Now can you understand Hitler? He was born and bred Austrian! But the world condemns Germany for allowing that sick man to take over!

Fritzl is an Aspie and I am sure that the authorities know that but fear that this might be taken as an excuse for his crime, so won't voice! Very wise! He is not insane by any counts - he is just a mentally abnormal man!

But making a 'theatre play' of the torment his daughter and children suffered.......... now that is SICK!

hexie

Austrian Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children by her, will go on trial on March 16 on charges including murder, an Austrian court said.


The trial, most of which will be closed to the public and the media to protect the victims, is scheduled to last for one week, said Franz Cutka, spokesman for the regional court of St Poelten, west of the capital Vienna.


Fritzl, 73, has been charged by prosecutors with the murder of one of his daughter's children who died shortly after birth. He is also charged with rape, enslavement, incest, coercion and deprivation of liberty.


His lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said last year that Fritzl would not appeal against the charge sheet.

Grace

The guy is a nut, through and through....so Rosemary won some money from all this?

Dave

An Austrian judge ruled on Thursday that two magazines violated the privacy of the wife of a man who allegedly held his daughter captive for 24 years and fathered her seven children.

Judge Bettina Koerber ordered the magazines' parent company, News publishing group, to pay Rosemarie Fritzl €11,000 ($22,000) in compensation over the articles, which appeared in News and Woman magazines.

The publisher's lawyer has appealed the ruling.

Rosemarie Fritzl initially sought €260,000 and is also taking other media outlets to court.

Her husband Josef Fritzl, 73, goes on trial March 16 on charges of murder, rape, incest, false imprisonment and enslavement.

Investigators say he has confessed to imprisoning and raping their daughter - now in her 40s - in a soundproofed, windowless dungeon he built beneath their home starting in 1984, shortly after she turned 18. Authorities said they have no evidence that Rosemarie was involved.

This is the best news so far, other than the fact he's in jail..

Sharon

Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man alleged to have sexually abused and imprisoned his daughter for 24 years, has officially been declared bankrupt, reports suggest.

The 74-year-old was told by authorities of his financial situation while in jail.

He is currently waiting to go on trial charged with murder, rape, false imprisonment, enslavement and incest on March 16th.

The Austrian authorities announced on Monday that Mr Fritzl had become insolvent and those with a claim in his assets now have until March 24th to contact the courts.

Prosecutors allege Mr Fritzl has confessed to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth and abusing her for almost a quarter of a century, resulting in her giving birth to seven children, in a windowless dungeon he built under their family home.

The horrific crimes were only discovered in April last year when one of Elisabeth's children was taken ill and admitted to hospital.

Of all the stupid things. I be he gets a lot of sick psychos that take him up on the offer...

Rebecca

ST. POLTEN, Austria, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- A tenant of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man accused of using his daughter as a sex slave, is offering tourists a chance to stay in his apartment.

Anton Kraushofer hopes to get about $1,000 a night and has put the apartment on eBay, The Sun reports. Kraushofer told the British tabloid he got the idea after learning hotels in Sankt Polten, where Fritzl is to be tried, are already fully reserved for the five-day proceedings.

The building, which includes seven apartments, a pizzeria and a shoe store, is also up for sale. Fritzl was declared bankrupt Monday.

Fritzl kept his daughter in a dungeon under his home in Amstetten for more than 20 years and fathered seven children with her. One boy died, and Fritzl is charged with killing the child by failing to get medical treatment.

Kraushofer said Fritzl was in his apartment many times, often to do maintenance work.

"He was a neat, completely normal looking pensioner -- always friendly and kind," Kraushofer said. "He probably was a bit wealthy because he was driving a Mercedes."

The lowlife money grubber...

Rebecca

Incest dungeon slave Elisabeth Fritzl believes she has been sold out by a close family member, with leaked photos and personal details about the 42-year-old and her children splashed across a UK tabloid.

Ms Fritzl — who was imprisoned for 24 years by father Josef in his Austrian basement where she gave birth to seven of his children — has now slammed the media for an "unbearable disturbance" on her life.

British tabloid The Sun ran a double-page spread last week with photos of Ms Fritzl and her daughter Kerstin as they shopped near their home in Austria.

In a statement released by her lawyer after the photos were published, Ms Fritzl said: "The permanent and persistent attempts of media representatives to get in touch with me and my children are an unbearable disturbance of my life.

"I do not wish any contact with the press and will not give any interviews."


According to The Austrian Times, Ms Fritzl suspects a "close female relative" has entered into several lucrative deals with media outlets in exchange for photos and details of where Ms Fritzl and her six surviving children have begun their new life.

The full horror perpetrated by Josef Fritzl in his Amstetten basement was exposed last April when his granddaughter Kerstin fell ill and required hospital treatment.

Elisabeth and her children were rescued from their dungeon existence and rehabilitated at a nearby clinic. Last December they moved into their own residence at an undisclosed location.

Josef Fritzl has been charged with murder, rape, incest, grievous assault and slavery.

He remains in St Poelten prison and could spend the rest of his life behind bars.

I can't find the Fritzl thread....... please move it where it should be and Thank You!

Typical of an Aspie.. he blames his victim(s)! He sees his crime in black and white - not in colour! I just hope he lives a long time in prison WITHOUT any comforts instead of being kept isolated so that nobody can 'hurt' this b....d! He wants hurting!
hexie


Skynews - 10:50am UK, Tuesday March 03, 2009

Josef Fritzl, the man who kept his daughter imprisoned for 24 years and fathered seven children by her, says it was all her fault he kept her captive.
The 73-year-old reportedly told doctors he locked Elisabeth up initially after finding her sniffing household cleaners and unsuccessfully trying to talk to her about it.

"She had been sniffing cleaning fluids and I decided I should talk with her in my cellar," he said in an interview leaked to an Austrian magazine.

"We did that but she reacted to my accusations with a 'couldn't care less attitude'.

"A dreadful anger developed in me and out of this anger I decided to lock her up.
"And because in the coming days she showed no improvement in her attitude, I decided to keep her locked up."

Fritzl faces charges of murder, in connection with the death of one of Elisabeth's children, incest, rape, slavery, cruelty and false imprisonment.

He is due to go on trial on March 16.

The story was revealed last April when 42-year-old Elisabeth told police her version of events.

It came to light after her eldest daughter became seriously ill and Fritzl agreed to her being taken to hospital.

That triggered off a series of events which eventually led to the discovery of the secret family.

I believe I may have a couple of updates here....woohoo, the scumbag is pleading guilty...

Beth

The lawyer for the Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man accused of locking his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathering seven children with her, says his client will plead guilty to most of the charges he is facing.

Fritzl's trial starts in just over a week.

His lawyer Rudolph Myer says his client expects to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

He says Fritzl will plead guilty to the general charges of deprivation of liberty, rape, incest and coersion, but will contest the murder charge.

Mr Myer says Fritzl was not a sex monster, but had loved his daughter in his own way.

He says Fritzl - whom he described as having a deeply disturbed personality - had wanted a family he could be sure of.

The more I read this the madder I get at what he did...

Tony
A WOMAN whose father locked her in a cellar for nearly a quarter of a century and had seven children by her will tell a court next week that she “tried to please him” in order to protect her daughter and sons from his abuse.

In filmed testimony, Elisabeth Fritzl, 43, will describe being assaulted by her father for the first time at the age of 11, when she defended herself against rape by “kicking and screaming”, according to sources close to the investigation.

Josef Fritzl, 74, who goes on trial next week for murder, incest, unlawful imprisonment and “enslavement”, is convinced he could serve fewer than 10 years in prison for what has been described as Austria’s most horrific post-war crime.

The trial will raise uncomfortable questions about Austrian society, highlighting police failings and a town’s astonishing blindness to what was unfolding beneath one of its main streets, where Fritzl held Elisabeth as a sex slave for 24 years in a warren of windowless, soundproofed rooms.

He will offer a shocking defence, claiming that his daughter was having sex when she was barely out of her teens. She smoked. She took drugs. She drank. He wanted to save her.

“He is not a monster,” Rudolf Mayer, Fritzl’s lawyer, said last week. “He loved his daughter in his own way.”

Fritzl locked her in the purpose-built cellar, forcing her to write a letter claiming she had run away to a cult. Their sexual relationship was “consensual”, he maintains - even though Elisabeth has described being chained to a wall while he raped her.

Elisabeth claims in her testimony that he also physically hurt her, without wanting to specify how.

Police found whips and handcuffs in the cellar, where she gave birth to one child after another without medical assistance in a case that has sickened the world.

One infant died shortly after birth and the corpse was incinerated by Fritzl, leading to a charge of “murder by omission”: he could have saved the baby if he had called a doctor, the prosecution argues.

Three of the children were taken upstairs and officially adopted by Fritzl and Rosemarie, his wife. Fritzl pretended that the babies had turned up on his doorstep and forced Elisabeth to write a letter claiming she had left them for him to look after.

In an attempt to gain sympathy, Fritzl will explain how he “cared for” his captives, taking them food, books and toys. He gave them a budgerigar, whose survival in the cellar meant that the air quality must have been adequate for humans, he will argue.

Elisabeth, for her part, talks about large rats that would, on occasion, appear. She managed to kill at least one of them, squashing it with a bucket.

Fritzl sometimes took her photographs of the “upstairs children”, which she put in an album. They have since been reunited as a family and live with Elisabeth under a new name.

Fritzl will tell the court that he had been planning to free them all along. He had begun work on converting part of the house upstairs for their use and asked Elisabeth to write a letter explaining that she had decided to come home.

His plans went awry, however, after Kirsten, their daughter, became seriously ill last year. Elisabeth persuaded Fritzl to let her go to hospital, where staff realised something was wrong and called the police.

In her video testimony, Elisabeth will tell the court how she began enduring Fritzl’s abuse as a child after he put pornographic magazines under her pillow.

She suffered psychological problems. She cut herself. She lost weight and was only 5 stone 10lb by the time she was locked in the cellar.

Fritzl has expressed no remorse beyond accepting that he is “not normal”. He has offered himself as a subject of study to Reinhard Haller, one of Austria’s top criminal psychiatrists, apparently in the hope that experts can help to prevent anything similar happening again.

Reviled as “das Inzest-Monster”, Fritzl may yet walk free surprisingly early. Legal experts believe it will be impossible to convict him of the murder charge. Of the remaining charges, rape is the most serious, carrying a sentence of up to 15 years. With good behaviour and parole he could be out in 10 or even five years.

“It is a spectacular crime but not in terms of the sanction envisaged under our antiquated criminal code,” said Raoul Wagner, a Viennese lawyer campaigning for changes in a system that “protects criminals” rather than victims.

“It is outrageous,” Wagner said. “There is no guarantee that Fritzl, if he lives to a ripe old age, won’t be a menace to women again.”

No questions were raised when Fritzl applied to adopt the children supposedly found on his doorstep, even though he had been convicted in 1967 of a rape for which he spent 18 months in prison. That is because, until recently, criminal records were erased in Austria 10 years after the completion of the sentence. “He could have been stopped if the information had been available to police,” Wagner said.

The case is just as embarrassing for social workers in the town of Amstetten, where the Fritzl family lived. They visited the house, but failed to notice signs of distress. Nor, apparently, did relatives or neighbours, although it has been suggested that some preferred not to see. Even Rosemarie, the wife, claims to have known nothing.

“We have an unfortunate tendency in this country of brushing things under the carpet,” said Hubsi Kramar, a theatre director who provoked outrage earlier this year by putting on a satirical play based on Fritzl. “We prefer not to look. Not to see.”

The regional capital of Sankt Pölten, where the trial will open next Monday, is preparing as best it can for a media invasion from around the world. Stands selling sausages are to be erected in the square. A guide to the area is being rushed out by the town hall.

In order not to prolong the national nightmare, however, a deal is rumoured to have been struck between the prosecution and the defence under which Fritzl’s lawyer will not appeal against the sentence. In exchange, Fritzl will be allowed the prison of his choice.

He has selected a “special regime” establishment offering “meditation”, tennis, football and darts. The gym looks better than those of many hotel establishments and Fritzl will be able to sing in a choir. He can also take lessons in cookery.

They could be useful if he is ever granted his wish of returning home one day to live with his wife.

Memoirs up for sale

Fritzl wants to cash in on his worldwide notoriety by selling his memoirs and public tours of the “house of horrors”

He believes he could earn up to £1m for his story and the same for a television documentary about the “beast of Amstetten” that would include exclusive footage from his cellar. He is trying to sell interviews to the press for a similarly astronomical sum.

However, a lawyer representing Fritzl’s children has managed to block a scheme to open the house to the public for £10 a head. Whatever Fritzl earns will go to creditors, who are owed £3.5m.

It's good that they are starting to bond with each other, but it will be a long road ahead....they have so much to deal with.

Janet

SOME of Josef Fritzl’s children grew up in a subterranean dungeon, deprived of natural light and fresh air. The others were allowed to live apparently contented lives above ground. Now they are together under the same roof but life is not normal: their mother is also their sister.

In the land of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, few experts are predicting an easy road to recovery for the young Fritzls.

The “upstairs” children have returned to school, albeit it a different one, in lower Austria, while their more fragile “downstairs” siblings are tutored - and treated - at home.

Of the cellar children, five-year-old Felix is thought to have the best chance of rebounding from his ordeal to lead a normal life. Too young to comprehend the darkness from which he and the others were rescued, however, he is said to miss his father.

Stefan, 18, is described as excruciatingly “polite” but still walks with a slight stoop after spending so long under the low cellar ceiling. Kirsten, 19, his sister, is said to enjoy the music of Robbie Williams. Until their liberation last year their only experience of the outside world came from television.

Elisabeth Fritzl, their mother, tried to give them an education, providing school textbooks and doing her best to pass on what she had learnt at school before being locked in the cellar by her father when she was 18.

The boys have apparently bonded with Alexander, their 12-year-old “upstairs brother” who has introduced them to video games. His “upstairs” sisters Lisa, 15, and Monica, 14, have impressed their cellar siblings with their musical abilities. Monica is learning the trumpet, Lisa the flute.

As for Rosemarie, Fritzl’s wife, she lives on her own in a council flat on a meagre pension. She visits her daughter’s house regularly to see Alexander, her favourite grandson, who constantly asks after her.

I didn't know the trial started...

Janet

Nine days from now, Josef Fritzl should learn his fate.

Jurors will file back into a courtroom in the small Austrian town of St Poelten to deliver their verdict on the kind of monster usually created only in the minds of Hollywood scriptwriters.

They will have heard testimony so harrowing the judge ordered they listen to no more than two hours of it each day.

And over five days they will have discovered, in Fritzl’s own words and in the videotaped evidence of his victim-in-chief, how this seemingly ordinary man became the rapist, jailer, torturer and thief of his own daughter’s life.
In many ways what they decide is irrelevant. The man who decided to lock up his child, Elisabeth, for 24 years to use as his personal sex slave will certainly never be released.

Whether he lives out his days in a secure prison or a psychiatric hospital means little to a world captivated by his unique brand of evil.

This is a man so cunning, so controlled, so arrogant that he carved out a secret, fortified dungeon beneath his own home to incarcerate his own flesh and blood - a place where he could rape his daughter an estimated 3,000 times and father seven children with her in the dank, rat-infested darkness.
What Fritzl did is truly the stuff of horror films. In a book I wrote about him called, simply, Monster, I tried to gain an insight into the void where his soul should be, into those places where humanity, kindness, love and compassion ought to dwell. But while chronicling his crimes, I failed to get anywhere close to what made him truly tick.

I was in good company, however. The battery of psychologists and psychiatrists sent to map the dark recesses of his twisted personality also failed to come up with the answer to the single question: why?

In the end, they believed only the truth of the simple five-word sentence he gave shortly after his arrest in April last year: ‘I was born to rape.’

Fritzl will shuffle from the dock of the court in St Poelten, stoic and unbowed, convinced, as he has been convinced throughout his life, of his innate superiority. The secure van will take him away, blue lights flashing and siren sounding, heralding his much-deserved appointment with a lonely cell.

Yet some 25 miles from St Poelten, in the village of Mitterkirchen, the nightmare goes on. In a house provided by the authorities, Elisabeth Fritzl, now 42, lives with the six children she bore to her father who survived the ordeal.

Something gnaws at Elisabeth about her mother
Three of them were brought up shortly after birth by Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie in the house above ground, the other three never saw a speck of sky or a blade of grass from their dungeon until they were freed last year.

Now these two groups, joined by blood and little else, are trying to bond as a family unit as their Frankenstein creator is removed for good from their lives.

But nothing can ever erase the memory of what he did. Freedom has not brought the rest of the Fritzls inner peace. From interviews with carers and police sources who provided much of the material for my book, it is clear that therapy stretches on, with no end in sight.

The rift between Elisabeth and her mother Rosemarie has not healed. It started in the psychiatric clinic with Elisabeth’s constant complaining about three of her offspring referring to Rosemarie as ‘mother’.

In fact, the enmity between the two women predates the day in 1984 when Elisabeth was drugged with ether and dragged into the dungeon her engineer father had carved beneath the foundations of the family home in the town of Amstetten.

Its roots go back to 1967, when Elisabeth was barely two, and Josef Fritzl broke into the home of a sleeping nurse in nearby Linz and raped her at knifepoint, telling her he would kill her if she went to the police.

Daddy went away after that, to work abroad, Rosemarie told the children. In reality, he had gone to prison. Something gnaws at the very fabric of Elisabeth’s psyche about her mother - the knowledge that Rosemarie brought Fritzl back into their home, despite knowing he was a rapist.

By the time Elisabeth was 11, Fritzl was leaving pornographic magazines under her pillow and masturbating in front of her.

The question Elisabeth must ask is how could Rosemarie not know that Fritzl was abusing her; not know that he later engineered her disappearance?
It is this doubt which has caused a division that will probably never heal.
Rosemarie lives alone in Linz and is welcomed to Elisabeth’s house as a visitor but always leaves with a handshake and rarely a hug for the daughter her husband said had run off to join a sect.

‘Elisabeth could understand her mother swallowing her father’s line,’ one of her carers told me, ‘because she was as brutalised as anyone by his tyrannical rule.
‘But when Elisabeth was released from the cellar she learned his dark secret - that he was a convicted rapist - and she began to question how her mother could have stayed with him knowing that. With this in the background, things became ever more tense.’

The doctors hope the maternal bond will strengthen, but for now they are concentrating more on Elisabeth’s physical and mental wellbeing.

Elisabeth must ask, how could Rosemarie not know?
Physically, what Fritzl did to Elisabeth was medieval in its horror. He used over-sized sex toys on her for hours on end, causing terrible internal injuries.

If she was still a prisoner now, it is doubtful she could have borne him another child. Years of cheap, beyond-sell-by-date food Fritzl fed his clandestine family left her with vitamin deficiencies and weak bones and she lost many teeth.

But these are legacies that good diet and medicines will help overcome. Mentally, she suffers from the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that soldiers in combat zones experience.

The house always has the doors in all rooms open - Elisabeth, like her children brought up underground, has a phobia of being in a room where the door might never open again. In the cellar, she was the determined woman who saved others - and was saved - by the strongest love on earth: that of a mother for her young.
In the upstairs world she now inhabits, she is in many ways the teenager whose clock stopped on that summer day in 1984.

Slowly and painfully, the clock has to be reset. Treading carefully is paramount. No doctor can go to areas still mined with pain. Slowly, carefully, as with all victims of sexual abuse, she has to deal with the grotesque crimes committed against her.

She must understand that she bears no guilt and must separate life before the cellar and after it. And she has to learn basic life skills - taking a trip to the supermarket, using a mobile phone, making small talk.

Berthold Kepplinger, the psychologist in charge of the mental health of the cellar tribe, said of Elisabeth: ‘She is nothing short of heroic. She persevered down there, only keeping going out of love for her children. The mothering instinct saved them all.’

Those who deal with her have their breath taken away by her courage, love, dignity and pride. In a world of instant fame and celebrity, it came as no surprise when in January this year she was approached by one of the world’s biggest media companies and offered £5 million for an exclusive deal spanning newspapers, magazines, talk shows, a movie and a book.

There was no hesitation from Elisabeth: ‘No thanks. Please leave us alone.’
When the secret of the family location was leaked, the landscape gardeners moved in as the trial of her father approached, to plant tall hedgerows in the back garden and erect fences.

Elisabeth wants nothing more than a sanctuary for the children she nurtured in the darkness and the ones snatched from her to live upstairs with her mother and father.

As to the cellar siblings, they have to learn to deal with the memories of seeing their mother raped before their eyes. They always knew when it was going to happen: Fritzl turned the lights down.

But they could see, and they could hear, and they felt the agony their mother endured time after heartbreaking time.

Fritzl stole their childhoods, their first dance and first kiss
Kerstin, now 20, whose illness in the subterranean gloom (she was suffering from multiple organ failure caused by poor food and lack of medication) triggered their eventual release, remains inordinately close to her brother Stefan, 18, with whom she shared her life underground.

They are tutored at home and rarely go out, spending their days watching television, listening to music and helping their mother. And like their mother, Kerstin and Stefan are encouraged to slowly talk about their feelings and to learn self-respect - something else Fritzl stole from them along with their childhoods, their first dance, their first kiss.

They have to learn how to ease themselves into a world they only ever viewed through the prism of the constantly-running television in the cellar that transmitted images of a distant place they had never experienced, and were told they would never experience.

Felix, now six, who needed special goggles to shield his eyes from the sunlight he had never seen, is best placed to cope.

He delights all who meet him. He spends his days stroking the trees in the garden, picking up grass, staring at the sky in wonderment. The doctors believe he is young enough to forget; besides, he never knew what Grandad was doing when he took his mother off to her sleeping quarters and the lights went dim.

Working through the conflicted feelings the family have for Fritzl is another, more complex matter.

While they hate what has occurred, residual feelings of affection - perhaps even a twisted sort of love - remain.

That is why neither Stefan nor Kerstin was asked to give evidence against him.
The last thing prosecutors wanted to hear is the kind of defence of Fritzl that the monster himself has put forward - he was a carer, provider and loving patriarch.

More complex still is the relationship between the erstwhile cellar dwellers and the children who were removed from confinement to have a life upstairs.

Monika, 15, Lisa, 16, and Alexander, 12 - whose twin brother Michael died in the cellar - all have the same mother and father but any similarity ends with their genes.

‘The cellar children couldn’t understand at first why the upstairs children found it difficult to call Elisabeth “Mum”,’ said a clinic worker.

‘They are polite and kind to the siblings they never knew, but it is like the relationship of a child whose father returns after 20 years at sea; they are strangers.’

As another of their carers put it: ‘They had a life. They went to school. They had friends, they had crushes and they had music lessons, swimming and after-school activities. Then they wake up one day and not only find out their mother has returned, but that they have three other siblings.

‘They have been cut off from all they knew and they know that what they had is gone for ever. Moreover, they know their strict, but not unkind, grandfather still has to stand trial for what he did. They know this situation will last for years and it terrifies them.’

Removed from the school they attended they now go to separate schools to minimise the risk of identification. They have been given new identities and are under the constant watch of teachers aware of their situation.

All the children get on at a superficial level, but there is no telling where this experiment will end.

Happily, those close to the family say they all have a genuine love for, and sympathy with, Elisabeth. It is her aim, as head of this dysfunctional clan, to bind each to the other.

That is her quest. And ultimately, this is her triumph over Josef Fritzl and the degradations he heaped upon them all.