Fritzl Watch: Josef Fritzl’s Hitler Youth, Running Of the Jews And Burgenland Bombs
FRITZL Watch: Anorak’s look at Josef Fritzl, Elisabeth Fritzl, Nazis and assorted Frtizls in the news
THE SUN (front page): “Dungeon kids are suffering like POWs”
Do mention the war.
DAILY RECORD: “JOSEF Fritzl’s cellar children are afraid of the colour blue, rustling leaves and noisy traffic after spending their entire lives underground.”
Zees are ein few of zeer (least) favourite things. Blue? Surely brown, black and feldgrau?
THE GUARDIAN: “How many more of our missing are stuck in some underground prison?”
There’s also the curious case of a town mayor poisoned by a praline filled with strychnine, and the case of Franz Fuchs, a neo-nazi who hid bombs in bilingual schools and blew up four Roma from the Burgenland region in 1995.
Initially, it might look as if there is no common basis to these cases, beyond the first two. But these crimes reveal much about Austrian society.
Just when you thought it vas safe to go into ze woods…
Austrians are worried that on their next holiday, someone might ask them if everyone in Austria has sex with relatives. They feel guilty – something they didn’t do after the last war nor after the Burgenland bombs.
THE INDEPENDENT: “Josef Fritzl: The making of a monster”
Fritzl was born in 1935 and would have been four years old at the start of the Second World War. It was not clear whether he lost his father during the war, but, when the war ended, he would, as a nine-year-old, have experienced first hand the invasion of Austria by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. Reports in the Austrian media have claimed that as a child he “suffered badly” during this post-war occupation which was notorious for the high incidence of rape perpetrated by Russian soldiers on civilian German and Austrian women.
The haus ist ein pill box:
However the back of the house which was extended out to include Fritzl’s notorious cellar, looks not unlike the kind of massive Second World War above-ground bunkers that were built by the Nazis to withstand air raids.
DAILY TELEGRPAH – Simon Heffer: “What else does Austria have up its sleeve?”
Or on them?
I don’t want to get into the habit of attacking our continental partners – I was, of course, pained to read in our letters column the complaint of the Italian ambassador about my calling his banana republic of a country a banana republic – but I do feel compelled to ask one question in particular this week: what is it with the Austrians?
Yeah, what is it with Austrians?
We had just about come to terms with the fact that this one little nation produced, in short order, Adolf Hitler, Kurt Waldheim, and The Sound of Music, and seems still – 63 years after they cleaned out the ovens of Auschwitz – to have anti-semitism as one of its national sports.
Like Kazakhstan, but with ruddier cheeks, felt hats and cellars.
Now a barbarian of Hitlerian proportions locks up his daughter in a cellar, fathers seven children by her, and (in a peculiarly Nazi touch) threatens to gas any who try to escape: this coming a year after another girl was found after being locked in another cellar for six years. What else are they hiding underground? Is Hitler really dead?
NEW YORK TIMES: “Dungeons & Austrians”
While the world at large (or at least the world’s press) is endeavoring to identify which peculiarly Austrian traits made the Josef Fritzl case possible, Viennese acquaintances of mine are busily discussing the case in regional terms, as a specifically Lower Austrian species of nightmare. At this very moment, no doubt, the residents of Ludwigsdorf, the next town over to Amstetten, are comforting themselves with the fact that such a crime has never happened there, and they’re perfectly right.
Not yet, at least. Not as far as anybody knows.
Austria calling…
Posted: 3rd, May 2008 | In: Broadsheets, Tabloids Comments (27) | TrackBack | Permalink
