Austria searches soul in sex dungeon aftermath

updated 5:30 p.m. ET May 1, 2008

AMSTETTEN, Austria - Carefree children in alpine costumes danced around a maypole, and parents crowded a churchyard to snap photos of sons and daughters making their first communion.

But an unmistakable melancholy settled Thursday over this town where police say Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her in a windowless, soundproofed cell.

As the sheer monstrosity of his alleged atrocities sank in — less than two years after a young woman escaped her tormentor in another high-profile case — anguished Austrians questioned whether their clannish society and cherished privacy have steered them horribly wrong.

"Without question, this entire experience shows the system isn't working," said Wolfgang Bachmayer, who has been scrambling as one of the nation's chief image consultants to do some damage control.

"It's a question of having a functional society," said Bachmayer, who heads the Austrian Institute for Marketing. "The authorities can't train their eyes everywhere and peer into every bedroom. We can only hope our politicians make the right decisions."

Some can't help but wonder whether more sinister forces are at play.

Natascha Kampusch, a freckle-faced 10-year-old when she was kidnapped on her way to school in 1998 and held in a dungeon for nearly eight years, told the British Broadcasting Corp. in an interview aired Thursday she thinks Austria's past complicity with the Nazis is at least partly to blame.

Abuse exists worldwide, she said, "but I think it's also a ramification of the Second World War."

During the Nazi era, "the suppression of women was propagated ... an authoritarian education was very important," said the 19-year-old Kampusch, whose dramatic flight to freedom in August 2006 captured the world's attention.

Did the Nazis influence Fritzl?
There has been widespread speculation that Fritzl, 73, may have been traumatized by the war.

He was only 3 when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Yet he was an impressionable pre-teen when Amstetten — strategically situated on a key railway linking Vienna and the western city of Linz — sustained heavy Allied bombing.

Austria is still taking stock of the long-term effects of WWII, and only recently has it begun to break with decades of silence, denial and repression to confront its Nazi past.

In yet another bizarre twist to a fast-developing case, investigators disclosed Thursday that Fritzl repeatedly warned his captives that poisonous gas would be released if they were to attack him in a bid to escape.

The Nazis gassed to death millions of Jews in concentrations camps — including the Mauthausen camp not far from Amstetten. It was unclear whether Fritzl had actually rigged the cellar to release toxic gas.

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