Austrian clinic for terrorized family has its own tale of recovery

The clinic where an Austrian family terrorized for decades is trying to recover and prepare for reintegration into the world has had to overcome its own tragic tale, one that involves a dark Nazi past.

Hundreds of patients were put to death during World War II at the provincial clinic in Mauer, close to where, more recently, Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter in a dingy dungeon for 24 years, raped her and fathered six children with her.

On Sunday, five of the children, their mother and grandmother all met together for the first time in what authorities called an "astonishing" scene at a psychiatric clinic.

Officials at the center said the family was in the care of a team of specialists and doing "quite well" — a recovery echoing that of the difficult past the clinic itself has had to overcome.

Under the Third Reich's euthanasia laws, numerous patients were killed in Mauer, according to the clinic's Web site. At least another 800 patients were transported to other institutions to be killed.

A book entitled "Amstetten 1938-1945," commissioned by the city, includes a chapter on the clinic's wartime atrocities against "unworthy lives."

"The first step to eliminating inherited and mental diseases was sterilization," the book said, citing 346 cases in Mauer. "The last was euthanasia."

The euthanasia officially began in 1941, and was mostly focused on psychiatric patients, but also on people in nursing homes and homes for the elderly, the book said.

Patients were also sent to Gugging, near Vienna, where Dr. Emil Gelny gained notoriety for his killings. Gelny visited the Mauer clinic in 1944 to kill what he deemed "unnecessary mouths." He killed at least 39 people with drugs such as veronal, luminal and morphine, the book reports.

Gelny fled Vienna at the end of the war, moving first to Syria and then Baghdad, where he died in peace as a reputable doctor in 1961, it said.

Today, about 600 staffers work at the Mauer clinic, caring for more than 6,000 resident patients. The clinic provides outpatient services for an equal number of people.

With the Fritzl family currently inside, the old building built during the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was being protected Wednesday by security guards and a firefighter.