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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”

According to his sister-in-law, Christine, 56, Fritzl covered his tracks by telling his wife Rosemarie – who believed Elisabeth had run away from home – that he was working on plans for machines in the cellar and was not to be disturbed.

Christine, whose surname has not been made public and the first of Fritzl’s close family to speak publicly, said – with the benefit of hindsight – that Fritzl’s daily routine in managing his macabre double life was “uncanny”… She said he was known by the nickname “Sepp” and ruled his household like a dictator.

Like Hitler.

THE SUN (front page): “HOW COULD THE WIFE NOT KNOW?”

“’Rosemarie took food to Fritzl dungeon’”

Christina, 56, said: “He would go to the cellar every morning at nine and he would often spend the night there, allegedly to draw blueprints for the machines he was selling. Rosie was not even allowed to bring him a cup of coffee.”

One police source told The Sun: “We thought we were dealing with a monster, but this man is the Devil himself.”

Der Weisse Engel?“The more we learn about him, the more his actions defy belief. He is morally sub-human.”

But it’s a uniquely Austrian crime, right?

TORTURED Lydia Gouardo, 45 – held captive and raped by her dad in France for almost 30 years – hopes to visit Elisabeth to help her recover from her ordeal.

What else can we expect form those French collaborators?

DAILY MIRROR (front page): “TRY TO ESCAPE AND I’LL GAS YOU”

Nazis.

THE NELSON MAIL: “Dungeon of shame”

Josef Fritzl has secured his place in history as one of the most loathsome individuals to ever be found out. The imprisonment of his daughter from 1984 until this week in a cunningly-crafted secret dungeon, his incestuous abuse of her and what he did to their seven children will leave an indelible stain on the reputation of his home town, Amstetten, and on the Austrian nation, which still suffers from its association with its infamous son, Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis.

THE INDEPENDENT: “Dominic Lawson: There are no lessons to be learned from the Fritzl case – it remains simply inexplicable”

Josef Fritzl’s behaviour was so extreme, so outside the norms of our common human experience, that we could be confident that no other person would do as he did, even if that person’s upbringing and early adult life had mirrored exactly the circumstances of Mr Fritzl’s own existence. Indeed, it is the extremity and inexplicability of Josef Fritzl’s behaviour that compels our attention. If we could understand it, our curiosity would be rapidly quelled.

Of course this does not stop us all trying in our amateurish way to emulate the efforts of the Austrian police – quite the contrary. The popular favourite in this country (not surprisingly) is that it’s all to do with Adolf Hitler. It goes something like this. Hitler was Austrian. Many Austrians were involved in organising the Holocaust; but after the war they pretended to be victims of the Nazis, when they were really accomplices. This shows that they are a people unusually gifted at committing terrible crimes while retaining respectability. Josef Fritzl was a child during the war and was therefore somehow infected with this; meanwhile, his suburban neighbours did nothing to stop his terrible deeds, so they are all guilty too – and by extension the whole country.

Well, it’s absolutely true that far too many Austrians under Nazi rule displayed an enthusiasm for brutal anti-Semitism which left the Germans looking like amateurs; however, as a heap of innuendo piled upon non sequitur, this explanation for what went on in a basement in Amstetten takes some beating. Yet quite serious writers have proposed something along these lines with every appearance of sincerity.

Posted: 2nd, May 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Josef Fritzl, Tabloids. Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0