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  But he was growing bolder, more reckless. He began to follow women, or wait for them to cross his path, before stepping out of his hiding place. One day, in one of the “spontaneous” acts that would characterize Josefs entire sexual life, he did something that shocked even him. He saw a woman, stepped into her path, and revealed himself. Solitary and one-sided, these were Josef Fritzl’s first sexual experiences. He was sixteen.

  Many years in the future, only Friedrich Leimlehner would be able to look back on this period of time—their “idyllic” (Dunkl’s word) childhood—and remember anything concrete about the young Josef that might have indicated the direction his life would later take. To Leimlehner, Josef loved “dirty jokes—he was never the initiator but the kind of boy who laughed too long when one was made and then somehow managed to keep the conversation focused on the subject.” Nobody really noticed that anything odd was obscured behind the exterior of the ambitious young man. Here was a person, they felt sure, who had overcome the disadvantages of his deprived childhood to go on and make something of himself. Josef had exceeded his teachers’ expectations in the three years since his former headmaster had taken him under his wing. At age sixteen he finished school, one of the few among his classmates to go on to further education. Behind his mother’s back he enrolled in a two-year evening course in engineering, and he supported himself with a day job in metalwork. In 1951 he left Amstetten for the very first time. His destination was Linz.

  Just twenty miles south of the border to what was then Czechoslovakia, Linz is Austria’s third largest city, a prosperous place that had fallen into the American zone during the occupation. Unlike Amstetten, where people subsisted on food vouchers until the mid-1950s, Linz had Hershey chocolate, Winston cigarettes, and a thriving black market. It was one of the few places in Austria whose economy had survived the trauma of war. Linz owed much of its comparative prosperity to Hitler, who grew up there. Hitler had earmarked his home town for rapid industrialization; whole factories, mainly chemical and metal-manufacturing plants, had been dismantled brick by brick in conquered Czechoslovakia, loaded onto trains, and reassembled in Linz. At the heart of this economic powerhouse were the city’s steelworks, built with slave labor in 1938 and named the Reichswerke Hermann Goering, in honour of Hitler’s putative successor. When the war ended, the plant continued as one of the region’s largest employers, and in 1952 the American occupation authorities renamed it. Reichswerke Hermann Goering became Vereinigte Osterreichische Eisen- und Stahlwerke AG, or VOEST.

  In Linz he had found lodgings in a Catholic home for boys, Don Bosco, and, through a local job center, he was taken on as an apprentice at the engineering firm Hüner und Ziegler, where he learned to design farming machinery and for which he was paid thirty schillings a month. But he was always aimed at VOEST. It was only natural that Josef Fritzl, who was now proving himself to be a diligent, even gifted, worker with a flair for the construction of machines, would be drawn to the possibility of working for one of Austria’s most rapidly expanding and successful businesses. VOEST had interests in faraway places like Africa and Brazil. Four years passed without any particularly memorable incidents. He felt exceptionally proud when, in 1956, the company gave him his first real job.

  Although excelling professionally, he still lagged behind in his personal life. It was usual in 1950s Austria for young men to be married by their early twenties. He was nineteen and had never even had a girlfriend, and stood little chance of finding one in the technical department of an engineering company. But early in 1956 he accepted an invitation from a colleague at VOEST to a party in Linz, hosted by a lively, middle-aged couple and their three teenage daughters, Christine, Erna, and Rosemarie.

  The Bayers had moved to Austria from what was then Czechoslovakia; they were among the German minority expelled from that country when the communists took power. Their party was largely a family affair—an assortment of cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and their various children—and had an atmosphere vastly different from anything Josef had ever experienced at home. The second-youngest daughter, sixteen-year-old Rosemarie, a quiet girl with a tomboyish physique and not, by all accounts, the assertive type, spotted Josef the minute he entered the room, and something about this handsome, distant young man must have lent her the courage to be bold. It was Rosemarie who asked Josef to dance, and she who initiated their first kiss.

  The courtship was straightforward enough, as courtships tended to be in those days. For their first outing he took her to the cinema in Linz. Rosemarie sensed his ambition and felt fortunate to have met a man of such intelligence and drive. In return she could offer herself to him as a traditional wife and homemaker; she cooked well and would accept without question her husband as the head of the household. She understood that he had very firm ideas about marriage, that he wanted a large family, that he was keen to take on the role of the reliable patriarch, never abandoning his children as his father had done. He and Rosemarie wanted the same things: to have a lot of children and do well for themselves. In June 1956 they were married.

  Financially it wasn’t an easy start to a marriage. The young couple moved into one of the two-bedroom apartments in Ybbsstrasse, where the rent was cheapest. Josef would continue to work at VOEST in Linz, where he lived with Rosemarie’s parents during the week, returning to Amstetten each weekend. And to supplement his income—and pay Maria, who still relied on her tenants’ rent for her livelihood—Rosemarie worked in a bakery. Amstetten, although still a backwater, now boasted a bank, its own symphony orchestra, and even its own cultural week, the Amstettner Kulturwoche, during which various municipal buildings hosted art exhibitions and concerts and plays were staged. But the house at 40 Ybbsstrasse remained as squalid as ever.

  Josef and Rosemarie lived on the second floor. Their two-bedroom apartment was flanked on the left by a two-bedroom apartment rented by a young couple, the Kaisers, and on the right by a small one-room apartment where an elderly widow, Frau Klammer, lived on her own. On the ground floor Friedrich Setz, a poor widower and laborer who later found moderately better-paid work in an insurance firm, lived in the two-room apartment to the left of the front door with his young sons, Peter and Friedrich. The apartment to the right of this was let out to Peter and Aloisia Berger and their son. Back on the second floor another apartment with its view onto Ybbsstrasse was occupied by the Kaisers and their three daughters, Elvira, Gudrun, and Judith. Also on this floor, Maria still lived in her apartment overlooking the garden. The house had not been improved since the war and would remain in a dilapidated state for another decade. There was only one tap, and the tenants would bathe and wash their clothes and dishes only once a week with water heated up over the stove in a large tin bucket. The ground-floor toilet was still a pit latrine in the garden; upstairs the toilets were holes without flushes connected to pipes that fed into the outhouse, the waste washed down with water from a pail.

  Maria much preferred her daughter-in-law to her son, and they got on tolerably well. But, in her manipulative way, she was using Rosemarie as an excuse to stop talking to Josef. When Josef wanted anything at all from his mother, she would pretend not to hear, so he would have to put the question to his wife, who would in turn ask Maria. In this way ordinary, everyday communication between mother and son virtually ceased. They lived in the same house, on the same floor, but rarely spoke to each other.

  But Josef and Rosemarie’s relationship remained good. He was overjoyed when, on June 17, 1957, she gave birth to their first child, a girl, whom they christened Ulrike. Just under three years later, on May 11, 1960, the couple’s second child was born, another daughter, and they named her after her mother. That second pregnancy was complicated. But Rosemarie was adamant that she would have more children, so she ignored the doctor’s advice and her husband’s misgivings; on September 7, 1963, the couple’s first son, Harald Gunther, was born.

  The second half of the 1950s was a period of rapid and exciting change in Austria—the beginning of
the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, or Economic Miracle. Finally there were signs of a better life ahead. After a decade of occupation, Soviet, British, American, and French forces were withdrawn, and on May 15, 1955, Austria became a sovereign state. The Austrian State Treaty had banned Austria from forming another union with Germany, and Nazi and fascist organizations were outlawed. But unlike the Germans, who were undergoing a difficult period of self-examination and guilt about the Second World War, Austrians wasted little time castigating themselves for their recent past. Their lack of accountability had been formally ratified by postwar propaganda in which the Allied powers had declared Austria to be a victim, rather than an accomplice, of Nazi aggression. By the 1950s the unspoken consensus in Austria was that most of its citizens had been unaware of the crimes committed during the Third Reich and that only individual Austrians could be judged for their actions. While Germany prepared to pay millions in reparations and restitution, its neighbour went about the task of restoring its self-image while cultivating itself as a victim nation. As it elevated its small wartime resistance movement to an heroic scale, Austria also focused on the atrocities committed by the Russians. Any mention of either the country’s delirious admiration for Hitler during the Anschluss or the complicity of its citizens in the atrocities that followed was considered irrelevant and in bad taste.

  So the cream of Austrian politics and society remained largely unchanged. High-ranking former Nazis formed part of the new establishment after the war and became members of the two most prominent political groupings, the Social Democratic Party and the People’s Party, the second being the new incarnation of the old Christian Social Party, which had changed very little except its name. Former Nazis continued their lives and careers uninterrupted by prison sentences or even demotions. Among these were men such as Dr. Heinrich Gross, a leading Austrian psychiatrist and medical doctor, who had personally killed at least nine disabled children at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Gross was a veteran Nazi Party member but, because he had been captured by the Red Army after the war, was unavailable to be tried at Nurem berg in the late 1940s. On his return from the Soviet Union he was convicted for manslaughter in an Austrian court, but his sentence was overturned on a technicality. He joined and became a trusted member of the Social Democrats and returned to Am Spiegelgrund, where he became chief physician and used the preserved brains of children that he had ordered to be killed during the war as the basis for his research. By the 1950s he was carving out a reputation for himself as one of the best-known and best-paid psychiatric court experts in the country.

  In Amstetten the Anzeiger became an organ of the Social Democratic Party. Its former publisher, Josef Rahmhart, cleared of charges of collaborating with the Nazi regime, bought the printing plant that produced the newspaper and became close to the Social Democrats.

  Josef’s career at VOEST was progressing well. In 1958 he was made a full-time employee, working as an electrical engineer in the division responsible for the design of cranes, lathes, and other construction machines. His achievements within the company had given him confidence, and all traces of the awkward, unhappy-looking boy he had once been were disappearing. He walked taller now, had an excellent posture, and wore a blue suit set off with a canary-yellow shirt. He was vain, there was no doubt, and a new expression took over his face, one of light irony; his lopsided grin looked, according to a friend, as if it were saying, “The situation, although hopeless, isn’t serious.”

  He liked to go about his business alone and put no effort into maintaining his old school friendships. People who knew him around this time describe him as a respectable, almost impressive-looking man, a real “sir.”

  VOEST was a great innovator in its field; in 1952 it had patented a process involving the use of oxygen in the manufacture of steel and became a commercial giant. By the 1960s the company had expanded worldwide, building and maintaining steelworks and ironworks, as well as other plants, in countries including France, Italy, Poland, the USSR, Brazil, India, and parts of Africa. The future looked exciting for both the company and its employees. Josef was seen as an up-and-coming young manager; he continued to pursue his studies at a technical school in his spare time. Company business had taken him to Vienna, then Luxembourg for eight months in 1962, and now it was felt he was ready to oversee a project at their new plant in the newly independent Ghana. Fritzl was delighted to be chosen. Not only would his income double, but his food and accommodation would be paid for. After seven years of marriage and three children, and having lived his whole life in Austria, he found his first taste of Africa exhilarating, disorienting, but full of promise. During the eighteen months he spent there, Josef did not return to see his wife and there were no telecommunications. He was completely cut off from his family and, like many of his colleagues, had a series of short “sexual experiences.” In many ways he was a fastidious man. He prided himself on the fact that while working abroad he never had sex with prostitutes, instead having what he called “affairs” with local women to whom he would give gifts of food or money. They were the “normal” extramarital affairs of a man away from home for a long time.

  But when he returned home in 1965, the first cracks in his marriage began to show. It was hard to tell what exactly had changed. Rosemarie was lonely, unhappy, and overburdened raising three children. And the children, now eight, five, and two, had forgotten him and regarded him with suspicion and a little fear. Perhaps he had become used to living the life of a bachelor and being waited on by servants. Perhaps he felt that, having improved his family’s financial circumstances, he deserved their love and respect. Failing to get it, he became violent and would resort to the same disciplinary tools that his mother had used: Scheitelknien. He felt shut out by his wife, who seemed to him entirely preoccupied by her children and, soon, by a fourth pregnancy. Josef hated fat women, and pregnancy made Rosie fatter. The old feelings of loneliness and self pity returned with a vengeance : “If you don’t do what I say,” he would threaten his wife, “it will only get worse.” His sister-in-law Christine had never liked him, and now she decided that his attitude toward his wife and children could only be described as “despotic.”

  Into this volatile household now came the couple’s fourth child. She was born on April 8, 1966. They called her Elisabeth.

  By 1967 many of the Mostviertel’s pear trees had been felled in what was known as the “Clearing of the Fruit Gardens” to make space for industrially grown crops. In Amstetten, every household now had water, gas, and electricity on tap. Two large construction companies, which had in Nazi times relied on forced labor, now became profitable again thanks to the growing influx of foreign workers, lured by the Austrian government from Turkey and Yugoslavia. Amstetten became both uglier and livelier. Roads were resurfaced, the town square was given over to parking, and Ybbsstrasse became a major artery leading out to the Westautobahn, the motorway that connected Vienna and Linz. The town’s biggest dance hall, the Schillhuber Gasthof, opened at number 15, where government-sponsored parties, resembling conservative balls, were held for the town’s youth. Even the fourteenth-century, gothic-steepled church of St. Stephan, which had given Kirchenstrasse its name, tried to engage the interest of a new generation of young people by hosting jazz evenings in its public hall.

  Although some of the big events of the 1960s passed Austria by—protests against the Vietnam War, widespread drug use—the sexual revolution did not. Women embraced their new freedoms, shocking traditionalists, and were blamed, along with jazz and pop and a growing lack of interest in religion among the young, for the rising number of sexual attacks on young women. And there was no denying that it was a problem; the late 1960s would mark the peak of violence against women in twentieth-century Austria. The case that most deeply shocked Amstetten in 1967 was the rape and murder of Rosa Laimlehner, a forty-one-year-old mother of ten, by a twenty-year-old apprentice electrician in the nearby town of Ansfelden. The attack was shocking
enough to be featured prominently in the regional press—an article by a Dr. Schneider in the Linz-based Oberösterreichische Nachrichten newspaper gives a flavour of the contemporary responses: “There have always been murders and sex murders,” Dr. Schneider wrote. “But it seems that the numbers of sexually motivated murders has been increasing since the end of the last war. Young people are being revealed as murderers more and more frequently. Criminologists, teachers, psychologists, and, not least, doctors, are trying to understand the reasons behind these murders. Probably the most common cause is the flood of sexual stimuli from magazines, novels, and films. Even fashion is being blamed and this summer people have earnestly warned girls about wearing mini-skirts, as they could directly provoke sexual assaults.”

  In Linz, Josef had his room; his job, at which he excelled; and a bicycle. Much more about his existence there we don’t know except that Rosemarie, feeling the emotional distance between herself and her husband, began to worry he was having an affair and confided her anxieties to Christine. Although Rosemarie was right to suspect Josef, her instincts about the precise nature of his infidelity were wrong. He had in fact slipped back into his teenage ways. In Linz’s main park he had begun to expose himself. He had been cautioned when a woman had reported him to the police. A few months later he again came to the attention of the police, this time for the attempted rape of a young woman. Again he was cautioned.

  It would seem likely that there were other incidents, but these remained unknown to the authorities.

  Shortly afterward, in October 1967, when Josef was thirty-two, he began to follow a young woman about the streets of Linz. Having discovered that she lived in Kleinmünchen, the old garment district at the southern end of the city, he took to lurking outside her home, as he had done outside the homes of many of his neighbours as a teenager in Amstetten. He soon gathered the basic facts of her life: She worked as a nurse, she was married, and she had a young child with her husband, a railway worker. The couple lived in a ground-floor apartment, and their bedroom window looked onto the street. Josef noticed that the young woman slept with the window open every night, even when her husband was on a late shift at work.