FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news

The pensioner made the statement in notes to his lawyer Rudolf Mayer, which were passed on, at Fritzl’s request, to News, an Austrian current affairs magazine. Now read on…

DAILY MIRROR (front page): “I CONFESS”

A picture of Josef Fritzl and the news that “I learned to be disciplined from the Nazis”

He claimed he only locked up daughter Elizabeth, who was then 18, out of love and as a result of Hitler’s Germany which instilled “a high regard for decency and uprightness” in him.

Hitler. He never drank alcohol and shunned tobacco. We also hear that he had only one testicle:

He said that by kidnapping Elizabeth and keeping her in a dungeon labyrinth protected by eight doors, he “rescued” her from “going out to seedy bars” and “drinking and smoking”.

THE SUN (front page): “FRITZL: MY STORY”

Mein Kampf:

“HITLER MADE ME DO IT”

There’s picture of Josef Fritzl and Adolf Hitler. They are “faces of evil”. One’s mania led to the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of gypsies, and a war that cost the lives of 20 million Russians (and many more dead and crippled). The other had sex with his kids.

“Adolf Hitler had been given a rapturous welcome in Fritzl’s home town of Amstetten when he visited in 1938, around the time of the cellar fiend’s third birthday.”

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SAYS he: “If someone were to produce a mash-up of Dowd and Polly Toynbee, leavened with a dollop of George Monbiot we might have the world’s most compellingly-appalling columnist.”

FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news

THE GUARDIAN: “The human monster”

When we seek for causes that distance us “nice” people from the actions of those the media likes to label as “monsters”, Nazi or otherwise, we also dilute the very sense of vigilance and awareness that, perhaps, one day might give help to the most vulnerable at a time when it makes the difference between life and death, or a living death.

COURIER MAIL (Aus): “Spotlight on Austrian horrors”

An interview with writer and filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, who directed The Counterfeiters, teh first Austrian film to win an Oscar:

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BORIS Johnson is the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone is free to spend more time with his newts, sorry, his children, and the Independent’s Johan Hari is making some snese of it all.

“At last – a solution to my Boris blues! I have just forced myself to read the detailed election stats from last Thursday. It seems the media cliché is true: it’s the angry, whiter outer suburbs that elected Boris, out of rage with the congestion charge and council tax. Boris will forever be the mayor of Zones Four to Six, the chief executive of Watford and Bromley and Amersham”.

Watford and Amersham are not in zones 1-6. Residents of those locales were afforded no vote in the election. And you can’t have a democratically elected leader who you didn’t vote for, at least not outside the US and Zimbabwe.

SAYS political nodding head Steve Richards Independet column on Labour’s drubbing in the local elections:

It can be summarised in three words: “Brown is a disaster”

There’s only one word for that: magic darts…

MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann, with special guests the McGuckins.

British media massed in Portugal for the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann are filling in the blanks by watching the telly. Eamon and Antoinette McGuckin flicker into life. Now read on…

THE GUARDIAN: “Holiday couple insist they were not drunk”

Friends in their village in County Derry, Northern Ireland, said the McGuckins had been the victims of “media paranoia” generated by the first anniversary of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.

You can never be too careful. There could have been three more Maddies.

Their children - aged one, two and six - were temporarily taken from them last weekend by the Portuguese authorities. The McGuckins said they were saddened and traumatised by the furore.

Portugal – bring the kids and get away from the kids.

DAILY MIRROR: Watching the parents. And what do we know about them?

“The couple live in a £450,000 house in Maghera, Northern Ireland.” Such are the facts.

DAILY MAIL: “’We were ill, not drunk’, claim Portugal holiday couple who had children seized”

Last night, a statement released by the McGuckins failed to state how much or what had been drunk, only that it was not “an excessive amount”.

Semantics. Well, Mr McGuckin is a “former bank manager”.

The incident has caused outrage in Portugal, where the year-long investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance has already raised questions over standards of British parenting.

Let’s bomb Portugal, or at least give our young offenders a free holiday there.

BELFAST TELEGRAPH: “Did Derry duo pay for McCanns’ mistake?”

Lindy McDowell plays tabloid bingo and wonders…

And here we come to the crux of the matter. Two words — Madeleine McCann.

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MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann

SUE CARROLL (Mirror): The McGuckins are “ashamed”.

“What they should not be are convenient scapegoats for the Portuguese police who, a year on, have failed to turn up even a sliver of evidence on the fate of Madeleine McCann”

McCann. McGuckin. It’s Tabloid Bingo! Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!

DAILY MAIL: “Big Brother? Hardly. The CCTV cameras don’t work - and actually make crime even worse”

Says Ross Clark: “The revelation that only three per cent of London street robberies are solved by CCTV cameras comes as no surprise to me.”

It is a similar story with that other great arm of the surveillance society: the national DNA database. So far, there has been muted public protest at the database, on which there is now the DNA of 4.5 million Britons recorded. But the public’s view of the database is based on the assumption that it is helping to catch criminals. Yesterday, however, the Home Office admitted that for every 800 samples added to the database, it helps solve just one crime.

For example?

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FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news

THE SUN (front page): “Inside Fritzl’s other dungeon”

To the dungeon room at Villa Ostende, a brothel in Linz where a blonde prostitute says: “I was hired by him many times and he was sick beyond imagination. He chose me because he said he liked young, plump girls who were happy to submit to him.”

Did you know that “Adolf Hitler was among its former clients”?

Barman Christoph Flugel tells us: “Ninety-five per cent of the guests are entirely normal, three per cent are slightly ‘derailed’. Fritzl belonged to the last two per cent of extreme perverts.”

Which group he’d put Hitler in was not enlarged upon, although he was something of a prude and insited on keeping his socks on. Those kinky Nazis.

Meanwhile, back at the house:

“Pipework is also being checked after Fritzl bragged he would turn the cellar into a Nazi-style gas chamber if the kids disobeyed him.”

Those Austrian really are obsessed with Nazis. Perhaps we should invade before it gets outyof hand, again?

THE lawyer representing Fritzl, Rudolf Mayer, yesterday claimed he had received death threats from English soccer fans planning to travel to Euro 2008 games in Austria.

Cue the theme song to Escape To Victory. We’re going in…

DAILY TELEGRAPH: “MPs from Austria’s two far-Right parties, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and the Freedom Party, have demanded castration for repeated sex offenders, plus compulsory examinations of children for the purpose of detecting sexual abuse.”

All kinder will have their genitalia examined and probed for signs of interference and deformity.

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MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann

DAILY MIRROR: “Portugal booze parents’ court fear”

It’s Eamon and Antoinette McGuckin.

Bank manager Eamon, 35, passed out in the hotel reception while Antoinette, 36, vomited before falling unconscious.

A source close to the family said last night: “They are very ashamed. They want to go to court. They want to say to the judge that the children are safe with them.”

Significant:

Vilamoura is 45 miles from Praia da Luz, where four-year-old Madeleine McCann went missing while her parents were out with friends a year ago.

DAILY MAIL: “Shamed: The middle class parents who got so drunk on holiday their three children were taken into care”

Middle-class drinkers. Who knew of such a thing?

Mr McGuckin used to be manager of the Magherafelt branch of the Ulster Bank, a spokesman said. He left 18 months ago and is understood to now work for a mortgage company. His wife is a full-time mother.

British parents:

The incident has caused outrage in Portugal, where the year-long investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann has already raised questions over standards of British parenting.

BELFAST NEWSLETTER: “Couple ‘will face NI social services’”

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GLOBAL warming - the truth is out there:

On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a “tipping point” where “irreversible change” takes place.

This was based on last September’s data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million.

What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded

In Snowdon, where there’s no snow, tthe builders are getting snowed on (gerrit?)…

MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann

DAILY MIRROR: “DRUNK HOLIDAY BRITS’ CHILDREN TAKEN INTO CARE”

A British couple on holiday in Portugal got so drunk their three children were taken into care. Hotel staff called the authorities when the pair seemed unable to look after the two boys, aged six and one, and a girl of two.

Bit judgemental?

Sources said the parents came back in a “drunken stupor” from a “euro-apint” bar in Vilamoura.

But what has it to do with Madeleine McCann?

The town is a 45-minute drive from Praia da Luz, where Madeleine McCann vanished a year ago.

DAILY EXPRESS: “DRUNKEN HOLIDAY BRITONS HAVE CHILDREN PUT IN CARE”

The alleged incident took place on Friday evening at the Mourabel Apartments in the resort of Vilamoura, 40 miles away from where Madeleine McCann disappeared last May.

THE HERALD: “British children taken into custody in Portugal as parents too drunk”

Hotel staff in Vilamoura, in the Algarve, called police after Eamon McGuckin, 34, and his wife Antoinette, 32, collapsed while on holiday on Friday night. The couple, believed to be from Magherafelt, Northern Ireland, were taken to a health centre in nearby Loule while their children, one-year-old Adam, two-year-old Amy and Aaron, six, were taken to the Refugio Aboim Ascensao children’s home in Faro.

Allegedly, of course. It’s shocking. And worse:

The incident happened on the eve of the first anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, who went missing from her family’s Algarve holiday flat while her parents dined nearby.

DAILY MAIL: “Three British children taken into care after parents ‘drank themselves into a stupor’ on Algarve holiday”

The manager of the Mourabel hotel in Vilamoura, where the family were staying, said: “Fortunately the children were safe - otherwise it might have been not one Maddie, but three Maddies.”

THE SCOTSMAN: “Family in care after parents collapse drunk”

The incident happened on the eve of the first anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, who went missing from her family’s Algarve holiday flat while her parents dined nearby. Referring to the McCann case, Dr Villas-Boas said: “The press were not around – they were very fortunate in that there was very heavy news from Great Britain that day.”

THE SUN: “McCanns in legal boost”

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: THE COLUMNISTS:

ROD LIDDLE (Times): “Madeleine, the incidental onlooker”

Come on, be honest. When Kate McCann appears before you on your television screen, do you sink your head low and remember poor Madeleine, somehow spirited out of that Praia da Luz apartment, or are you overwhelmed with a sense of irritation, annoyance and ennui?

Or like me, is it a little bit of both, callous pig that I am?…

The weird thing is the way the story has taken on a life of its own, with Madeleine as a terribly absent onlooker, almost incidental to the whole charade.

ANDREW ANTHONY (The Observer): “For a variety of reasons, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann seems to hold an enduring, not to say unhealthy, hold on the nation’s imagination. The first and most obvious is that it exemplifies every parent’s deepest fear.

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SAYS the sire Arabella Weir, on Boris Johnson in The Guardian’s desperate chrestomathy of leftyluvviedom for Ken:

How do we trust a guy who says he knows about London, when he’s just taken three of his kids out of state school and put them into private schools?

Question asked, question answered…

FRENCH medic Frédéric Saldmann wants a “May ‘68″ of the body.

In his work Le Grand Ménage (Spring cleaning), Saldmann says his countrymen should “dare to fart”.

This is not because M,. Saldmann wants to preserve the French national identity – well, not only that – but because dating, belching and burping can prevent cancer.

Dr Saldmann also recommends throwing out anti-perspirants. “To block sweat not only stops the elimination of toxins,” he writes, “but also a certain number of messages that are potentially very attractive to the opposite sex.”

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MADDIE WATCH - Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCannTHE OBSERVER (front page): “One year on, Kate McCann’s please: ‘Please stay with us. Pray like mad.’”

DAILY MIRROR (front page): “MADDIE: KATE’S PLEA: ‘KEEP WITH US..KEEP PRAYING’”

MAIL ON SUNDAY: “Kate McCann’s pulpit plea: stay with us and pray like mad”

The McCanns’ spokesman Clarence Mitchell said: “It’s an intensely private and very difficult day for them.”

SUNDAY PEOPLE: “’PUBLIC KEEP US STRONG’ - MISSING FOR A YEAR: BRITAIN, PORTUGAL AND WORLD UNITED IN HOPE”

The world unites.

“LIGHT HER WAY HOME - MISSING FOR A YEAR: BRITAIN, PORTUGAL AND WORLD UNITED IN HOPE ‘You are a light that shines in the darkest times. Guide all who search for Madeleine’ - By Rachael Bletchley In Praia Da Luz”

The sunrise over Praia da Luz was as beautiful as ever yesterday. A warm, orange glow spread up from the horizon then burst into the dazzling rays that give the resort its name - Beach of Light.

A rosy-fingered dawn…

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THE SELL-O-GRAPH:

What’s more, I couldn’t even use my carefully hoarded “5p off petrol” vouchers from Sainsbury and Tesco, as there was no such filling station nearby and I needed petrol urgently because, tomorrow, we are off to visit friends in Oxford.

Even with a Family Railcard, it has to be cheaper to drive than to let the train take the financial strain of transporting the seven of us (two parents included) 100 miles.

Which broadsheet will die first?

FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news

THE SUN (front page): “Dungeon kids are suffering like POWs”

Do mention the war.

DAILY RECORD: “JOSEF Fritzl’s cellar children are afraid of the colour blue, rustling leaves and noisy traffic after spending their entire lives underground.”

Zees are ein few of zeer (least) favourite things. Blue? Surely brown, black and feldgrau?

THE GUARDIAN: “How many more of our missing are stuck in some underground prison?”

There’s also the curious case of a town mayor poisoned by a praline filled with strychnine, and the case of Franz Fuchs, a neo-nazi who hid bombs in bilingual schools and blew up four Roma from the Burgenland region in 1995.

Initially, it might look as if there is no common basis to these cases, beyond the first two. But these crimes reveal much about Austrian society.

Just when you thought it vas safe to go into ze woods…

Austrians are worried that on their next holiday, someone might ask them if everyone in Austria has sex with relatives. They feel guilty - something they didn’t do after the last war nor after the Burgenland bombs.

THE INDEPENDENT: “Josef Fritzl: The making of a monster”

Fritzl was born in 1935 and would have been four years old at the start of the Second World War. It was not clear whether he lost his father during the war, but, when the war ended, he would, as a nine-year-old, have experienced first hand the invasion of Austria by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. Reports in the Austrian media have claimed that as a child he “suffered badly” during this post-war occupation which was notorious for the high incidence of rape perpetrated by Russian soldiers on civilian German and Austrian women.

The haus ist ein pill box:

However the back of the house which was extended out to include Fritzl’s notorious cellar, looks not unlike the kind of massive Second World War above-ground bunkers that were built by the Nazis to withstand air raids.

DAILY TELEGRPAH – Simon Heffer: “What else does Austria have up its sleeve?”

Or on them?

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FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news

DAILY MAIL: “In the shadow of the swastika”

The similarity between the drab old three-storey apartment house in Amstetten where Josef Fritzl raped and imprisoned his daughter for 24 years, and the one 90 minutes’ drive away where Adolf Hitler was born is a coincidence - but not a comfortable one.

Nazis! Is Josef Fritzl a Nazi?

Natasha Kampusch, who for eight years was held in a similar dungeon to the one where Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter, opened a Pandora’s box when she linked both horror stories to the country’s ‘authoritarian education’ and ‘the suppression of women’ under the Nazis. Her implication was that Fritzl, at 73 a child of the Nazi era, belongs to a generation that thought it could get away with anything.

After 1945 redefinition started all over again, as Austria revelled in the ‘victim’ status, pretending Nazism was something that happened to Austria rather than in it.

Fritzl. Austria. Nazis. Was Harald Shipman a Nazi? Fredrick West?

A wave of collective amnesia was hypocritically cloaked in Catholic morality, folksy loden coats and winter sportswear.

Hitler Knits for all the family. 

Not many today boast that Hitler was a fellow Austrian, born in the border town of Braunau-am-Inn, spent his youth in Vienna, and that the resentful bitterness of a great cosmopolitan city stripped of its empire rubbed off on him.

Best not mentioned in public, that. Best kept quiet, like Fritzl’s other family in the basement.

DAILY EXPRESS (front page): “It was let him rape me or starve, says the cellar daughter”

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