This is what a complete loss of reality looks like: “I’m not a monster,” Josef Fritzl asserted after his arrest at the end of April 2008. Before that, he had had his own child Elisabeth for almost 24 years, namely since August 28, 1984, in a cramped dungeon in the basement imprisoned in his house in Amstetten (Lower Austria).
And not only that: he regularly raped his daughter – and made her pregnant seven times. Three of the children had to live locked up with their mother, and Fritzl “adopted” three and took them into his family living above ground. The seventh child, a boy, died in the dungeon in 1996 shortly after the birth (of course without medical support). no monster?
Incest is taboo in most societies throughout human history, and for good reason, and especially sexual intercourse between parents (usually fathers) and biological children, almost always daughters. But Fritzl’s offense went far beyond multiple violations of this taboo: he was not only a rapist and jailer of his own offspring, but also a murderer.
In any case, the eight jurors of the regional court in the Lower Austrian capital of St. Pölten classified the death of the newborn boy as murder by omission. They also found him guilty of slavery. The 73-year-old Fritzl received the maximum sentence of life imprisonment as “sound of mind”, yet “mentally abnormal offender”; unlikely that he will ever be released.
The verdict was the end of a criminal “career” that had lasted at least 41 years. Fritzl, born in Amstetten in 1935, was first prosecuted in 1967 for rape and attempted rape, for which he was already behind bars. At that time Fritzl had already been married for three years; his eldest daughter is already born.
It was exactly this Elisabeth that her own father had lured into the basement under a pretext on August 28, 1984 and locked in the windowless, musty and damp dungeon. The following day he reported the then 18-year-old girl as “missing”; Fritzl claimed that she had “ended up with a sect”. In reality, the father raped his daughter several thousand times over the next few years.
In 1988 and 1990, Elisabeth gave birth to two children in the successively expanded dungeons, a girl and a boy. Three years later, a nine-month-old girl was lying in front of the Fritzls’ house with an accompanying letter. In it, Elisabeth allegedly “asked” her parents for help because she couldn’t take care of the newborn. Because she already has two children. Fritzl, who is both father and grandfather of the little ones, adopted them. This was repeated in December 1994; another girl, this time ten months old.
The birth of twins, two boys, in the dungeon in April 1996 was said to be unknown to anyone in the house either. One of the twins died after two days, and Fritzl “disposed of” his corpse in the oven. The other was “found” in August 1997 with the Fritzls.
For more than ten more years, Elisabeth had to vegetate with her two eldest children, and from the end of 2002 with another son of her own father, in the dungeon, which had been converted into a small two-room apartment, underground and without daylight. These three children never saw sunlight until 2008.
The martyrdom only ended when the oldest imprisoned child, Kerstin, who was born in 1988, fell seriously ill. Fritzl took them out of the dungeon and put them in front of his house; Kerstin came to the hospital. When regional television broadcast a call for her mother to get in touch, after 24 years in the basement, Elisabeth was able to persuade her father to release her and her other children.
But initially Fritzl was able to maintain the representation that his daughter was responsible. Only when the authorities assured her that there would be no more contact with her tormentor did she testify. Austria was shocked by the crime. Only two years earlier, after more than 3000 days, Natascha Kampusch had been able to free herself from the violence of her kidnapper. The man then committed suicide, so there was no criminal prosecution.
It was different with Josef Fritzl: He was tried in public, even though Elisabeth’s testimony, recorded on video, was of course played to the jury in camera. On that day, the now 42-year-old woman was sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the courtroom, at a safe distance from Fritzl, but still visible to him. As a result, the perpetrator, who had already confessed by then, but was looking for excuses, made a comprehensive confession. The trial was shortened from the estimated five to four days of negotiations in view of the clear evidence. Fritzl accepted the verdict and decided not to appeal.
Similar acts became known in connection with the Fritzl case: In the USA, an eleven-year-old girl was kidnapped in 1991 and held captive for 18 years; she gave birth to two children in the dungeon after being raped. In Brazil, a fisherman hid his daughter in an inaccessible hut for twelve years and fathered seven children with her. In Italy it was even a mother who had held her daughter captive for 18 years; here, of course, ordinary sexual abuse, as in the case of Fritzl, was not a motive.
You can also find “World History” on Facebook. We are happy about a like.
