Читать книгу House of Horrors - Nige Cawthorne - Страница 8

Josef Fritzl has said little to explain the brutal rape and incarceration of his daughter and the appalling maltreatment of at least three of their children. However, he has claimed to be a victim of his Nazi past, and there may be some truth in this.

He was born on 9 April 1935, in Amstetten, and was nearly three when his home town turned out to raise their arms in a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute as Adolf Hitler drove by in an open-topped car on 12 March 1938. The Führer was on his way to Vienna, where he was greeted by huge crowds celebrating the Anschluss – the German annexation of Austria. In the First World War, Austria had fought alongside Germany and, in defeat, lost its central European empire. Subsequently, the country suffered similar political and economic upheaval to its larger neighbour. The Nazi Party then grew in power in Austria and many Austrians, even those who were not Nazis, favoured a union with Germany. Hitler was, after all, a local boy, an Austrian who only took German nationality in 1932 at the age of 43, the year before he became German Chancellor.

Born in Braunau am Inn on the Bavarian border just 85 miles from Amstetten, Hitler spent most of his childhood in Linz, less than 30 miles from Fritzl’s home town. Linz remained his favourite city and he said that he wanted to be buried there. In his ‘Private Testimony’ written in the Führerbunker in Berlin on 29 April 1945, the day before he died, Hitler wrote, ‘The paintings in the collections which I had bought in the course of the years were never collected for private purposes, but solely for the gradual establishment of an art gallery in my home town of Linz. It is my heartfelt wish that this bequest should be duly executed.’

Fritzl was an only child. His mother Rosa was disabled and he grew up for the most part without a father as Franz Fritzl was in the Army. School friends remember a boy so poor that other parents gave his mother food. She lived by herself after divorcing Franz, a scandalous event in the small, traditional Austrian town.

‘My father was somebody who was a waster; he never took responsibility and was just a loser who always cheated on my mother,’ Fritzl said. ‘When I was four, she quite rightly threw him out of the house. After that, my mother and I had no contact with this man, he did not interest us. Suddenly there was only us two.’

It seems that Fritzl’s father was killed in the war. The name Franz Fritzl appears on the town’s war memorial, which also bears the carved image of a Nazi stormtrooper. Although after the Second World War, most Austrians claimed to have been unwilling victims of the Nazis, many were enthusiastic party members. It is known that Amstetten, particularly, was a hotbed of Nazism. Hitler’s visit in 1938 was greeted with wild excitement by the residents, and every house in the town flew the swastika. A local history book says of the visit, ‘The crowd was screaming and yelling and waving.’

Amstetten went a step further than other Austrian towns in its enthusiasm for the Anschluss and made Hitler an honorary citizen. The Führer sent a thank-you letter, saying the town’s tribute ‘filled him with great pleasure’. According to Fritzl, the Hitlerian past of Amstetten, where he grew up, affected him profoundly. ‘I grew up in the Nazi times and that meant the need to control and the respect of authority,’ he said. ‘I suppose I took some of these old values with me into later life. It was all subconscious, of course.’

After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Amstetten found itself on a main rail line for troops and material heading for the Eastern Front. The RAF bombed the rail lines there repeatedly and the inhabitants, including the young Fritzl, would have regularly sought shelter in their cellars as the bombs were dropped. Throughout this time, slave labourers were brought in to help reopen the vital rail link that ran from Linz to Vienna.

Just a short walk from the cellar where Fritzl repeatedly raped his daughter and imprisoned their offspring is the site of a Nazi concentration camp, where 500 women were caged during the war. In Amstetten itself, there were two concentration camps – Bahnbau II, which held the women, and Bahnbau I, which held some 3,000 male slave labourers used to rebuild the railway lines. These two camps were branches of the infamous Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp 25 miles away. Although the camp had been initially designed for ‘extermination through labour’, in December 1941 it opened a gas chamber where inmates were murdered 120 at a time and Nazi doctors performed cruel experiments on their captives. Up to 320,000 people died there. While the camp officers indulged themselves with Austrian beer and women in Amstetten, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were being starved, tortured, raped and murdered close by.

Again, the Austrians enthusiastically embraced this most evil aspect of the Third Reich. Some 40 per cent of the staff and three-quarters of the commandants of concentration camps were of Austrian origin, and it was largely Austrians who organised the deportation of the Jews. Some 80 per cent of the staff of Adolf Eichmann, the logistics planner of the Holocaust, were from Austria. It is unlikely that, even as a child, Fritzl would have been unaware of the death camps near his home.

Even the clinic where Elisabeth and the Fritzl family were cared for by doctors and psychologists after their release has a Nazi past. Hundreds of patients were put to death at Amstetten’s Mauer clinic under the Third Reich’s euthanasia laws. At least another 800 were transported to other institutions to be killed.

A book called Amstetten 1938–1945, commissioned by civic leaders in Fritzl’s home town, includes a chapter on the Mauer clinic’s wartime atrocities. ‘The first step to eliminating inherited and mental diseases was sterilisation,’ it says, citing 346 cases in Mauer. ‘The last was euthanasia.’

The euthanasia programme officially began in 1941. It started with psychiatric patients, but moved on to those in nursing homes and homes for the elderly. In 1944, a notorious doctor named Emil Gelny visited the Mauer clinic to dispose of what he deemed to be ‘unnecessary mouths’. He killed at least 39 people with drugs such as barbitone, luminal and morphine, the book says.

It is not known how much young ‘Sepp’ – the Austrian diminutive of Josef – Fritzl was aware of, but he may well have been a member of the Hitler Youth. Enrolment was, by then, compulsory after the age of ten. However, local officials say the records were burned at the end of the war so, like those of many other Austrians and Germans from that era, his Nazi past was conveniently buried. That is not to say that having been a member of the Hitler Youth necessarily turns you into a monster. The current pope, Benedict XVI, had been enrolled in the Hitler Youth in 1939, despite being a bitter enemy of Nazism, believing it to conflict with his Catholic faith. But this was not a concern for Fritzl who, like most Austrians, was a Catholic. The conflict between Nazism and Catholicism did not bother Hitler either – he never renounced his Catholic faith.

By his own admission, Fritzl was affected by the politics of the era. He called his secret cellar his ‘Reich’ and he openly admitted that he got the iron discipline needed to live a double life from growing up under the Nazis.

‘I have always placed a great deal of value on discipline and good behaviour,’ he said. ‘I admit that. My behaviour comes from my generation; I am from the old school. I was brought up during the time of the Nazis that meant discipline and self-control – I admit that took over me to a certain extent.’

Although his character may have been shaped by being brought up under Hitler and the Nazi regime, it is no excuse – any more than it was for those who committed atrocities in Hitler’s name at the time.

Four days after Fritzl’s tenth birthday, Vienna was liberated by the Red Army following several days of vicious hand-to-hand fighting. The following month, Soviet tanks rolled into Amstetten. Fresh from seeing the Nazis lay waste to their country, Russian troops embarked on an orgy of rape and pillage. Reports in the Austrian media say that, as a child, Fritzl ‘suffered badly’ during this post-war occupation, a period marked by the high incidence of sexual assaults perpetrated by Russian soldiers on German and Austrian women – so much so that Vienna’s memorial to the ‘unknown soldier’ was sardonically referred to as the memorial to the ‘unknown father’. The Red Army stayed in Austria until 1955.

Although Austria was spared the rigorous de-Nazification programme inflicted on Germany, Fritzl would have been acutely aware of the shame of his nation’s defeat in the post-war era. A 1951 school photograph shows a surly 16-year-old youth glowering at the camera. Nonetheless, he was said to have been a very bright and resourceful boy. He did well at school and was always well behaved. This has been credited to his mother.

‘My mother was a strong woman; she taught me discipline and control and the values of hard work,’ Fritzl said. ‘She sent me to a good school so I could learn a good trade and she worked really hard, and took a very difficult job to keep our heads above water.’

Rosa Fritzl was strict, but they were living through hard times. There was little food in post-war Austria and it was years before the country’s economy was back on its feet. His mother reflected the period. ‘When I say she was hard on me, she was only as hard as was necessary,’ he said. ‘She was the best woman in the world. I suppose you could describe me as her man, sort of. She was the boss at home and I was the only man in the house.’

There has been some speculation that there may have been something unhealthy about their relationship. ‘It’s complete rubbish to say my mother sexually abused me,’ said Fritzl. ‘My mother was respectable, extremely respectable. I loved her across all boundaries. I was completely and totally in awe of her. That did not mean there was anything else between us, though. There never was, and there never would have been.’

However, when asked if he had ever fantasised about a relationship with his mother, he answered, ‘Yes, probably … But I was a very strong man, probably as strong as my mother and, as a result, I was capable to keep my desires under control.’

His sister-in-law told another story in an interview with an Austrian newspaper. ‘Josef grew up without a father and his mother raised him with her fists,’ said the women identified only as Christine R. ‘She used to beat him black and blue almost every day. Something must have been broken in him because of that. He was unable to feel any kind of sympathy for other people; he humiliated my sister for most of her life.’

Others got a better impression. A friend at high school said, ‘He was a very positive influence on his younger colleagues, but he was also a bit of a loner. We all thought he’d do quite well for himself and he always came to class reunions with his wife. We were shocked to learn what he had done. That wasn’t the man we knew.’

But some had already noticed a darker side. An old classmate of Fritzl painted a picture of a fiend obsessed with power and torture. Gertrude Haydn, now 73, said, ‘His family was very poor. People said he tortured his pets and killed cats and dogs inside his house. I was too afraid to ever go in there.’

Leaving school at 16, Fritzl went on to study electrical engineering at a nearby polytechnic and took up an engineering apprenticeship where he excelled. Then he took a job with a local steel company, Voest. Working there, he managed to get out from under the thumb of his mother and began to take an interest in other women.

‘I became older and I managed to meet other women,’ he said.

By all accounts, he was also something of a moustached charmer, although hardly in the David Niven mould. He was insufferably arrogant and self-absorbed. Known for his lecherous innuendoes, it was clear he was unnaturally obsessed with sex. ‘I had affairs with a few girls,’ he boasted, ‘and then a short while later I met Rosemarie.’

It was 1956. He was 21 and Rosemarie was 17 when they married and started a family of seven. Of course, it was difficult for Rosemarie to live up to the standard of his mother, but for what Fritzl had in mind, his new wife fitted the bill perfectly.

‘Rosemarie was also a wonderful woman … is a wonderful woman,’ he said. ‘I chose her because I had a strong desire then to have lots of children.’

And the reason Fritzl wanted lots of children lay in his own childhood. ‘I wanted children that did not grow up like me as single children,’ he said. ‘I wanted children that always had someone else at their side to play with and to support. The dream of a big family was with me from when I was very small, and Rosemarie seemed the perfect mother to realise that dream.’

The other advantage was that she had little in common with his mother, the redoubtable Rosa. ‘She is just a lot more shy and weaker than my mother,’ he claimed. He could dominate her and she would not question him, although this was of particular concern to her family who distrusted him from the outset.

From 1969–71, Fritzl worked for Zehetner, a construction materials firm in Amstetten, where he was described as ‘an intelligent worker and a good technician’. Yet even in those early years, he was demonstrating a tendency towards sexual deviancy. His first brush with the police came when he was 24 after a complaint that he had exposed himself. The police say he went on to rape at least two women in Linz, where he was working in the 1960s. Only one of the victims brought charges. In 1967, Fritzl was convicted of rape and sentenced to 18 months in jail.

He still struggles to explain why he betrayed his wife and his, by then, four children, by breaking into a ground-floor flat and raping a young nurse. ‘I do not know what drove me to do that,’ he said. ‘It’s really true I do not know why I did it. I always wanted to be a good husband and a good father.’

Despite his conviction for rape, his wife, the long-suffering Rosemarie, took him back. He later claimed he was grateful. ‘I always loved her and I will always love her,’ said Fritzl, even after confessing to the rape of their daughter. This can have been of little comfort to Rosemarie.

Details of the 1967 rape case have now been expunged from the records. Under Austrian law, as part of the process of rehabilitation, details of previous convictions are destroyed after ten years. ‘When such a crime has been atoned for, it’s been atoned for,’ a senior police officer explained.

However, another victim, who claimed that she had been too frightened to press charges at the time, came forward after Elisabeth had emerged from her dungeon, saying that she was ‘100 per cent sure’ it was Fritzl who had raped her in September 1967, when she was 20 years old. She recognised him as her attacker when she saw his photograph in the newspapers.

‘I was raped by Fritzl,’ the woman, who refused to disclose her identity, told the local Linz newspaper, Upper Austrian News, on 30 April 2008. ‘When I saw his picture yesterday, I knew, yes, that is him.’ There was no doubt in her mind. ‘I recognised him immediately,’ she said. ‘I will never forget those eyes.’

At the time of the rape, she was a recently married young mother. While her husband, an Austrian railway worker, was away on a night shift, Fritzl slipped through her ground-floor bedroom window. ‘I felt the bedclothes being pulled back,’ she told the newspaper. ‘At first I thought it was my husband coming home but then I felt this knife being pushed against my throat. He told me, “If you make a noise, I’ll kill you.” Then he raped me in my own bed.’

At the time, she was too ashamed to report the rape, and neither did she want to risk alienating her husband. She kept the memory of her terrifying attack to herself for over 40 years. The woman admitted that she had had her suspicions about Fritzl from the start and feared she might not be the only victim of his sexual deviancy. She said she had seen Fritzl on a number of occasions in Linz before she was assaulted by him. He had attracted attention because he behaved like a peeping Tom. ‘He was a voyeur. He used to ride around on his bicycle and watch everyone,’ she said.

Once Fritzl had been exposed as the dungeon rapist in the Austrian press and on television, it was then that the memory came flooding back and she realised that he was the same man who raped her more than 40 years before.

A third woman from Linz also went to the police in April 2008 to complain of an attempted rape by Fritzl. She had been 24 at the time and a work colleague of his. On 2 May, officials said a rape file had been found and was being studied. However, the Austrian justice authorities say the offence is irrelevant because it happened more than 15 years ago and was beyond the statute of limitations.

However, Fritzl was convicted and went to prison at the time. As a result, he lost his job. But he was such a good engineer, and such was his ability for inventing new devices that, in 1969, when he was released, he immediately found work, despite his record.

‘My father often said he was an absolute genius,’ said a daughter of his late boss, Karl Zehetner. ‘He was amazed at what he could do.’

Fritzl’s ingenuity would later be put to sinister use when constructing the elaborate dungeon where he imprisoned the hapless Elisabeth and their children, complete with its electronically-controlled sliding steel door.

When the sister-in-law of the company’s manager was told that Fritzl had been taken on, she spoke up. ‘I don’t want that,’ she protested. In her mind, Fritzl was a danger and she repeatedly warned her children to stay away from him.

A spokeswoman for a company where Josef Fritzl was employed as an engineer and procurement manager during the 1970s also had misgivings. ‘He did an excellent job,’ she said, ‘but there was always something uneasy about him as it was widely known that he had served time in prison for a sexual offence.’

Neighbours in Amstetten also knew of his record. ‘I was ten at the time,’ a 50-year-old resident now recalls, ‘but I remember how we children were afraid to play near Fritzl’s house because of the rumours that he had raped a woman and spent some time in jail for it.’

Later, Fritzl became a travelling salesman for a German company and then worked as an electrical engineer at a company that made industrial drills. In 1973, he and his wife bought a summer guesthouse and camping ground at an idyllic tourist spot in the mountains on the shores of Lake Mondsee in the Vöcklabruck district of the Salzkammergut near Salzburg, which they ran until 1996. Then, in the 1980s, he decided to move into real estate, buying several buildings around Amstetten. He already owned the large grey town house at 40 Ybbsstrasse in Amstetten, which he extended into the back garden to provide accommodation for up to eight tenants at a time. The family lived on the floors above; below was the cellar.

Over the years, Fritzl bought a further five properties and started an underwear company. But his attempts at property development came to nothing and his businesses failed. It is now known that he had run up debts of more than €2m (£1.56m) as a result of his various endeavours, but in the eyes of the townsfolk, he became ‘a man of stature’, as the local police chief put it. He was a respected, well-connected figure in Amstetten, often seen at the wheel of a Mercedes. He dressed in fine clothes, with gold rings on his fingers and a gold chain round his neck. Even when running errands, locals said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.

Generally, Fritzl was known in Amstetten as a polite man who loved fishing, drinking beer and sharing a bawdy joke with his neighbours. But he was a private individual; he was not active in community or church groups. Even fellow members of his fishing club say he was something of a question mark. Fritzl made little attempt to socialise, but always paid his dues. ‘There was never a problem with him,’ said club treasurer Reinhard Kern. ‘Whether he actually went fishing or not, how am I to know? Maybe it was an alibi.’

However, most neighbours or townsfolk remember only an affable, if unremarkable, fellow who liked to keep himself to himself. In fact, he was part of a well-heeled coterie of businessmen who were not short of friends in all the right places.

With all record of the rape conviction eradicated after ten years under Austria’s statute of limitations, Fritzl was at liberty to present himself as the strong, wholesome family man. In a devoutly Catholic country like Austria, it is necessary for a ‘paterfamilias’ to sire a large brood and Fritzl fathered five girls and two boys. Ulrike was born in 1958; Rosemarie followed in 1961; Harald in 1964; Elisabeth in 1966; the twins Josef Jnr and Gabriele in 1971; and Doris in 1973.

Outwardly, all was well. Josef Fritzl was the smartly dressed engineer who drove a nice car and had such well behaved children. True, he was an autocratic task-master behind closed doors, but that was not an unknown characteristic among provincial Austrian men of his generation.

Fritzl said that his favourite daughter was Elisabeth, the fourth of his seven children with Rosemarie, but that did not mean that she was given an easy time. Because she was pretty, it appears that he was harder on her than the others and beat her mercilessly. Fritzl had no time for spoiling children. At home, in this traditional Austrian family, father ruled the roost – though, even in the eyes of others who shared his background, he was inordinately strict.

‘For me, I always had the impression that Sepp was an intelligent and successful man,’ said Leopold Stütz, deputy mayor of Lasberg, a town 30 miles from Amstetten. Stütz was a close friend of the Fritzls and even went on joint holidays with the family. ‘He often talked about his perfect family. He was very strict with his children, a strict but fair father, I would say. It was enough for him to snap his fingers and the youngsters would be in bed. He always stressed that, for him, education and career were the most important things.’

Others were not so sanguine. Fritzl’s sister-in-law Christine told the Austrian newspaper Österreich that her brother-in-law was a ‘disgusting despot’, who cleverly covered up his excesses. ‘Every person that looked in his eyes was fooled by him,’ she said.

The family lived in fear of his outbursts. ‘He tolerated no dissent,’ said Christine. ‘When he said it was black, it was black, even when it was ten times white.’ She loathed the way he was so harsh on the kids. ‘I always hated him,’ she said. ‘He was like an army drill instructor with his children. They had to stop whatever they were doing and stand still when he entered the room. Silence fell over everyone immediately – even when they were in the middle of playing a game. You could sense their constant fear of being punished.’

The children were required to remain silent while their father was in a room. If they failed to comply, or if they forgot to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, he would hit them until they toed the line. They were very rarely allowed to have friends round. If they did, the children’s friends had to leave the house immediately when he came home from work.

Christine believed that Fritzl’s tyrannical behaviour towards the seven children he had with her elder sister Rosemarie was the main reason why most of them had married young. ‘The only chance for the children to escape this atmosphere was to marry,’ she said. ‘And that’s what they all did as soon as they were old enough.’

When Elisabeth finally escaped the House of Horrors and the police eventually took an interest, they confirmed what Christine was saying. ‘We have spoken at length to Elisabeth’s brothers and sisters,’ said the detective in charge of the case, Chief Investigator Polzer. ‘All of them said their father wasn’t just very strict, aggressive, dominant and power-mad, he was a “real tyrant”. They weren’t ever allowed to address him or ask him anything. That was why every child except one son left the house as soon as they could.’

However, none of them moved very far. Their eldest daughter Rosemarie married at 21 and now lives with her husband, Horst Herlbauer, in an apartment in the Linz suburb of Traun, 30 miles from the family home. With his wife, Harald moved into an orange-painted cottage in the village of Mitterkirchen im Machland, eight miles from Amstetten. Doris left home when she married a man named Henikl and set up home with her husband in a villa in the Alpine province of Styria, not far to the south. However, she and her family would join her parents at family reunions and sometimes go on holiday with her mother.

Ulrike married a man named Pramesberger and became a teacher. She moved to Bad Goisern in the foothills of the Alps, some 65 miles from Amstetten, to an impressive chalet-style property set in extensive grounds. Gabriele lives with her partner and child near Amstetten in a small chalet. Only Josef Jnr, Gabriele’s twin brother, continued to live in the family home, although he is now in his late thirties. Very much under his father’s thrall, he remained a virtual slave.

‘One son wasn’t allowed to leave,’ said Polzer, ‘just like Elisabeth. He is very slow and has a few problems and difficulties. Josef kept him, using this son as his slave and house-boy. I believe it was Josef’s youngest son. He had to wait on his father hand and foot, and skivvy for him.’

Christine described how Fritzl expected his wife to play a subservient role from the start of their married life. ‘When Rosemarie married Sepp she was 17, and had no professional qualifications, so she was always dependent on him – and for 51 years he exploited that,’ she said.

Rosemarie was poorly educated and had trained as a kitchen help. Fritzl’s pride in his own intelligence and resourcefulness prevented him from taking his wife seriously, Christine said. He was completely in control in their marriage.

‘Listen, if I myself was scared of him at a family party, and I did not feel confident to say anything in any form that could possibly offend him,’ she said, ‘then you can imagine how it must have been for a woman that spent so many years with him. He was a tyrant. What he said was good and the others had to shut up. He was a despot and I hated him.’

Asked what would have happened had Rosemarie challenged Fritzl, Christine said, ‘We don’t know what he would have done to her. Maybe he would have slapped her.’

It never happened. Fritzl had intimidated her far too much for it to come to that. He frequently mocked his wife, put her down and took a sadistic delight in humiliating her in public. ‘He was relaxed and sociable with everyone in the family apart from Rosi,’ said Christine. ‘He used to tell her off in front of the others. The worst things were his crude, dirty jokes, which he used to laugh loudly about. This was embarrassing for everyone, because we all knew they hadn’t had sex with each other for years.’

Rosemarie secretly confided this to friends, but Fritzl was quite open about it. ‘He would always say, “My wife is much too fat for me,”’ said Christine. It was a comment he made regularly to others, often within Rosemarie’s earshot.

She also said the narcissistic Fritzl spent a fortune on a hair transplant after she said he was bald. ‘Josef would be spiteful about my weight, but I would say, “Better to be chubby than bald,”’ Christine said. ‘He is so vain he went to Vienna for a hair transplant.’

The most difficult time for the family came in 1967, when Fritzl was convicted of rape and went to prison for 18 months. Christine is 12 years younger than her sister, and was young and impressionable at the time. ‘I was 16 when he was locked up for rape and I found that crime truly disgusting – all the more so seeing as he already had four children with my sister,’ she said. ‘I have always hated him. He was born a criminal and will die a criminal.’ She could not understand how her sister could take him back.

Despite his protestations of love for Rosemarie, Christine said that Fritzl showed no gratitude for his wife’s tolerance and understanding. Prison had not chastened him and his conviction taught him no humility. Instead, he began to batter and brutalise his family. Rosemarie and their seven children were subjected to regular vicious beatings as he unleashed a relentless reign of terror against his cowering victims. According to a friend, Rosemarie was so desperate that she plotted to flee the monster with her two boys and five girls at least 20 times, but she told her friend that she feared, ‘Josef will hunt us down and drag us back’.

Details of the harrowing home life of Rosemarie and the children were provided by Elfriede Hoera, now 69, who became close to Rosemarie after she and her husband Paul met the Fritzls on a camping trip in 1973. Elfriede said Rosemarie lived in total fear of her husband, whose ‘father was a Nazi stormtrooper who died fighting for Adolf Hitler’. Elfriede said her best friend had told her, ‘We must escape – he has hit me many times and beats the children. He slaps me hard in the face if I don’t do what he wants and he makes the children cry. I can’t stand it any longer – I want to run away from him.’

Fritzl was still working at the time so there was some respite. ‘I am always happy when he is out of the house,’ Rosemarie confided, but she dreaded his return. ‘That swine beats me up – and the children,’ she said. ‘All the time he treats us like rubbish. I really hate the bastard. My marriage is made up of quarrels and arguments. We haven’t had sex for a very long time – though I’m very happy when he doesn’t touch me.’

It seemed to Elfriede that Rosemary had resigned herself to her fate. ‘I must stay for the sake of my children,’ she said. ‘Josef will find us if we all run away.’

Elfriede knew Rosemarie for many years and was in a position to assess how she and the children suffered. ‘Fritzl was a tyrant who terrorised his family,’ she said. ‘He bossed them around and brutalised them like an army officer. I saw him beating his children and Rosemarie told me how he beat her many, many times – too many times for me to remember.’

Elfriede said she also had regular talks with Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth when, as a teenager, she spent three years working as a kitchen helper at a guesthouse they owned. Although Fritzl said Elisabeth was his favourite, this appeared to be belied by his brutal treatment of her. Elfriede recalled, ‘Josef did not like Elisabeth at all and she was a very shy, sad child – not happy at all. I never saw her laugh once and she seemed somehow disturbed.’

But Elfriede failed to find out what the root of the problem was. ‘I tried to get close to her but she never confided in me what was happening to her,’ she said. ‘I once asked her why she was so sad and she just said, “Papa is so dominant and strict.”’

It appeared to Elfriede that Fritzl only liked three of his children – his daughters Gabriele and Ulrike, and his son Josef. The other four – Rosemarie Jr, Doris, Harald and Elisabeth – routinely suffered the full fury of his hate-fuelled rages. ‘Josef was very cruel to them,’ Elfriede said. ‘Rosemarie told me it was common for him to attack them.’

Elfriede witnessed this for herself. ‘When I saw Josef hit his children with his open hand across the face they always burst out in tears,’ she said. ‘I felt so sorry for Rosemarie and her family.’

One day she saw Fritzl drag his daughter Rosemarie from a caravan by the hair before slapping the weeping youngster across the face for disobeying him. There was nothing discreet about his abuse. Elfriede told how she had witnessed Fritzl openly lash out at his children in public outside their home.

‘Josef was driving down the road one night and saw the kids running around,’ she recalled. ‘He stopped the car and got out in the middle of the street and started beating them. It was awful – I heard the screams.’ Elisabeth was also subject to these assaults and had bruises all over her body.

Elfriede, who now lives in Munich, across the border in Germany, said she often asked Rosemarie why Fritzl doted on some of his children while appearing to loathe the others. ‘Rosemarie said she did not know,’ Elfriede recalled. ‘But she once told me, “Ulrike is Josef’s favourite – she is the only one to answer him back.” He seemed to respect that.’

Elfriede even begged Rosemarie to take the kids and run away from the brute who had turned their home into a living hell.

‘I tried to convince her to go but she was helpless,’ she said. ‘She told me she wanted to leave Fritzl – but she knew she could not escape with all seven of her children. She knew Fritzl would hunt them down and drag them back. She stayed in the marriage because of the kids. Many times she told me how she was afraid to stand up to him for fear of being beaten up. And she feared for the safety of the youngsters because he beat them so brutally.’

Mother-of-two Elfriede lost touch with Rosemarie when her own marriage broke up. She and her husband Paul divorced in 1984, some months before Elisabeth’s dungeon ordeal began.

Elfriede later speculated that Rosemarie might have had some inkling that something was going on in the cellar. ‘Rosemarie once told me, “Josef is busy at home at the moment – he has lots of building work to do,”’ Elfriede said. ‘she did not know what he was doing.’

Elfriede is sure that Rosemarie did not know what her husband was up to, because she was too cowed by his brutality even to ask questions.

However, in 1973, Rosemarie plucked up the courage to leave her husband, although she was not allowed to take the children with her. It seems she simply made the excuse that she had to stay at a guesthouse at Mondsee to take care of business there. It was two hours from the family home. Fritzl insisted their seven children stay with him at Ybbsstrasse, although she was allowed to see them occasionally.

Rosemarie’s former colleague Anton Klammer said, ‘Josef beat her and she was petrified of him. She loved her kids but the guest house they owned was a good excuse to leave him. She thought that if she didn’t leave, he may kill her. Rosemarie was happy and normal but when he was around she used to shrink away. You could tell she was terrified of him. The children stayed with Josef because they had to go to school but sometimes he would come up and drop the children off with Rosemarie for a few nights. She was a loving mother.’

Rosemarie had to move back into 40 Ybbsstrasse nine years later when the guesthouse was burnt down. Soon after Fritzl was arrested for arson. A local newspaper published a picture of Fritzl taken at a court hearing in 1982. However, he was released due to lack of evidence.

Beate Schmidinger, the owner of a nearby café, said, ‘Everyone thought he set fire to the place because we knew he had money trouble.’

Despite the appearance of prosperity, it is clear that Fritzl was already badly in debt, but the real motivation for the fire might have been to force Rosemarie to return to Ybbsstrasse, where he could control her.

Paul Ruhdorfer, who took over the guesthouse after it had been restored, said, ‘There were two Rosemaries. One was the owner and competent businesswoman who was happy and carefree. The other was a timid victim, controlled by her overbearing husband.’

While Fritzl was a tyrant, that did not mean he could not enjoy life as well. A friend, who went on holiday with him to Thailand, filmed him having a massage on a beach and cheerfully tucking into a knuckle of roast ham. A home video from this Thailand trip, shown widely on Austrian television, showed Fritzl and a friend from Munich riding on an elephant. The off-camera commentary says, ‘Hey, Sepp, you had better show this to your wife to convince her that we’re on safari, not hunting for humans.’ The police do not believe this was significant. It may simply have been a reference to his predilection for seeking out young Thai prostitutes. However, the remark now appears chilling.

It is clear that Fritzl had, indeed, once hunted humans – his rape victims. Even before his daughter disappeared into the cellar, he could have feasibly perpetrated a series of ghoulish crimes. Despite the removal of his 1967 rape conviction from the record, the Linz police now believe he was a suspect in two other sex attacks, in 1974 and 1982. He was also investigated for arson and insurance fraud on more than one occasion and there are indications that he had at least one other conviction. However, once again, the records have been expunged and the authorities said they were unable to give further details of the crime.

‘I don’t know what happened then,’ said District Governor Hans-Heinz Lenze. ‘It happened too long ago. It’s beyond the statute of limitations and it’s therefore no longer of relevance to the authorities.’

Along with Austria’s laws governing the lapsing of criminal records for the purpose of rehabilitating criminals, Fritzl has also been the beneficiary of an informal ‘Masonic’ network that has brought ‘good chaps’ with murky pasts back into main-stream respectability. Without a de-Nazification programme, a large number of former Nazis – some of whom were involved in the concentration camps or implicated in the Holocaust or other atrocities – managed to find their way back into society. As a result, it was usually best not to ask too many personal questions. Austrian diplomat Kurt Waldheim, for example, had served two terms as Secretary General of the United Nations and was standing for election for the Austrian presidency when it was revealed that he had not been studying law at the University of Vienna during the war as he claimed. Instead, he had been with a German unit in the Balkans that took brutal reprisals against Yugoslav partisans and shot civilians, and was responsible for the deportation of the Jews from Salonika in Greece to the death camps in 1943. Nevertheless, he won the election and served for six years as President.

In Fritzl’s case, the Austrian unwillingness to ask questions may have covered up some more recent crimes. On 22 November 1986, 17-year-old Martina Posch was found dead on the southern shore of Mondsee Lake, opposite the Fritzls’ guesthouse and camping ground near Salzburg. Two divers found Martina’s naked body, bound and wrapped in two green plastic sheets, ten days after she had gone missing from her home. She was thought to have been raped and murdered before her body was dumped in the lake.

No one was arrested. Fritzl’s best friend, Paul Hoera, who first met him at Mondsee on a camping holiday with his wife, Rosemarie’s friend Elfriede, in 1973, said he made regular trips to the lake and could have been in the area when Martina went missing. Since Fritzl hit the headlines, the police made the connection between the two cases and Martina Posch’s 22-year-old murder file has been re-opened. A pretty 17-year-old, Martina bore a striking resemblance to Elisabeth who, by then, had already been in captivity for over two years.

‘We have found no sign of a concrete link up to now,’ said Alois Lissl, Chief of Police of Upper Austria province, but he said Fritzl would be questioned about the murder as he could have been in the area when Martina was killed.

Although Fritzl was no longer co-operating with the police, he had claimed earlier that he had an alibi for the day Martina Posch was killed and dumped in the lake. This has yet to be tested in court, but his close friend Andrea Schmitt said that her husband was staying at Lake Mondsee at the time – and she believes Fritzl was there, too.

The police were also hoping to find a DNA match, and they searched Fritzl’s house for the murdered girl’s missing possessions, which include a blue jacket, a grey purse and a pair of black ankle boots.

‘The perpetrator could have kept these items as a kind of trophy,’ said Police Chief Lissl, adding, ‘What really stands out is that, without her permanent wave, Martina looks similar to Fritzl’s daughter Elisabeth. When we put the portrait photographs next to each other, it was unbelievable.’

The artist’s drawing of Elisabeth published so far bears little similarity to the only photographs of Martina released to date. Observers say Elisabeth now looks more like the sister of her mother, Rosemarie, who is 69. However, a black-and-white snap of Elisabeth as a smiling teenager and a colour picture of her as a 14-year-old secondary school pupil are said to bear an uncanny resemblance.

Austrian police are also investigating the possibility that Fritzl was involved in another unsolved sexually-motivated murder of a teenager in the 1960s. In 1966, prior to Fritzl’s first conviction for rape, the body of 17-year-old Anna Neumauer was found in a cornfield near her home in Pfaffstaett bei Mattinghofen in Lower Austria, 65 miles from Amstetten. She had been killed with a captive bolt pistol, the type used for slaughtering livestock.

The police are reviewing the case of 16-year-old Julia Kuehrer, who disappeared from Pulkau, 60 miles from Amstetten, in June 2006, and they are also looking for any possible connection between Fritzl and the murder of Gabriele Supekova, a 42-year-old prostitute, whose body was found in August 2007 near the Austrian border, where Fritzl is said to have spent time on holiday.

It may be that the police are just trying to write off their unsolved cases. On the other hand, Fritzl might have been conducting a parallel career as a serial killer. It is not unknown for criminals to progress from minor crimes such as flashing or theft, via rape to murder – and, in this case, possibly, to incest, imprisonment and enslavery.

After his arrest, Fritzl condemned the media coverage of his case, saying that he could have killed the family he kept in the cellar, but he didn’t. For those who have not killed before, surely this is a daunting prospect – particularly if the victim is your own flesh and blood. Perhaps he knew that he really could kill his dungeon captives because he had already killed elsewhere. He was plainly a man who placed little value on the lives of others – whether they were strangers or his own flesh and blood.