Monsters are Made, Not Born.

More revelations are coming out on the Fritzl case, which I have been semi-obsessed with in recent days because of its sheer evil and uniqueness, that Josef Fritzl was himself horribly abused as a child:

In an interview, the sister of Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, a woman identified as 56-year-old Christine R said that Fritzl had been brought up by a single mother with an explosive temper who resorted to violence to control her child.

"Josef grew up without a father. His mother raised him with her fists," Mrs R said. "She used to beat him black and blue almost every day. Something must have been broken in him because of that. He was unable to feel any kind of sympathy for other people. He humiliated my sister for most of her life."

Fritzl was born in 1935 and would have been four years old at the start of the Second World War. It was not clear whether he lost his father during the war, but, when the war ended, he would, as a nine-year-old, have experienced first hand the invasion of Austria by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. Reports in the Austrian media have claimed that as a child he "suffered badly" during this post-war occupation which was notorious for the high incidence of rape perpetrated by Russian soldiers on civilian German and Austrian women.

Doctors have already provided an initial assessment of Fritzl's personality. Reinhard Haller, an Austrian psychiatrist whose analysis of defendants is used by the courts, has suggested that Fritzl suffers from a power complex that may have resulted from his being abused by his mother.

That doesn't excuse his actions obviously, but it does put them in context.