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  The police had to put her allegations to Fritzl. Initially, he refused to talk, even producing the letter from his daughter saying that she was intending to return from the religious sect where she had spent the last 24 years in an attempt to deflect her accusations. Later, he even complained that he was disappointed that Elisabeth had seized her opportunity to ‘betray’ him so rapidly.

  The following morning, the police took Josef Fritzl back to his house at 40 Ybbsstrasse. The front was a typical suburban townhouse on an ordinary street, but at the rear was an imposing concrete structure, not unlike a wartime bunker. Although it was set among leafy suburban gardens where those neighbouring the Fritzls’ property were all visible, the back of the house was screened off by high hedges. Fritzl’s garden was the only one not overlooked by neighbours.

  At first, the police could not find the dungeon where Elisabeth said she had been held; it was so well hidden. But, sensing the game was up, Fritzl led them down the cellar stairs and through eight locked doors and a warren of rooms. Concealed behind a shelving unit in his basement workshop was a heavy steel door just 1m high with a remote-control locking device. After some prompting, Fritzl gave the police the code to open it; he was the only one who knew the code. He had told Elisabeth and her children that if they harmed him or overpowered him while he was in the cellar, they would find themselves locked in there for ever. He taunted them that, if he died suddenly from a heart-attack outside, they would starve. Their prison was also rigged with security systems that would electrocute them if they tried to tamper with the door, and led them to believe toxic gas would be pumped in, should they try to escape.

  Later, he told Lower Austria’s top criminal investigator, Oberst Franz Polzer, that the lock on the heavy steel door that shut the basement dungeon off from the outside world worked on a timer. It would open automatically if he was away for a protracted period, so his daughter and her children would be freed if he died, he said.

  ‘But there was no mechanism in place that we have found to release them,’ said Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘I do not want to think about what would have happened to the mother and her three children if anything had happened to Fritzl.’

  Beyond a basement workshop, Fritzl had built a perfectly concealed bunker to imprison his own daughter and her children. Ducking through the first door – just 3 feet 3 inches high – the police found a narrow corridor. At the end was a padded room, sound-proofed with rubber cladding, where he would rape his daughter while the children cowered elsewhere. It was so well insulated that no scream, cry or sob could be heard in any other part of the building. Beyond that was a living area, then down a passage little more than a foot wide that you would have to turn sideways to negotiate were a rudimentary kitchen and bathroom. Further on, there were two small bedrooms, each with two beds in them. There was no natural light and little air.

  On the white-tiled walls of a tiny shower cubicle, the captives had painted an octopus, a snail, a butterfly and a flower in an attempt to brighten their prison. The furnishings were sparse. The police found a toy elephant perched on a mirrored medicine cabinet and scraps of paper and glue that the children had used to make toys. The only other distraction was a small TV, which provided flickering images of the outside world, which the children had never experienced and, for Elisabeth, was an increasingly dim memory. There was also a washing machine and a fridge and freezer, where food could be stored when Fritzl took off on the holidays he denied his captives.

  The entire space was lit by electric light bulbs – the only source of light – although Elisabeth had begged her father to give her vitamin D supplements and an ultraviolet light to prevent her kids from suffering growth abnormalities. The lights went on and off on a timer to give them some sense of day and night, something else that the children had never experienced.

  The police found two children who had survived these appalling conditions – 18-year-old Stefan and 5-year-old Felix. They were in a poor physical state and unused to strangers; they were so lacking in social skills that the police found they were practically feral. Because of the low ceilings in the dungeon – never more than 1.7 metres, or 5 feet 6 inches – Stefan was stooped. In his excitement, young Felix resorted to going on all fours. Having never been required to communicate with anyone beyond their immediate circle, the police found the boys had difficulty talking and, between themselves, resorted to grunts. For the first time in their lives, they were taken out into the daylight.

  Confronted with the evidence, Fritzl confessed that he had imprisoned his daughter. ‘Yes,’ he told the police, ‘I locked her up, but only to protect her from drugs. She was a difficult child.’

  While admitting to having repeatedly raped her, he rejected his daughter’s allegations that he had chained her to the cellar wall and kept her ‘like an animal’, claiming he had been kind to the ‘second family’ he kept in the cellar. He admitted that the children were his own, the offspring of incest with his own daughter, and subsequent DNA tests confirmed that he was their father. However, the police did not understand why he had decided that three of the children – Lisa, 16; Monika, 14 and Alexander, 12 – should live upstairs with him and his wife and go to school, while the other three – Kerstin, 19; Stefan, 18 and Felix, 5 – should remain downstairs in their subterranean prison. Asked by police how he had come to that decision, Fritzl told them he had feared the noise of their cries might lead to their discovery. ‘They were sickly and cried too much in the cellar for my liking,’ he said.

  There had been another child, Alexander’s twin, who had died at just three days old, back in 1996. The infant’s sex has not been determined, but it is now thought to have been a boy and has posthumously been named Michael. Fritzl had taken the child’s tiny body and burnt it in the furnace that provides hot water and central heating for the family home that lay just beyond the steel door in the more open part of the cellar.

  Fritzl confessed in an almost matter-of-fact manner to the abduction and rape of his daughter, and to the imprisonment and enslavement of Elisabeth and their children, as well to incinerating the body of Michael. Otherwise, he was not particularly forthcoming during his interrogation, officers said. He did not bother to explain himself; he just said he was ‘sorry’ for his family and announced that he wanted to be left in peace.

  Despite the DNA tests confirming that Fritzl fathered the cellar children, in court he may yet plead not guilty to rape, incest and false imprisonment. His lawyer Rudolf Mayer declared, ‘The allegations of rape and enslaving people have not been proved. We need to reassess the confessions made so far.’ It is also widely believed that he will be angling for a plea of insanity.

  ‘Every 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.

  2

  HEART OF DARKNESS

  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.

  ‘I have always placed a great deal of value on discipline and good behaviour,’ he said. ‘I admit that. My behaviour comes from my generation; 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.’