Fritzl Watch: Austrian Nazis, Fritz, Puns And Nuclear War
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl and assorted Frtizls in the news
THE SUN (front page): “AS HIS CHILDREN COWERED IN DARKNESS, HE WAS THE.. Beast beside the seaside”
Not easy to find humour in incest and rape, but the Sun makes a decent stab of it, using a pun to accompany a shot of Josef Fritzl in his “tight-fitting trunks” on a boys’ trip to Thailand.
There’s another picture of Josef Fritzl on a deckchair in Cyprus. “Wish you were here?” comes the headline pun.
“Monster’s 6yrs on sex-hell pit”
TWISTED Josef Fritzl spent SIX years building his monstrous sex dungeon for “favourite daughter” Elisabeth, investigators revealed yesterday. It is believed that the 73-year-old hatched the plan to trap Elisabeth “forever” only months after he started to abuse her at the age of just 11. Council chiefs in Amstetten TWICE granted Fritzl planning permission for his den – after he told them he needed a “Cold War bunker” to protect his family in case Austria was hit by a nuclear bomb.
DAILY MAIL: “A nation in haunting denial”
Says Allison Pearson: “The case makes you wonder what darkness lies in the basement of the Austrian imagination.”
Not sure. Maybe she should ask Rosemary West’s children?
DAILY EXPRESS: “A COUNTRY IN CRISIS”
“Still scarred by the war, Hitler and Nazism, the terrible stories of kidnap and abuse may now force Austrians finally to ask the question they’ve feared for so long – are we a damaged people?”
The war. What war? Fritz?
“Three-quarters of the commandants of Nazi concentration camps were of Austrian origin, while the country supplied 80 per cent of the staff to Adolph Eichmann, who organised the Holocaust.”
Holocaust? Vot Holocaust?
DER SPEIGEL: “Austria Faces another Tortured Debate”
A pun. A German pun!
DAILY STAR: “DAD STOCKED UP DUNGEON AS HE WENT FOR CHILD SEX IN THAILAND”
There is no evident of Josef Fritzl having sex in Thailand with anyone, let lone young children in “seedy fleshpots”. But the Star makes a guess that this is what he was up to, and given his track recordFritzl is less than likely to win a case for libel.
THE MIRROR (front page): “CELLAR MUM: I’M SORRY”
Rosemarie Fritzl tells Elisabeth Fritzl: “I’m sorry – I had no idea.”
“Best dad takes his holiday on Thai sex beach”
A picture of Josef Fritzl on holiday in Pattaya, although the Sun says the picture of him on the deckchair was taken in Cyprus
Fritzl - not Fritz…
April 30th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Maybe there are men all over the world keeping women in basements - but they only get caught in Austria?
April 30th, 2008 at 9:22 am
i think you may be right
April 30th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Oh ferfeckssake!
The Mail and The Excess really are the pits…
Two high profile cases of imprisonment and abuse, and the whole country is tarnished in the eyes of the flawless English.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:26 am
exactly, the Wests over here, the Jersey events to name but two. Some poor girl left to die in a drain here..
April 30th, 2008 at 9:43 am
There are a lot of things about this sad case I can’t fathom out , one thing is the selection process of the children taken from the bunker and why.
Two boys and a girl left in the bunker and the baby that died.
Two girls and a boy taken from the bunker.
Why not leave them all in the bunker?
Would it have been too hard to conceal the feeding and clothing , disposal of rubbish etc for 7 people?
Did he think the bunker would be too small to hold so many people?
Was it because the noise of so many people may have drawn attention to their plight?
Was it another cruel attempt at controlling Elisabeth?
April 30th, 2008 at 9:49 am
5
matty Says:
There are a lot of things about this sad case I can’t fathom out , one thing is the selection process of the children taken from the bunker and why.
————–
F. is said to have removed the “loud ones” from the cellar.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Let that be a lesson to us all; make as much noise as possible.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:55 am
BabyJane 6- I thought they were taken as babies. Aren’t all babies loud?
April 30th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Oddly enough, some babies are entirely predictable; if you do what they want a nanosecond before they want it, they don’t cry…
April 30th, 2008 at 10:15 am
On TV it was also said that those members of the family who are sort of reunited in hospital now plan a birthday party for one of the children today.
If I think of them, being together in hospital now, all being victims of an undescribable crime, and bravely trying to make a good day for the birthday-child, is so tragic I can’t stop crying.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Then start thinking about the fact that however dreadful it has been they are free now.
And freedom means everything to a slave.
It’s going to take a lot of time, and there will be scars, but people can, and do, overcome the most horrific circumstances and go on to lead happy lives.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am
I agree BabyJane. What relief they all must feel now they are all safe and free from their tyrant father?
I hope the love of the family united will heal them all.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:30 am
chenier and matty, yes, that’s wise and true. One has to think that they are free now and safe and united.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:31 am
chenier 11- It is amazing when you think of all the things we take for granted that the children from the bunker can now experience. Rain on their skin, the feeling of the warm sunshine etc. It must be like being reborn.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:36 am
One thing I find particulary cruel is giving them a TV. It will have supplied hours of etertainment and education but also give them an insight in to the real world that they were apart from. Elisabeth will have been aware of how much the world had changed and the children were aware of a world they never thought they would be part of.
It was reported that the young boy had said when he was in the police car, I have seen cars on TV and always wanted a ride in one. Simple pleasures.
A world apart from the children of today, Xbox, iPhone,computers, Playstation etc etc.
April 30th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Been thinking again about this case, can’t help it!!!
With reference to above,thank God they did have a TV to give them an insight into the real world, cars, buses, streets, cities , dogs, cats, the list is endless!!!
We can only hope that when watching TV they hoped and dreamed that one day they would see it with their owns eyes. I really hope they all believed one day they would get out .Their hopes and dreams have now come true!!
Talking to myself again, do it all the time
April 30th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Fritzl is 100% responsable of his horrible crimes.
I’m quetsionning on collective reponsability:
Fritzl managed to maintain his system for 24 yrs…leaving no appearing evidence of his criminal project….Nobody did dared to check serioulsy his case….or to ask…[crazy]
Recently in Belgium , the serial killer Marc DUTROU Gate was also an horrible story for kidnapped chidren and their famillies. The inquiry revealed later that many people known, participated also, even within the police, and among politics. Still a scandal in Belgium because all of them are not in jail….
Fritzl, Dutrou are criminals inrooted in our society, they have in common, that are highly influent on their surroundings, over victims but also theirs accomplices, wich is an evidence that their are not schizophrenics, Hitler drove easily mass people to HIS HELL.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
http://news.aol.co.uk/murder-link-to-austrian-rape-father/article/20080429230709990001
It looks like his family might not have been the only victims of this monster.
April 30th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Hi Noseycow- heard that on the news at teatime!!!
What can of worms has been opened, time will tell!!!
Did the wife and kids ever go on luxury holidays to sun themselves abroad?
It did hit me that what if something happened to the evil one, who would know that the family were there?
Read that the dad used to tell the family in the bunker that if anything happened to him they would all perish, what a life to live where you wish nothing bad happens to such an evil person otherwise that would be your own death sentence. : (
What an absolute ++++ !!!!!!
April 30th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I can’t understand the wife saying she had no idea! Where did she think the children she raised came from? How could she deny the “bunker” in the basement and food and waste coming from there? And how did Elisabeth deliver her babies–alone??? Wouldn’t one think her mother was there to assist. As a nurse, I have a hard time thinking this father would know all about delivering babies–but on this I may be wrong maybe he is a mid-wife who is self trained! But I fail to see how the wife said she had no knowledge, I feel she is just as guilty, she raised these children and knew they had no “papers”. She was involved in their lives 100%, what kind of excuses could she use.
April 30th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
were the children relised upstairs not all girls?,and the ones left in the celler all boys??? Perhaps he couldnt trust himself leaving (granddaughters) downstairs when he visited his (daughter) so he removed them! thus removing further temptation!!! sorry,sick,sad but maybe true????if you can do this to your daughter maybe you are scared how far you will go with granddaughters????
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
They weren’t just his grandchildren, they were also his children. As it was, one of the children left was a girl, the other two boys. I don’t think we can attempt to exercise any form of logic on the reasoning behind it all, I don’t begin to imagine he’d be scared about how far he’d go though - he left his daughter and two (grand)sons in a darkened cellar for their entire lives.
May 30th, 2008 at 11:52 am
The choices to raise certain children and abandon the others in the dungeon do not seem to be based on gender. There were two boys and a girl in the dungeon, and two girls and a boy upstairs. At any rate, Elisabeth’s living in the main house as a child did not prevent his raping her from age 11 until 18 when he imprisoned her.
For many years, the dungeon in which Elisabeth gave birth to and cared for her first two children Kirsten (19, now in hospital) and Stephan (18), was 5 x 5 metres. Just guessing, but it may be that Fritzl had not yet devised his scheme of “taking in the abandoned children of his daughter” and really had no plan other than to leave them in the dungeon.
Two years later, perhaps Fritzl thought the 5×5 cell was a little crowded with a third child.
In his first interview, he told reporters that whether they went upstairs depended on whether they were “crybabies.” He may have been referring to the fact that the first child taken upstairs (Lisa, 16) was sickly, and Elisabeth thought her chances of survival were better with grandmother Rosemarie (not to mention clean water, air to breathe, etc.). Lisa’s adoption was subsidized by the State. But by the time Monika (14) and Alexander (12, twin of Michael who died in infancy) were born, he had discovered that State subsidies for foster children at 800 pounds each were twice as high as for the adopted daughter, so they were kept as foster children and were never adopted.
Youngest child Felix has just turned 6, fully six years later than the next youngest. Rosemarie was about 62 and the dungeon creep was about 67 when Felix was born, and he may well have decided another baby would not fit into his lifestyle, would disrupt the order he could expect in the household now that the three children (6, 8, 10) were all in school. At any rate, at his and Rosemarie’s ages, he may have elected not to “start over” raising children.
So, you see, it all makes sense — if you are a COMPLETE PSYCHOPATH!
M and A
I thought he was finally impotent.
May 30th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
I have haunting feeling Elisabeth”s mother knew what was going on…..and did nothing to stop it.I just cant believe she did not know if it is true Elisabeth was abused as early as 11 years old….
May 30th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
There is reference in this article to Elisabeth as his “favourite daughter.” If you read the reports of psychiatric interviews and of friends who spent time with them, you will realize that she was his LEAST favourite daughter. People don’t imprison and rape out of love; they do it out of desire for control, anger, hatred, and so on. Elisabeth had demonstrated, early on, that she was the one in the family who had a side which he could not completely dominate, of which he could never be quite sure. In fact, she actually ran away once–which infuriated him, as it was a flagrant denial of his power of life or death over his children. In the end, I am certain the psychiatric analysis will say that his motive was to “break” her, to teach her once and for all that he was her master, and not to try to escape him.
I hope you are as appalled as I am at these clips from the interview of a friend whose family spent time with the Fritzl family at their respective homes. Note particularly that the evenings together were “happy” DESPITE the treatment of a “shy and reticent” daughter by her “amusing” father. I think it sheds a little light on why the neighbors saw nothing wrong in the family life at the Fritzl home:
“For Paul Hörer, who first met Josef Fritzl 35 years ago, the Austrian was a “decent, outgoing and, above all, amusing bloke”.
“He remembered how Fritzl came to stay with him in Munich, and how he and his family spent happy evenings with Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, on the terrace of their “tip top” house in Amstetten where there was “white marble everywhere”.
. . . . .
“Hörer, too, remembers her as “reticent and shy”. But he added: “I had the impression Josef didn’t like her as much as his other children. He hit her more. Every little thing meant she got dealt a few.”"
May 30th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
THIS IS A DIFFERENT COMMENT
There is reference in this article to Elisabeth as his “favourite daughter.” If you read the reports of psychiatric interviews and of friends who spent time with them, you will realize that she was his LEAST favourite daughter. People don’t imprison and rape out of love; they do it out of desire for control, anger, hatred, and so on. Elisabeth had demonstrated, early on, that she was the one in the family who had a side which he could not completely dominate, of which he could never be quite sure. In fact, she actually ran away once–which infuriated him, as it was a flagrant denial of his power of life or death over his children. In the end, I am certain the psychiatric analysis will say that his motive was to “break” her, to teach her once and for all that he was her master, and not to try to escape him.
I hope you are as appalled as I am at these clips from the interview of a friend whose family spent time with the Fritzl family at their respective homes. Note particularly that the evenings together were “happy” DESPITE the treatment of a “shy and reticent” daughter by her “amusing” father. I think it sheds a little light on why the neighbors saw nothing wrong in the family life at the Fritzl home:
“For Paul Hörer, who first met Josef Fritzl 35 years ago, the Austrian was a “decent, outgoing and, above all, amusing bloke”.
“He remembered how Fritzl came to stay with him in Munich, and how he and his family spent happy evenings with Fritzl and his wife, Rosemarie, on the terrace of their “tip top” house in Amstetten where there was “white marble everywhere”.
. . . . .
“Hörer, too, remembers her as “reticent and shy”. But he added: “I had the impression Josef didn’t like her as much as his other children. He hit her more. Every little thing meant she got dealt a few.”"
May 30th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Matty says: “We can only hope that when watching TV they hoped and dreamed that one day they would see it with their owns eyes.”
________
Actually, Elisabeth, thinking they would see it never or not for a long time, helped keep them from chafing over their imprisonment by raising them to believe that their life in the dungeon was “real” and the things on tv were “imaginary” or “on another planet.” One article reported the boys’ delight in finding that cars were real; Felix’s comment on being taken to a local fast-food restaurant was, “I’m glad McDonald’s is real.”
May 30th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
I’d rather have killed myself than stay in that dungeon longer than 6 weeks. Elisabeth is a true survivor. Unbelieveable!
May 31st, 2008 at 10:31 am
Karen–I concur. What a uniquely strong woman is Elisabeth Fritzl. Very little has been published about her except as victim, but what there is shows an amazing person.
After five years of solitary confinement, visited only by her tormenter who abused her bodily, with his fists, as well as sexually, she had her first child. Incredibly, after five years she had the strength to give birth alone, and the SANITY to care for her daughter alone in the 5×5 m room in which she had been confined already for five years.
I am most impressed by the way she, without resources or friends to talk to and without help during her many illnesses in the oxygen-poor room and their illnesses from both environment and heredity, through untreated pain including the loss of all her teeth, through many unassisted childbirths and the death of the infant Michael, retained the mental strength and the creativity to make the children’s life bearable for them so that they would not experience the terrible loss and frustration and grief of losing the world that she had to endure.
Today, their adjustment to life outside is helped by the fact that she planned and worked to allow them to think they were normal, growing up normally, which is essential to their having the courage it now takes to embrace this unknown life. She created a reality for them that did not include knowledge of things that could not help but hurt them every day–their isolation from an entire, beautiful world; the fact that they were prisoners; the existence of siblings living–even in this abusive household–with riches they couldn’t even imagine; the randomness and coldness with which they were abandoned in the cellar and the others taken upstairs to a normal life. Even the fact that their grandfather was their father–she did not want them to know that they were the children of incest, or that the terrible grandfather they feared was also their father. In that way, she helped them grow up without the bitterness they could not have avoided if they had known the truth–the bitterness that now would have been a stumbling block in the way of their already difficult adjustment. Without that bitterness, their prospects for a good life in the sun are infinitely better.
The cost to Elisabeth must have been terrible. Her beloved children, loved despite the violence in which they were conceived and born, were her only friends, her only relief from a solitary existence. It would have been a relief to tell someone of her suffering. Yet to protect them, she committed herself to an additional 19 years of emotional isolation, of having no one to speak to regarding her agony, physical and mental and emotional, no one from whom to seek emotional support or sympathy.
I don’t even have to wonder–I couldn’t have begun to endure what she did, and make still more voluntary sacrifices for the children. In fact, I can’t even comprehend it. What an amazing woman!
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Elisabeth should be made a saint for her courage and dedication to her children. Austria should never forget this brave woman. A statue of Elisabeth and her children should be erected as a testimony of her goodness and suffering least Austria ever forget this brave, wonderful and courageous woman. She should be made”patron saint of children in Austria”. Elisabeth we love you.!