"Mack the Knife" <bulldog101750@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Anguished Austrians question how ***** case went undetected
By WILLIAM J. KOLE – 1 hour ago
AMSTETTEN, Austria (AP) — Carefree children in alpine costumes danced
around a maypole, and parents crowded a churchyard to snap photos of
sons and daughters making their first communion.
But an unmistakable melancholy settled Thursday over this town where
police say Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and
fathered seven children with her in a windowless warren of
soundproofed cellar rooms.
As the sheer monstrosity of his alleged atrocities sank in — less than
two years after a young woman escaped her tormentor in another
high-profile case — anguished Austrians questioned whether their
clannish society and cherished privacy have steered them horribly
wrong.
"Without question, this entire experience shows the system isn't
working," said Wolfgang Bachmayer, who has been scrambling as one of
the nation's chief image consultants to do some damage control.
"It's a question of having a functional society," said Bachmayer, who
heads the Austrian Institute for Marketing. "The authorities can't
train their eyes everywhere and peer into every bedroom. We can only
hope our politicians make the right decisions."
Police allege that Fritzl confessed to taking his daughter Elisabeth —
now 42 — captive when she was 18, repeatedly raping her, fathering
seven children with her and tossing the body of one of their offspring
into a furnace after the child died in infancy.
Authorities say DNA tests confirm Fritzl is the biological father of
the six surviving children, three of whom he and his wife adopted and
raised upstairs. The other three, along with Elisabeth, were held in
the cellar and never saw daylight until — aged 19, 18 and 5 — they
finally gained their freedom last Saturday.
Amstetten, reflecting shock and shame felt across Austria, has
struggled to regain some kind of equilibrium since the revelations.
In a poignant reflection of how life goes on, bulletin boards
displayed wedding engagements, the local soccer club's scores and
photos of firefighters burning a barn in a training exercise. Tacked
to a door just around the corner from the Fritzls' gray concrete
apartment complex, a gaily painted poster proclaimed: "Hip Hip Hooray!
Stella Turns 4 Today!"
But the mood was somber on Amstetten's tidy main square, where
clusters of candles laid on the cobblestones during an evening vigil
held earlier this week still flickered amid a pool of sticky wax.
Resident Maria Scheuch said she's convinced that Austria's closed
society — a time-honored mind-your-own-business, live-and-let-live
approach — will simply have to change.
"We like to say we are so child-friendly. But we must ask ourselves
how child-friendly we really are," she said.
Privacy is almost sacrosanct in Austria, where it's not unusual for
families living on the same street for many years to have little or no
contact beyond a curt greeting exchanged on the street.
Witnesses have since come forward to claim they saw or heard unusual
activity, such as Fritzl allegedly struggling under cover of darkness
to bring large quantities of food and water into his home through a
rear entrance.
Why, many Austrians now want to know, didn't they blow the whistle
years ago?
"This could happen anywhere, but the country's image is taking a real
hit. Everyone's saying: 'Austria, Land of Dungeons,'" said Karin
Cwrtila. "After the Kampusch affair, we didn't think it could get
worse."
Natascha Kampusch, who was a freckle-faced 10-year-old when she was
kidnapped on her way to school in 1998 and held in a dungeon for
nearly eight years, said she thinks Austria's past complicity with the
Nazis is at least partly to blame.
Abuse exists worldwide, Kampusch told the British Broadcasting Corp.,
"but I think it's also a ramification of the Second World War."
During the Nazi era, "the suppression of women was propagated ... an
authoritarian education was very im****tant," said the 19-year-old,
whose dramatic flight to freedom in August 2006 captured the world's
attention.
Experts contend Fritzl may simply have been a wily criminal who
outsmarted neighbors and police.
"To organize so many births, supply so many alibis and create an
atmosphere where no one dared ask questions, he had to be very lucid
and intelligent indeed," said Reinhard Haller, a leading Austrian
psychologist.
There has been widespread speculation that Fritzl, 73, may have been
traumatized by the war. He was only 3 when the Nazis annexed Austria
in 1938. Yet he was an impressionable preteen when Amstetten —
strategically situated on a key railway linking Vienna and the western
city of Linz — sustained heavy Allied bombing.
Austria is still taking stock of the long-term effects of WWII, and
only recently has it begun to break with decades of silence, denial
and repression to confront its Nazi past.
In yet another bizarre twist to a fast-developing case, investigators
disclosed Thursday that Fritzl repeatedly warned his captives that
poisonous gas would be released if they were to attack him in a bid to
escape.
The Nazis gassed to death millions of Jews in concentrations camps —
including the Mauthausen camp not far from Amstetten.
It was unclear whether Fritzl had actually rigged the cellar to
release toxic gas.
Legal experts say postwar Austria distanced itself from the Nazi
legacy by enacting laws — some of which still form the backbone of the
nation's modern criminal code — that effectively stripped police of
much of their past authority to keep close tabs on citizens.
Both Franz Polzer, the regional police official leading the
investigation, and prosecutor Gerhard Sedlacek confirmed an unusual
practice: Austria destroys criminal records after a certain period —
generally 15 years — when the statute of limitations is deemed to have
erased old offenses.
"When such a crime has been atoned for, it's been atoned for," Polzer
told the German weekly Der Spiegel this week.
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