IN a small provincial courtroom in Lower Austria, the most high-profile trial in the country’s post-war history is taking place behind closed doors. Members of the public, not to mention the world’s media, have been banned from hearing any of the evidence against Josef Fritzl because of Austria’s obsession with privacy. After brief opening arguments from the prosecution and defence on Monday, and a tantalisingly short statement from Fritzl himself, everyone bar the defendant, judges and lawyers was ordered to leave the room.
We journalists have been warned that if we report anything which is said in the trial from now on, we will be imprisoned for up to six years. So much for justice being seen to be done.
While it may seem incredible to anyone used to the British justice system that a man who imprisoned his own daughter in a cellar for 24 years should be tried in an empty room, in Austrian courts secrecy is the rule, rather than the exception.
Officially, the media ban is to prevent “voyeurism”. The consensus in the Austrian press, however, is that the authorities simply don’t want the horrific evidence to be used to question their failure to stop Fritzl sooner.
It is this culture of secrecy that enabled Fritzl to get away with his crimes for so long — a culture which has its roots in Nazi-era Austria, and one that is viewed with growing shame by a younger generation of Austrians, some of whom have staged noisy demonstrations outside the court in St Poelten.
One of the protesters, Peter Rosenauer, of the child welfare group Resistance for Peace, told me: “We have a society where child abuse is hushed up and trivialised.
People who report cases of abuse are often ignored or even intimidated by the authorities. The golden rule, which starts with bureaucrats and filters down through society, is that you shouldn’t pry into people’s private lives.” Elisabeth, Fritzl’s daughter, ran away from home on several occasions as a teenager, only to be returned by police to her father each time. What was making her so unhappy? No one bothered to ask her.
When three of Elisabeth’s children turned up on Fritzl’s doorstep, supposedly left by Elisabeth after she ran off to join a cult, social workers visited him 21 times to make sure he was fit to adopt the children. Josef Leitner, a former tenant in Fritzl’s house, said: “Why didn’t the authorities try to find out why Elisabeth wanted to run away?” Leitner says that after raising questions about those in authority he was visited by the police, who threatened to report him to the state prosecutor in what he says was a blatant attempt to “shut me up”.
Fritzl’s may be an extreme case, but it is by no means unique in Austria.
Natascha Kampusch escaped her captor in 2006 after eight years in a bunker; three children were rescued from a cellar in Linz in 2007 after being locked up for seven years by their mother.
Austria’s preoccupation with privacy is a throwback to the Nazi era, when Hitler was enthusiastically welcomed into towns like Amstetten, where a young Josef Fritzl sat on his father’s shoulders and cheered the Fuhrer. After the war, Austria was desperate to hush up its complicity in the Holocaust: three out of every four death camp commandants was Austrian. Hence the instinct, which exists to this day, to cover up the unsavoury.
Such a culture has led to farcical scenes at Fritzl’s trial, where judges were so nervous of breaching the defendant’s right to privacy that they did nothing to stop him covering his face when the media were briefly allowed to film him. Austrian newspapers are only allowed to refer to the defendant as Josef F, which is standard procedure in sex abuse trials.
Back in Amstetten, the mayor and senior civil servants have all gone on holiday for the duration of the trial, seemingly to avoid any awkward questions. Before they left, the council put out a statement saying: “The crime case of Amstetten does not exist. It is the crime of a single person.”
© The Daily Telegraph
