Josef Fritzl, the “monster of Amstetten”, suffers from dementia and would like to be released from prison

Joseph Fritzlthe Austrian who left the world in shock when it was revealed in 2008 that he had locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and borne her seven children, a sexual predator who for decades no one had distrusted, could be released from maximum security prison where he has been locked up ever since, according to Austrian public broadcaster ORF. Doctors believe it suffers from dementia and that it is not dangerous. Fritzl is already 88 years old.

His case left the country, the whole of Europe and half the planet trembling looking towards Austria. Amstetten, the town in the center of the country several hours’ drive from Vienna, a conservative place where Christian Democrats and the far right have dominated political life for decades, has become the center of the world and a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of journalists.

What was the case with Josef Fritzl?

The nightmare began on August 28, 1977. Elizabeth was 11 years old and her father was already abusing her. That day she drugged her and locked her in the basement, one of over two million fallout shelters in a country of just over eight million inhabitants, hermetically sealed with a 300-kilo steel and concrete door. Elisabeth lived there for 24 years.

Joseph told police that his daughter It’s disappeared and sent a letter (her father forced her to write it) asking not to be searched. And the agents believed him and sealed the girl’s future. They never searched the house. Three years later, at age 14, she became pregnant for the first time. Kerstin was born in 1988. Two years later, Stefano. It took them 20 and 19 years to get out of the prison in which they grew up, under the feet of their grandfather and at the same time their father.

In 1992 the third daughter was born and for some reason Fritzl decides to keep it. She tells the police that she was abandoned on their doorstep with a letter from Elisabeth, in which she asks them to take care of the baby. The old man and his wife Rosemarie ask for adoption, which is granted. In 1993 the fourth daughter was born and in December 1994 Fritzl repeated the operation telling the same story. The authorities still believe it.

Two years later Elizabeth gives birth to twins. You die within a few days and Fritzl burns the corpse in a gas boiler. In August 1997 the surviving twin appears abandoned on the doorstep. In December 2002, Félix was born, his last son, who remained in the basement with his two older brothers.

Hell breaks loose when Kerstin, the eldest, sick. Her grandfather takes her to the doctor and tells her that she was abandoned by her mother. On April 20, the hospital launched an appeal to locate her mother because he needs genetic testing to cure Kerstin. Fritzl then invents that his daughter Elisabeth has decided to return.

Elizabeth is 42 years old –He appears to be over 60 years old– and her children from basement 20, 19 and 5. On April 22, the police perform DNA tests on Kerstin. On April 26, Fritzl accompanies Elisabeth, Stefan and Félix to visit Kerstin in hospital and the doctor Albert Reiter suspects something and calls the police. After leaving the hospital they are arrested. Elisabeth tells everything and is released.

After a night in prison Fritzl he sinks and confesses. He is admitted to the nearby Santk Pölten prison, where he is held incommunicado and monitored 24 hours a day. DNA analyzes confirm that he is the father of all.

This journalist from Clarion It was in Amstetten in 2008. A Saturday morning market helped the neighbors take it over They didn’t want to know anything about the journalists and that the few who spoke were ashamed. As if nothing had happened in a town that then had 22,000 inhabitants, as if no one knew who Josef Fritzl was. Most neighbors approached by reporters quickly ended the conversation, stating that they “knew nothing” or that “this can happen anywhere”.

The damage to the country’s reputation was such that the government then announced it would launch a campaign abroad clean up Austria’s image. Because it was raining. Two years earlier, Natasha Kampusch had reappeared, kidnapped as a child for 8 years. Her kidnapper committed suicide by throwing himself onto the train tracks before being arrested.

While Germany atoned for the sins of Nazism after World War II, Austria swept it under the rug despite Hitler being Austrian and Austrian Nazis enjoying massive support for years.

The repressors were recycled, senior SS officials founded the FPO in the 1950s, a party that has governed the last decade in coalition with the conservatives and is currently leading the polls. The money laundering was such that Kurt Waldheim, one of those provosts of the Nazi regime, he became secretary general of the United Nations. From espionage and spying on each other during the Nazi period, the Austrians They began to completely ignore what their neighbor was doing because the opposite was seen as a Nazi attitude.

The Austrian and Nobel Prize winner for literature Elfriede Jelinek has made a career with works that tell stories of bourgeois families who are absolutely normal on the outside and with wardrobes full of monsters. The culture of silence is such that of the Fritzl house a room was rented because in those 24 years More than 100 tenants passed by without anyone suspecting or reporting anything. Sigmund Freud, Austrian and father of psychoanalysis, believed that human beings He is capable of not seeing what he doesn’t want to see.

While on the surface Josef Fritzl was just another neighbor, in the prison He was the lord of darkness.

For 24 years He tortured, raped and abused his daughter. When the doors opened and the stench began to escape, what Austria saw was so bad that the government’s reaction at the time was to sweep it under the carpet again, launching a marketing campaign to improve the country’s image.

The weekend following the scandal, in a 62-page edition, the region’s main newspaper (“Oberösterreichischen Nachrichten”) anointed half a page To the topic. The only gathering in honor of the victims was attended by just over 200 people, out of 22 thousand residents.

Was Fritzl crazy?

Clarion He took advantage of that trip to speak with Leonard Schey, an Austro-Argentine psychoanalyst who lived and worked in Vienna. That expert then explained it Fritzl “exercised power”.

He said that “the fundamental thing here in Austria is that the structures that look after the well-being of families have failed. While this man’s convictions for rape, children of dubious origin were given up for adoption. It is a failure of people, of mentalities, in Austria there is a question of lack of civil courage, there is no awareness of citizenship, people consider themselves more vassals than citizens, they are very obedient to the established power and if in the social Municipality offices no one says anything, so everything is fine and there is no right to protest. So it is accepted, and even if cries are heard, they are forgotten, they are erased.”

he also referenced Schey Mauthaussen, a Nazi concentration camp near Amstetten: “When it was liberated by the Allies, The same people who saw nothing then, have not seen this now either.. You can block perception and not see what you don’t want to see.” For Schey, “when someone doesn’t process their story, when there are secrets, then there are also fears and… there is a lot of fear here“.

Furthermore, according to the specialist, the government does not take advantage of the opportunity to achieve catharsis. Instead of launching an image campaign, “painting the facade, they should uncover the garbage. In Argentina, when people disappeared, many also said that ‘there must be a reason’. There are, making clear the ideological differences – between the Junta “The Argentine Army and the Austrian Social Democratic Government of 2008: Many Parallels. Argentina wanted to clean up its image before the ’78 World Cup and Austria is trying to do the same before the next European Championship.”

nuclear paranoia

With 8.2 million inhabitants and 2 million bunkers, mostly built in the 1970s, Austria is literally emptied. Its inhabitants, in a fit of general paranoia, built those 2 million fallout shelters in anticipation of a nuclear bombing. None of the neighboring countries he did nothing of the sort.