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  For Maria and her mother it was to be a period of bitter hardship, but times were hard for everyone. In 1933, just as Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party was entering government in Germany, in Austria power was seized by the Front of the Fatherland, a conglomeration of the country’s conservative and national parties, anti-Semitic, totalitarian, and besotted by Mussolini’s achievements in Italy. After a civil insurrection in 1934 had been swiftly crushed, the Front dissolved Parliament and all other democratic institutions, banned rival political parties, and forced many Jews to resign from state-owned companies and the civil service. Opponents of the regime were sent to specially built prisons that were inspired in their design and purpose by the new complexes already being constructed in Germany. The first of these camps, Wollersdorf, used for political prisoners, occupied an abandoned munitions factory thirty miles from Amstetten and was modeled on a camp that had been recently opened by the chief of the Munich police, Heinrich Himmler, just outside the Bavarian medieval town of Dachau.

  Austria was torn apart by social discontent, hyperinflation, rampant xenophobia, and massive unemployment—a quarter of the population were jobless. Among them were Maria and her mother. But the collapsing economy did at least mean there were plenty of drifters requiring cheap accommodation, and although to Maria it seemed almost a crime to have to turn the family home into a doss-house, put locks on the doors, and rent out her grandparents’ rooms to strangers, the house was their only resource. To supplement the rent, she was forced to leave Ybbsstrasse and seek employment in the kind of household that she felt her own should have been.

  In 1934 Maria began a relationship with, though never married, a man named Josef, about whom we know very little except that he was poor. Maria made no attempt to disguise her motive in seeking this union. She needed to correct the humiliation that had ruined her life and the life of her adoptive mother. She needed proof of her womanhood, and she craved vengeance on the men who had brought her to this pass. To her astonishment, she quickly fell pregnant. The child, born in the house in Ybbsstrasse on April 9, 1935, was a boy. Although Maria had taken the name of her first husband and would be known throughout her life as Nenning, the baby bore his grandmother’s maiden name.

  Thus Josef Fritzl, an “uneheliches Kind” like his mother, entered the world.

  As far as his mother was concerned, he had fulfilled his purpose on the day he was born. Maria had gloried in her pregnancy but was overburdened by the demands of motherhood; hugs and kisses were beyond her and when Josef cried or soiled his diaper or appealed to his mother for comfort, she would panic and slip into apathy, leaving the child screaming and filthy. Josef, Maria told his father as soon as the boy was born, was merely an “alibi child,” a vindication and nothing more. “How could you have thought I loved you?” she taunted him.

  So Josef Fritzl was born just a few years before the beginning of the Second World War, in a collapsing society, to a loveless mother who gave birth to him out of spite and a father who would gradually fade from his life.

  He was born into a town of 990 houses and 9,300 souls—a town where jobs were so scarce that men were joining the army to fend off starvation. He was born on a street that was still a dust road, running north-south between the town hall and the River Ybbs, now heavily polluted with the waste of a pulp mill whose chimneys belched noxious yellowish fumes that could be smelled for miles. He was born in a town whose mayor, Hans Holler, was the chairman of the local anti-Semitic league, and where the local newspaper, the Amstettner Anzeiger, had been founded by a member of Austria’s own pre-Anschluss National Socialist Party and staked out Jewish businesses in order to splash photographs of their customers across its pages: “The farmer Franz Reiter from Neustadl has obviously not yet heard of Aryan shoemakers!”

  Josef was not quite three years old when, on March 12, 1938, Hitler’s troops rolled over the border from Germany into Austria, entering Amstetten the same day. This was the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Greater Germany. Three days later Hitler entered Vienna and was greeted by an ecstatic crowd of up to one million people, by some accounts. That same week the Nazis held a plebiscite and 99.7 percent of Austrians voted to join the Third Reich. No fighting ever took place, and Austria effectively ceased to exist as an independent nation. Outside Austria the Anschluss caused little concern among the world’s leading powers. “After all,” shrugged the Times in London, “Scotland also joined England.” In May of that year the Amstettner Anzeiger was proud to report that “the town swimming pool and sun-bath declares that Jews are banned from entering. Now we only have to get rid of the mosquitoes from our pool for it to become really ideal!”

  Hans Holler was replaced by a new mayor, a pharmacist and passionate Nazi named Wolfgang Mitterdorfer, who immediately set about transforming the town. Mitterdorfer aspired to turn Amstetten into a Führerstadt, an honourable title by which the Nazis conferred special status on cities in the Third Reich. He announced plans to build a “town fortress,” a vast, rambling, neoclassical structure that would comprise a theater, social housing, an event hall, and the headquarters of the Hitler Youth. In and around Ybbsstrasse new schools and “body-training centers” were built, and for young children a puppet theater where traditional fairy tales were interpreted along Nazi lines. Josef Fritzl was among the children invited to the first night, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm story “The Devil’s Golden Hair” featuring new characters: a Policeman, a Mayor, a Jew, a “Churchill,” and an Englishman.

  By the summer of 1938 Mitterdorfer was able to declare that all twenty-eight of Amstetten’s Jews had been expelled. The town was officially “free of Jews.” War came a year later, when Josef Fritzl was four. Decades later he could still remember the terrible day when his father, conscripted into the Wehrmacht, had to leave for the Eastern Front, and how his mother’s face had shown only relief.

  As the tide of the Second World War started to turn against the Axis powers, the blessing of Amstetten’s location became a curse. The main railways supplying both Germany and Italy intersected in the town, so it was in the crosshairs of the Allied bombers. Mitterdorfer, always the keen planner, began to construct a vast network of underground bunkers in the hills surrounding the town. These bunkers were essentially long corridors tunneled deep into the hillsides of the Mostviertel. Great molehills of rubble and sand, evidence of their hasty excavation, were heaped at their entrances; because urination and defecation were strictly banned under the bunkers’ house rules, these served the evacuees as toilets. Inside, it was unheated and unventilated, dark, cold, and always stuffy; people fainted frequently. The only furnishings were a handful of benches donated by the Red Cross, while a smattering of electric lights saved the inhabitants from complete darkness. But when the first Allied bombs fell on Amstetten on November 19, 1944, the town was ready.

  From that day on the sirens sounded almost continuously and the people of Amstetten found themselves spending days, not hours, in their shelters. Twelve thousand bombs would be dropped on the town over the next six months: more bombs than inhabitants. There were times when almost the entire population was hiding beneath the surface. The first person in after the sirens began to wail might gain a precious seat; others either sat on the ground or never left the house without a chair that they would haul in with them, along with a suitcase containing their most important possessions: passports, jewelry, money, marriage certificates, ownership deeds, canned food.

  But Maria was a strange and solitary woman who had become obsessive about the house. She refused to leave it even during an air raid; she ignored the sirens that sent the other inhabitants of 40 Ybbsstrasse scurrying underground. Josef would be swept along with the other lodgers and refugees living in the house to the safety of the bunkers while his mother sat grimly in her kitchen, prepared to face death in her home rather than emerge from a bunker to find it obliterated. Certainly she didn’t have enough maternal feeling to accompany her son to the shelters, and that winter Josef
spent many days separated from her, feeling alternately terrified and protected: scared of what might be happening to his mother aboveground; secure in the bunker below. It wasn’t the worst feeling of his childhood: For an eight-year-old boy, a bunker could be a secret world, a safe place his mother would never come to, a place of shelter, and a chance to play with children his age.

  The house in Ybbsstrasse had been fully occupied throughout the war, but now, as refugees poured into Austria from the north and east, landlords were required to provide shelter to whoever might need it. Number 40 was overflowing with people: Families were living in the corridors and sleeping on the stairs at night. As starving hordes of Austrians and Germans fleeing the Russian advance overwhelmed the town, Maria was ordered to take in even more lodgers. It was too much for her; she refused and was reported to the authorities. Early one morning the security forces arrived at the house and ordered Maria to get into the back of a truck, and while Josef wept at the doorway, his mother was driven away to Mauthausen-Gusen, one of the worst of the Nazis’ extermination camps.

  Josef spent the final months of the war in an orphanage, from which he attempted to escape on at least one occasion, climbing aboard a train bound for Amstetten and hiding beneath a bench. When police discovered him, they told the ten-year-old Josef that his mother was dead.

  Thirty miles from Amstetten, the sparsely populated area outside Mauthausen, a pretty Austrian town tucked into a hairpin bend of the Danube, was the site of one of the Nazis’ most ambitious projects. Prisoners from the concentration camp at Dachau had been sent to build an even larger facility where political prisoners could be held. Although it was controlled by the German state, Mauthausen, which had, by 1944, been twinned with the nearby German camp of Gusen, was conceived as a private company. This commercial enterprise was founded by DEST, a German mining company that was soon buying up land around the granite quarries that had originally served to pave the streets of Vienna. When war arrived and the number of political prisoners suddenly exploded, Mauthausen-Gusen’s investors realized that it could be put to far more lucrative use as a labor camp whose inmates would work for free in the quarries or be hired out to local manufacturers and farmers. Soon Mauthausen-Gusen controlled more than fifty satellite camps throughout Austria, two of which were just outside Amstetten. The prisoners held in these two camps cost very little to keep and were easy to transport there because of Amstetten’s convenient position on the railway network. In addition, the labor force was unique in that the supply of workers was inexhaustible, and when a prisoner’s productivity dropped at either of the camps, he or she would simply be transported to Mauthausen-Gusen and killed.

  The place became a hugely profitable death camp, the Nazis’ biggest. The only camp designated Grade III (“for the incorrigible political enemies of the Reich”), it was underpinned by the twin principles of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“Extermination through Work”) and Riickkebr Unerwünscht (“Return Undesirable”). The slave laborers of Mauthausen-Gusen were responsible for the construction of Austria’s largest steelworks, in Linz: the Reichswerke Hermann Goering. Many smaller businesses also profited. Steyr munitions, an Austrian arms company; Puch automobiles; and Osterreichische Sauerwerks, the largest employer in Amstetten—all built their businesses with the slave labor of Mauthausen-Gusen. In 1943 life expectancy in the camp was six months; by the end of the war it was three.

  In comparison with Mauthausen-Gusen, “one could almost say those [other] camps were paradises,” to quote a Jewish survivor. But the Nazis’ definition of “incorrigible political enemies of the Reich” extended far beyond Jews, and Maria found herself incarcerated with communists, socialists, a troop of Polish boy scouts, homosexuals, Romanies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Spanish republicans who had fled Franco: a microcosm of conquered Europe. Although it is not known exactly what happened to Maria in the months she was there, we can be sure that she witnessed and was subjected to horrors. It was a place of inconceivable barbarism whose secrecy liberated its masters into a horrific inventiveness.

  In the privacy of the camp the guards learned to conduct experiments: to find out what happened, for example, when they herded a group of inmates onto a cliff top and gave them the choice of being shot or pushing another prisoner off the edge. They would throw people, some of them children, down the side of a quarry that they nicknamed “the Parachute Wall,” the joke being that the prisoners had no parachutes. In the camp’s gas chambers, quarries, hospitals, isolation units, and crematoria, in its underground brothel, and on its dissecting tables, a creative degeneracy blossomed.

  On May 5, 1945, Mauthausen was liberated by the 41st Reconnaissance Squad of the U.S. Eleventh Armored Division. In total the Mauthausen-Gusen complex of camps was found to contain 85,000 inmates, and the death toll is thought to have been around 320,000. Among those liberated were Simon Wiesenthal, later to become the world’s most assiduous Nazi hunter, and Maria Nenning.

  Three days later, on May 8, the war in Europe came to an end. Its last shots were fired in Amstetten. When the German High Command surrendered in Berlin, SS troops guarding the labor camps were still fiercely resisting Allied forces; in one last air raid, Russian bombers obliterated the railway junction so thoroughly that it was referred to for years afterward as “the ploughed field.” At two that afternoon the commanders of the Russian and American troops shook hands in the town square, officially marking the end of the war. Four days later Wolfgang Mitteldorfer, Amstetten’s mayor, was found dead in his vacation home in Gmunden, overdosed on sleeping pills. And Josef Fritzl was miraculously reunited with a mother he had thought was dead.

  Possibly Maria had been raped as well as starved and frequently beaten or even tortured. She returned to the house in Ybbsstrasse, and those who came across her at this time described her as a small, unsmiling, friendless woman who never discussed herself with her lodgers. Whenever possible she avoided talking to them at all, communicating with silent nods or rapid-fire blurtings.

  Maria was desperately poor and always wore the same clothes: a pinafore smock over a dark dress, a pair of rubber boots, and a black headscarf or a dirty straw hat, sometimes both. The frightening impression she made, particularly on the tenants’ children, was intensified after she lost her eye in a fight with one of the tenants. After that, she always kept it covered with either her hand or a scarf, or later with a patch worn behind a pair of thick-lensed glasses: a figure out of a Dostoyevsky novel. Only very occasionally did she leave the house, and when she did it was usually to sit aimlessly among the rubble and weeds of her garden. Nobody else was allowed there, and she would fly into a rage if any of her tenants, even the children, dared to trespass. Gardens weren’t playgrounds; as far as the landlady was concerned, the children could play in the street.

  Number 40 had never been a pretty house, but by the end of the war it had become one of the ugliest buildings in Ybbsstrasse: a gloomy, damp, dilapidated wreck with no proper toilets and holes in its internal walls, its old ochre paint peeling off in gashes that exposed the crumbling brickwork. Inside the house, everything was either broken or falling apart; the electricity and plumbing had been badly installed, and bandaged and rusty pipes and cables trailed along the floors at odd angles, dripping or spluttering. The windows were nearly opaque with grime, and the whole place gave off a smell of mold that seeped into the clothes and hair of all who lived there. It was now carved up into four dwellings: a two-room ground-floor apartment on either side of the front door and two upstairs. Maria and Josef lived in the larger upstairs apartment at the back, looking onto the garden. The small outhouse for washing, containing a basin and a cold-water tap, and the bespattered and often blocked squat-toilet were shared. Yet despite the stench and the appalling condition of the house, it wasn’t hard to find lodgers, for Amstetten was full of poor railway workers and times continued to be hard. Besides, anti-inflationary measures aimed at landlords prevented Maria from either increasing the rent or evicting tenants, so some f
amilies remained in the apartments for more than a decade, avoiding as much as they could their bitter, silently furious, one-eyed landlady, a woman profoundly disturbed by her experiences in Mauthausen-Gusen.

  After Maria’s return, the punishments she inflicted on her son seem to have gained a new imaginativeness. Slaps were no longer enough and now she used her fists and her booted feet—once she kicked him in the face until he bled all over the floor. Sometimes when Josef was disobedient, whether by accident or by childish design, he was made to sleep outside in the garden. Sometimes he was tied to his bed. A favourite punishment was Scheitelknien, a disciplinary practice that was still legal in parts of Austria and Germany. Children were made to kneel on the angle of a piece of wood so that the sharp edge was painful, and an hour on the board was considered normal. Maria kept her plank in the kitchen, using it often; there was plenty to punish. The child was too hungry, too clingy, too stupid. Too expensive, too, with the rate at which he grew out of his clothes. Obsessed with the story of his conception, she continually aimed her old refrain at him: “I only got pregnant to prove a point!” And over and over she would relive her disappointment at discovering his sex: “A boy!” she would say. “And the very image of his useless father.”

  The intensity of their relationship was more like that of a couple than a parent and child. They had no other family. Maria never found out the identity of her biological mother, and her foster mother was dead; her abusive father was nothing more than a memory, she had broken contact with her two half siblings, and Josef’s father was still being held in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp—which suited her fine. Although she instinctively disliked Josef and treated him appallingly, she also clung to him. A jealous parent, she pushed him away and reeled him back in, monopolized him. She was working in farmers’ households in the countryside, and as a result little Josef spent a lot of time on his own in the crumbling house. But at home, his mother would shout at him or slap him or pretend he wasn’t there, and the next thing he knew she was sobbing in a heap, extracting promises from him that he would never leave her. Even in her most violent tantrums she was terrified of his rejection. Would he abandon her like the others had? He was already eleven, and she was paranoid that he was slipping through her fingers. Still a religious woman, she took him to church every Sunday to impress on him the consequences of sin. “You’re a criminal,” she would accuse him, “a criminal that needs to be watched.” She claimed she could see the devil when she looked into his face.