Austrian Monster Revealed
April 28, 2008
Josef Fritzl and Elizabeth Fritzl
A 73-year-old Austrian today confessed to imprisoning, beating and sexually abusing his daughter in a windowless cellar for 24 years, during which time he fathered her seven children.
Josef Fritzl admitted to forcing his daughter Elisabeth into the basement of the family’s home in Amstetten, north-west Austria, on August 24 1984, when she was 18.
Franz Pölzer, the head of the criminal investigations unit in the province of Lower Austria, said Fritzl had admitted abduction, incest and abuse.
Holding up a picture of Fritzl, at a press conference, Pölzer said: “This man led a double life for 24 years. He deceived everybody. He deceived his wife and the legal system.”
After initially denying the crime, Fritzl later admitted locking up his daughter, beating and sexually abusing her, and fathering her seven children, Pölzer said.
“Even the most experienced members of the criminal police found it shocking.”
Fritzl is expected to appear in court later today. Police released several photos showing parts of the cramped basement cell where Elisabeth and her children were kept.
It included a thick soundproofed door, a small but brightly decorated bathroom, and a narrow passageway leading to a tiny bedroom.
Earlier, a police spokesman said 42-year-old Elisabeth was “psychologically extremely disturbed”, but that her version of events was “completely believable”.
She claimed her father had abused her since she was 11. “In her own words, she was continuously abused by her father,” the spokesman said.
She said she had borne seven children by Fritzl, including twins, one of whom died after only three days in 1996. He admitted removing the body from the cellar and burning it.
Police said many questions remained in the case, which is reminiscent of that of the Austrian girl Natascha Kampusch, who was abducted, aged 10, on her way to school in 1998 and locked in a windowless cell before escaping in August 2006.
Today, the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard said in an editorial: “The whole country must ask itself just what is really, fundamentally going wrong.”
Police said Fritzl, an electrical engineering technician by training, had told investigators how to enter the basement prison through a small hidden door, operated by a secret code which only he had known.
“There was a shelf with plenty of cans and containers, and behind the shelf was a door made of reinforced concrete, secured electronically and running on steel rails,” Heinz Lenze, a local official, told Reuters.
Yesterday, Pölzer told the broadcaster ORF that there were a number of rooms in the cellar.
“There is … one room to sleep in, one to cook, and there are also sanitation facilities,” he said. The APA news agency said some of the rooms in the cellar were no more than 1.7 metres (5ft 6in) high.
Fritzl’s wife, Rosemarie, had been unaware of what happened to Elisabeth.
It is believed she assumed her daughter had disappeared voluntarily after a letter in her writing to her parents said they should not search for her.
The drama began to unravel last weekend when Elisabeth’s 19-year-old daughter, Kerstin, who lived in the cellar, was left at a hospital with a life-threatening illness.
A search for Elisabeth increased in urgency as Kerstin’s condition worsened.
The plight of the mother and children was discovered on Saturday night when Elisabeth and her father appeared together at the hospital.
They were taken to the nearby police station, where he was arrested for sexually abusing his daughter and holding her captive.
Kerstin is said to be in a critical condition, suffering from an unknown illness, in the intensive care unit of Krems hospital.
Pölzer said Elisabeth “gave the impression of being in an extremely disturbed psychological state” and was “in a bad way physically”.
She had agreed to speak to police only after being assured that she and her children would never again have contact with her father.
They said it appeared that when Fritzl imprisoned his daughter in 1984, he had given the impression that she had left home of her own will. She remained on the Interpol missing persons list.
Police investigators at the time were of the view that she might have become a member of a sect.
On various occasions between 1993 and 2002, Fritzl claimed his daughter had left three children on his doorstep along with notes asking him to look after them.
Authorities gave the couple permission to become foster parents to what were assumed to be their grandchildren.
But, according to police, Elisabeth had given birth to the children, along with four others including the one that died, in her cellar prison. Her father had removed the children.
Of the six children - three boys and three girls aged between five and 20 - five-year-old Felix, Stefan, 18, and Kerstin lived with their mother in the cellar. They never saw sunlight and received no education.
“She taught them how to speak,” Pölzer said, adding that Josef had provided food and clothing, but the children never received any professional medical care.
DNA tests will be carried out in the next few days to confirm that Josef fathered the six children, but the spokesman said: “All indications point to the fact he did.”
Forensic scientists were searching the cellar yesterday, while others combed the grounds of the house.
“There are things that you just don’t want to see,” a policeman at the house said. “The fewer pictures you have in your head, the better.”
One neighbour said Fritzl had been “inconspicuous” and “always greeted us in a friendly way”.
Another said she had often seen Rosemarie with her grandchildren. “She is really very nice, taking the grandchildren to school - but we knew nothing of what was really going on,” she added.
This monster’s wife claims she knew nothing about what was going on, yet three of the children lived upstairs with them. Where did she think the children came from? The stork brought them?
Vermin like this is a perfectly good reson to reinstate the auto-da-fe’. Hold it in a big stadium, sell tickets, and auction of the privelege of lighting the fire. At least the money would help defray the costs of the treatment this woman and her children will require for the rest of their lives.
During WWII, Amstetten had a horrific female concentration camp nearby. Unimaginable torture and depravity was inflicted on the female prisoners by the guards. Many of the Amstetten locals worked as guards. Fritzl was 10 years old when it was still running. Of course, the locals said nothing. No one stood up and said this is wrong. Many of the children of the camp guards still live in the town, but it is taboo to mention it. The entire Amstetten society psychology was forever wrecked by its complicity in the running of a German concentration camp. It’s easy to see how a young Fritzl monster was formed.
Women and children in Mauthausen-Gusen
Although the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex was mostly a labour camp for men, a women’s camp was opened in Mauthausen, in September of 1944, with the first transport of female prisoners from Auschwitz. Eventually, more women and children came to Mauthausen from Ravensbruck, Bergen Belsen, Gross Rosen, and Buchenwald. With them came some female guards. Twenty are known to have served in the Mauthausen camp, and sixty in the whole camp complex. Female guards also staffed the Mauthausen sub-camps at Hirtenberg, Lenzing (the main women’s sub-camp in Austria), and St. Lambrecht. The Chief Overseers at Mauthausen were firstly Margarete Freinberger, and then Jane Bernigau. Of all the female Overseers who served in Mauthausen, almost all of them were recruited between September 1944, and November 1944, from Austrian cities and towns. In early April of 1945, at least 2,500 more female prisoners came from the female sub-camps at Amstetten, St. Lambrecht, Hirtenberg, and the Flossenbürg sub-camp at Freiberg. It is rumoured that Hildegard Lächert also served at Mauthausen.[32]
Common methods of extermination of prisoners, who were either sick, unfit for further labour or as a means of collective responsibility or after escape attempts included:
* Being beaten to death (by the SS and Kapos)
* Icy showers - some 3,000 inmates died of hypothermia - after having being forced to take an icy cold shower - and who were then left outside in cold weather.[43]
* Mass-shootings
* Medical experiments
o Aribert Heim, dubbed Doctor Death by the inmates, was there for seven weeks, which was enough to carry out his experiments[44]
o Another of the Nazi scientists to perform experiments on the inmates was Karl Gross, who purposely infected hundreds of prisoners with cholera and typhus in order to test his experimental vaccines on them. Between February 5, 1942, and mid-April of 1944, more than 1,500 prisoners were killed as a result of his experiments[45]
* Hanging
* Starvation
* Injections of phenol. (A group of 2,000 prisoners who applied to be transferred to the sanatorium were declared mentally sick and were killed by Dr. Ramsauer in the course of the H-13 action)[43]
* Drowning in large barrels of water (Gusen II)[46][47]
* Beating to death or starving to death in bunkers[48]
* Throwing the prisoners on the 380 volt electric barbed wire fence[48]
* Forcing prisoners outside the boundaries of the camp and then shooting them on the pretense (pretence) that they were attempting to escape[49]