up during the time of the Nazis that meant discipline and self-control – I admit that took over me to a certain extent.’
Although his character may have been shaped by being brought up under Hitler and the Nazi regime, it is no excuse – any more than it was for those who committed atrocities in Hitler’s name at the time.
Four days after Fritzl’s tenth birthday, Vienna was liberated by the Red Army following several days of vicious hand-to-hand fighting. The following month, Soviet tanks rolled into Amstetten. Fresh from seeing the Nazis lay waste to their country, Russian troops embarked on an orgy of rape and pillage. Reports in the Austrian media say that, as a child, Fritzl ‘suffered badly’ during this post-war occupation, a period marked by the high incidence of sexual assaults perpetrated by Russian soldiers on German and Austrian women – so much so that Vienna’s memorial to the ‘unknown soldier’ was sardonically referred to as the memorial to the ‘unknown father’. The Red Army stayed in Austria until 1955.
Although Austria was spared the rigorous de-Nazification programme inflicted on Germany, Fritzl would have been acutely aware of the shame of his nation’s defeat in the post-war era. A 1951 school photograph shows a surly 16-year-old youth glowering at the camera. Nonetheless, he was said to have been a very bright and resourceful boy. He did well at school and was always well behaved. This has been credited to his mother.
‘My mother was a strong woman; she taught me discipline and control and the values of hard work,’ Fritzl said. ‘She sent me to a good school so I could learn a good trade and she worked really hard, and took a very difficult job to keep our heads above water.’
Rosa Fritzl was strict, but they were living through hard times. There was little food in post-war Austria and it was years before the country’s economy was back on its feet. His mother reflected the period. ‘When I say she was hard on me, she was only as hard as was necessary,’ he said. ‘She was the best woman in the world. I suppose you could describe me as her man, sort of. She was the boss at home and I was the only man in the house.’
There has been some speculation that there may have been something unhealthy about their relationship. ‘It’s complete rubbish to say my mother sexually abused me,’ said Fritzl. ‘My mother was respectable, extremely respectable. I loved her across all boundaries. I was completely and totally in awe of her. That did not mean there was anything else between us, though. There never was, and there never would have been.’
However, when asked if he had ever fantasised about a relationship with his mother, he answered, ‘Yes, probably … But I was a very strong man, probably as strong as my mother and, as a result, I was capable to keep my desires under control.’
His sister-in-law told another story in an interview with an Austrian newspaper. ‘Josef grew up without a father and his mother raised him with her fists,’ said the women identified only as Christine R. ‘She used to beat him black and blue almost every day. Something must have been broken in him because of that. He was unable to feel any kind of sympathy for other people; he humiliated my sister for most of her life.’
Others got a better impression. A friend at high school said, ‘He was a very positive influence on his younger colleagues, but he was also a bit of a loner. We all thought he’d do quite well for himself and he always came to class reunions with his wife. We were shocked to learn what he had done. That wasn’t the man we knew.’
But some had already noticed a darker side. An old classmate of Fritzl painted a picture of a fiend obsessed with power and torture. Gertrude Haydn, now 73, said, ‘His family was very poor. People said he tortured his pets and killed cats and dogs inside his house. I was too afraid to ever go in there.’
Leaving school at 16, Fritzl went on to study electrical engineering at a nearby polytechnic and took up an engineering apprenticeship where he excelled. Then he took a job with a local steel company, Voest. Working there, he managed to get out from under the thumb of his mother and began to take an interest in other women.
‘I became older and I managed to meet other women,’ he said.
By all accounts, he was also something of a moustached charmer, although hardly in the David Niven mould. He was insufferably arrogant and self-absorbed. Known for his lecherous innuendoes, it was clear he was unnaturally obsessed with sex. ‘I had affairs with a few girls,’ he boasted, ‘and then a short while later I met Rosemarie.’
It was 1956. He was 21 and Rosemarie was 17 when they married and started a family of seven. Of course, it was difficult for Rosemarie to live up to the standard of his mother, but for what Fritzl had in mind, his new wife fitted the bill perfectly.
‘Rosemarie was also a wonderful woman … is a wonderful woman,’ he said. ‘I chose her because I had a strong desire then to have lots of children.’
And the reason Fritzl wanted lots of children lay in his own childhood. ‘I wanted children that did not grow up like me as single children,’ he said. ‘I wanted children that always had someone else at their side to play with and to support. The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very small, and Rosemarie seemed the perfect mother to realise that dream.’
The other advantage was that she had little in common with his mother, the redoubtable Rosa. ‘She is just a lot more shy and weaker than my mother,’ he claimed. He could dominate her and she would not question him, although this was of particular concern to her family who distrusted him from the outset.
From 1969–71, Fritzl worked for Zehetner, a construction materials firm in Amstetten, where he was described as ‘an intelligent worker and a good technician’. Yet even in those early years, he was demonstrating a tendency towards sexual deviancy. His first brush with the police came when he was 24 after a complaint that he had exposed himself. The police say he went on to rape at least two women in Linz, where he was working in the 1960s. Only one of the victims brought charges. In 1967, Fritzl was convicted of rape and sentenced to 18 months in jail.
He still struggles to explain why he betrayed his wife and his, by then, four children, by breaking into a ground-floor flat and raping a young nurse. ‘I do not know what drove me to do that,’ he said. ‘It’s really true I do not know why I did it. I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father.’
Despite his conviction for rape, his wife, the long-suffering Rosemarie, took him back. He later claimed he was grateful. ‘I always loved her and I will always love her,’ said Fritzl, even after confessing to the rape of their daughter. This can have been of little comfort to Rosemarie.
Details of the 1967 rape case have now been expunged from the records. Under Austrian law, as part of the process of rehabilitation, details of previous convictions are destroyed after ten years. ‘When such a crime has been atoned for, it’s been atoned for,’ a senior police officer explained.
However, another victim, who claimed that she had been too frightened to press charges at the time, came forward after Elisabeth had emerged from her dungeon, saying that she was ‘100 per cent sure’ it was Fritzl who had raped her in September 1967, when she was 20 years old. She recognised him as her attacker when she saw his photograph in the newspapers.
‘I was raped by Fritzl,’ the woman, who refused to disclose her identity, told the local Linz newspaper, Upper Austrian News, on 30 April 2008. ‘When I saw his picture yesterday, I knew, yes, that is him.’ There was no doubt in her mind. ‘I recognised him immediately,’ she said. ‘I will never forget those eyes.’
At the time of the rape, she was a recently married young mother. While her husband, an Austrian railway worker, was away on a night shift, Fritzl slipped through her ground-floor bedroom window. ‘I felt the bedclothes being pulled back,’ she told the newspaper. ‘At first I thought it was my husband coming home but then I felt this knife being pushed against my throat. He told me, “If you make a noise, I’ll kill you.” Then he raped me in my own bed.’
At the time, she was too ashamed to report the rape, and neither did she want to risk alienating her husband. She kept the memory