• Amstetten (pop. 23,727): Josef Fritzl (b. 1935) worked as an engineer in Amstetten and was sentenced for rape and attempted rape as early as 1967. In 1973 he became an innkeep in Unterach, where he was suspected of insurance fraud, although the police weren’t able to find definite evidence. In 1984, Fritzl lured his then 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth – he had repeatedly raped her for at least seven years at that point – into the basement where he locked her into a small, hidden room he had specially prepared for that. Fritzl kept his daughter for almost 24 years in that cell, raping and abusing her again and again and fathering seven children with her of which six are still alive. Publicly he maintained that his daughter had joined a cult and that three of the children had been secretly delivered to him by her so that they could grow up with their grandparents. The other four were kept together with their mother in the cell, one of them dying shortly after birth and being burned by Fritzl. Apparently he was such a brutal and controlling man that neither his wife not his children ever dared to even think about doubting him for a second. The entire thing only came to light when the oldest of those three, Kerstin, fell sick and had to be transported to the hospital. Fritzl tried it to frame it as Elisabeth being an abusive mother, which in turn meant that the police started actively looking for her. Via a TV in her cell, Elisabeth got to know of her daughter being in the hospital and begged Fritzl to let her visit, promising that she wouldn’t tell a word. Fritzl let her and the other two children out of the cell, telling his remaining family that Elisabeth had finally chosen to return home. During the hospital visit, a doctor got suspicious and called the police who then arrested Elisabeth. After being promised that the police would guarantee her safety, Elisabeth chose to come clean and tell about her torment. Fritzl, who will in all likelihood spend the rest of his life behind bars, in the meantime legally changed his name; his new one is unknown. Elisabeth and her children moved to another state; reportedly she cut contact with her mother over the question of who got to care for those children of hers who grew up with their grandparents.
  
• Andau/Mosontarcsa (pop. 2,262): This small border town is best known for its bridge, which crosses a channel and connects Austria with Hungary. In 1956, more than 70,000 Hungarians used the small bridge (which was normally only used by local farmers) in order to flee to Austria after the failed revolution against the socialist dictatorship. In late November, Hungarian soldiers blew up the bridge as part of a large-scale effort of securing the border and making it impossible for any more to escape the country. The bridge was rebuilt by Hungarian and Austrian soldiers in 1996 as a sign of peace and mutual cooperation following the dissolution of the Eastern bloc.
  
• Annaberg (pop. 508): Alois Huber worked at a logistics company and also was licensed to hunt small game in his free time, living alone at a farmstead in Großpriel, a small village near Melk. What for a long time nobody knew was that Huber also was a poacher, killing at least sixteen stags in Lower Austria and Styria and injuring a forester with a knife. In 2013 the police had started a large-scale operation to get the yet unknown poacher – they only knew that he likely drove a Toyota Hilux. At around midnight, Huber was spotted driving around in his Hilux. The police tried to stop him near Annaberg, but he broke through the barrier. After a first shootout with the police (where he hit an officer who succumbed two hours later to his injuries), Huber fled to a nearby sawmill and killed his dog before getting into a drawn-out shootout with the police, where he wounded another officer and killed an emergency medic who had tried to treat the former. Huber left the sawmill, killed two policemen who randomly encountered him on the street and himself got shot in the belly. With a stolen police car, the body of a dead officer sitting next to him, Huber drove to his home and barricaded himself there, while the police besieged the farmstead for hours. He eventually killed himself with a shot to the head. When police and military forcibly entered the house at around six pm, they found a secret door made to look like a fuse box. Behind the door was a bunker full to the brim with weapons, with Huber’s corpse amongst them.
  
• Ebergassing (pop. 3,934): In 1995, Peter Konicek and Gregor Thaler tried to blow up one of the main power lines supplying Vienna. Both were active in leftist groups in Vienna and wanted to use the attack as a protest against Austria buying nuclear power from its neighbouring countries. They hadn’t accounted for the high induction voltage, however, which prematurely set off two of their four bombs, killing both of them while not substantially damaging the power line. The Austrian police thought for a while that a third person might have been involved and tried to get the Mexican authorities to extradite an Austrian living in Mexico, but eventually nothing came of it. The far-right FPÖ party tried to use the Ebergassing attack as a whataboutist counter against charges laying responsibility for the racist Oberwart attack (see below) at their feet, but it thankfully didn’t stick.
  
• Galtür (pop. 787): This small mountain village lies at 1,584 metres above sea level. During the “avalanche winter” of January and February 1999, the western and central Alps saw massive amounts of snow over only short time, drastically increasing the danger of avalanches, of which hundreds were registered all over the place. On February 23rd, the Galtür region measured four metres of snow which was roughly six times the usual amount by that time of the year. At higher altitudes there was even more snow, which – due to a number of rare and highly unlucky coincidences – gathered in place until they reached a critical mass. Throughout the weeks before, Galtür had been largely cut off from the rest of the country due to the heavy snowfall and had to be supplied via helicopter. This didn’t stop the local authorities from trying to keep up the tourism industry, even organising a skiing race in the middle of the village. Only minutes after the race had ended, an estimated 300,000 tonnes of snow suddenly started moving, within seconds reaching speeds of 250 km/h and hitting Galtür with full force. Large parts of the village were destroyed, and roughly 50 people were buried, although about 20 of them could be rescued fairly quickly. The extreme weather made it impossible for outside help to arrive for quite some time, which meant that throughout the evening and the night the small village had to coordinate the rescue and medical care efforts by itself. The following day, another avalanche hit the nearby hamlet of Valzur, its lower half being virtually wiped out. Altogether, 38 people died in the two avalanches and 48 more were injured. Most of the victims were tourists from Germany, the Netherlands or Denmark.
  
• Ischgl (pop. 1,617): This is actually right down the road from Galtür, only about 9km away from where the first avalanche hit (and even closer to the second). Ischgl is in the news right now for another reason, however, and seeing as this is a current issue I won’t say too much about it. Suffice to say that local authorities and influential tourism managers refused to shut down the town’s thriving party tourism scene even though they early on knew that the danger of a Corona infection was high, and even after they were forced to close the hotels and bars the official response was shambolic at best. It is estimated that tens of thousands of infections all over Europe can be directly or indirectly traced back to Ischgl.
  
• Kaprun (pop. 3,170): This small town in the state of Salzburg is where the worst catastrophe of Austrian post-war history took place. In November 2000, a funicular train carrying 161 passengers and one conductor left its station going to the slopes of Kitzsteinhorn glacier, a popular spot for skiers. During its upwards trip, an electric fan heater started burning. The fire went unnoticed for the first couple of minutes and quickly spread, eventually melting plastic pipes carrying flammable hydraulic fluid, which in turn caused the train to automatically stop – 600 metres within a tunnel. The chimney effect in the tunnel meant that most passengers quickly felt unconscious due to the fumes and then were burned alive. All in all, 155 people died that day.
  
• Lambichl/Ilovje (pop. 380): In 2008, the governor of Carinthia and (in)famous right-wing politician Jörg Haider died here in a car crash. Although conspiracy theories abound to this death amongst the fashy parts of Austrian politics, the simple truth is that Haider drank way too much while visiting a gay bar in Klagenfurt and crashed into a wall while driving home*, going at least 142 km/h in an area where 70 was allowed. (*Also a “fun” fact: His house in Bärental used to belong to a Jewish family until it was aryanised in 1938 and never given back)
  
• Lassing (pop. 1,722): In this Styrian town, talc mining was one of the local economy’s most important pillars for more than a century until 1998, when a deadly disaster permanently ended all mining there. In 1998, the roof of a shaft level that had been dug illegally collapsed and caused a mudslide in the mine. While a sinkhole formed at the surface and eventually caused two houses in the village of Moos to vanish into the earth, 24-year-old miner Georg Hainzl was cut off from the exit by the collapse. A ten-people rescue detail was sent in, but a second mudslide caused the mine to basically implode. All contact to both Hainzl and his ten would-be rescuers was lost, and because they were all presumed dead (and because upper management tried to hide the fact that it all had started with an illegally dug level) further rescue attempts were sluggish at best. After 220 hours of sitting in the cold mine without any light, Georg Hainzl was recovered – alive and in surprisingly good health. The other ten victims were never found, however, and still remain somewhere in the remnants of the mine. The entire operation was shut down. Georg Hainzl still lives in Lassing with his family.
  
• Marchegg (pop. 2,991): During the 1970s, Soviet Jews who had gotten the permit to emigrate to Israel often travelled via Austria, where they would spend a while near Vienna before eventually being flown to Israel. In 1973, a Palestinian commando highjacked a train coming from the Soviet Union at the border station Marchegg and kidnapped three Jewish passengers as well as an Austrian customs officer. They then demanded the closure of a transit camp at Schönau, which was normally used by Soviet emigrés while preparing for their final trip to Israel as well as their being allowed to freely leave back to the Middle East. Chancellor Kreisky, who was Jewish himself, acquiesced to their demands, which led to harsh criticism from Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir. Schönau was closed, but the Austrian government opened another transit camp instead, so that there de facto was hardly any change to the situation at all.
  
• Oberwart/Felsőőr/Borta/Erba (pop. 7,623): This small town lies in the southern half of Burgenland state, where Hungarian-, Croatian- and Romani-speaking communities are quite prominent. During the nineties, the neo-nazi terrorist Franz Fuchs (1949-2000) committed several attacks against minorities and persons or organisations committed to supporting them, using self-made IEDs and mailbombs. His worst attack took place at Oberwart in 1995, when he erected a sign saying “Roma back to India” near a place where many Romani lived. When four young men of the community tried to remove the sign, a bomb exploded, killing all four of them. The police at first assumed that the attack was either part of Roma-on-Roma violence or that the four had tried and failed to build a bomb themselves. They only accepted the racist and terrorist nature of the attack two days later, when an Austrian official lost his hand due to another bomb. Fuchs was stopped by a random traffic control in 1997; since he thought that he had been found out, he exploded a bomb in his car in order to kill himself. This didn’t succeed – Fuchs lost both his hands and injured several police officers, but he survived and was sentenced to life in prison in 1999. He committed suicide the following year. To this day it isn’t entirely clear whether Fuchs really was a “lone wolf” terrorist or if he was part of a larger neo-nazi network (which might even have had connections within the Austrian security apparatus). There are also still some unanswered questions about how he managed to hang himself while having no hands.
  
• Ortmann (no pop. number available): Not much to say here. In 1971, a fire broke out in a local paper factory. Five firefighters were killed when the building’s roof collapsed. Ortmann is a part of Pernitz in Lower Austria.
  
• Parndorf/Pandrof/Pándorfalu (pop. 4,807): This Burgenland community made headlines all over the world when a lorry carrying 71 refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran was found standing idle next to a local motorway. All the refugees – 59 men, eight women and four children – were dead, crammed together into 13 sqm (roughly 140 sq ft) during one of the hottest summers on record. They all seem to have died from suffocation, likely trying to get out of the lorry beforehand. A Hungarian court would later go on to sentence four of the responsible human traffickers to life in prison as well as ten others to between three and twelve years. All but two of the victims could be identified. Most of the bodies were repatriated to their respective home countries; 15 others were laid to rest in Austria.
  
• Pöchlarn (pop. 3,937): In August 2000, a lorry veered off into the opposing lane at the nearby highway and crashed into a coach carrying 61 students from Germany. Eight of the students died, and 23 more were heavily injured.
  
• Sierning (pop. 9,329): This Upper Austrian town was the home of Alfred Engleder (1920-1993), also known as the “beast of Sierning” or “the bricklayer murderer”. During the 1950s, Engleder, always operated the same: riding on his bike, he approached women and hit them on the head with a hammer, afterwards trying to rape and kill the heavily injured victim. He attacked at least six women during 1951 and 1957 this way, actually managing to kill two of them (he was forced to abandon all his attacks either due to others appearing or because the victims successfully fended him off). He would later give “hatred of women” as his motive. During his last attack, he was surprised by a passerby and fled, leaving his bike behind, which finally made it possible for the police to know who they were looking for. After four days, he was arrested trying to cross the border to Czechoslovakia and sentenced to life in prison. In 1984, he was released early and moved to Vienna where he was given work and a place to stay in a monastery. In 1993, he was stabbed by a prostitute and died 22 days later.
  
• St. Stefan (pop. 1,833): In the early 19th century, it was discovered that the soil beneath St. Stefan holds large amounts of brown coal. In the 1850s, one of Europe’s most modern brown coal mines was constructed here, and the town became one of Carinthia’s industrial centres. In 1968, a sudden fire killed five of the miners and meant that the mines had to be evacuated. They were never reopened, and 1,500 people lost their jobs all of a sudden, which was a catastrophe in a state which back then was still mostly agrarian in nature and quite poor by Austrian standards. One of the dead miners never was recovered; his burned body still lies somewhere in the depths benath St. Stefan.
  
• Strasshof an der Nordbahn (pop. 10,392): This Viennese suburb is widely known for the abduction and eight-year-long imprisonment of Natascha Kampusch by Wolfgang Přiklopil (1962-2006). Kampusch was a ten year old girl living in Vienna who left for school in 1998, but never arrived there. Although Přiklopil was looked at by the investigating detectives several times, they never made the connection and considered him not involved. Kampusch was held in a tiny and windowless secret room beneath Přiklopil’s garage, who repeatedly hurt and abused her and basically held her as a slave, forcing her to do chores and work for him. In 2006, Kampusch saw a brief window of opportunity – she was vacuuming Přiklopil’s car in the garage while her captor received a call on his mobile phone, walking away several metres because of the noise. Kampusch ran away through a door Přiklopil had forgotten to close and sought shelter at a neighbouring house. When the police arrived shortly afterwards, Přiklopil had already fled his house and committed suicide later that day. Kampusch works as an author and designer of jewelry. To this day there are doubts about Přiklopil’s apparent suicide and whether he really was acting alone, but the police never found any definite proof. Kampusch herself denies this.
  
• Zöbern (pop. 1,397): In 1997, then 15 year old Helmut Z. went to his school armed with his dad’s revolver, killed one teacher and wounded another one. Z. claims to not be able to remember most of it; in his own words, he had a mental breakdown because his sick mother seemed to be at death’s door and he had to look after his four siblings while their father was away at work. What we know is that Z. went to school, shot five times in the ceiling of the classroom and hold his gun at his crush’s head, demanding sex. When the teacher tried to wrestle the gun away from him, he shot her in the head twice and fled, shooting another teacher through the leg. He got arrested shortly afterwards and was sentenced to eight years, of which he only had to spend five in prison because of his good behaviour. He returned to Zöbern where he still lives, working as a garbageman.
  

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