The Austrian police team is investigating how Josef Fritzl was able to imprison his daughter Elisabeth in a cellar for 24 years, during which time she bore him seven children, three of whom had spent their entire lives incarcerated in this specially constructed sound-proofed vault.

The Austrian police could spend an eternity on the Fritzl case, but I am certain that they will never “understand why he committed this terrible crime”. Fritzl’s behavior was so extreme; indeed, it is the extremity and inexplicability of Josef Fritzl’s behavior that compels our attention. If we could understand it, our curiosity would be rapidly quelled.

The popular favorite in Britain (not surprisingly) is that it’s all to do with Adolf Hitler. It goes something like this: Hitler was Austrian. Many Austrians were involved in organizing the Holocaust; but after the war they pretended to be victims of the Nazis, when they were really accomplices. This shows that they are a people unusually gifted at committing terrible crimes while retaining respectability. Josef Fritzl was a child during the war and was therefore somehow infected with this; meanwhile, his suburban neighbors did nothing to stop his terrible deeds, so they are all guilty too — and by extension the whole country. This explanation for what went on in a basement in Amstetten takes some beating. Yet quite serious writers have proposed something along these lines with every appearance of sincerity.

They have been given some support by Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian teenager who was herself imprisoned for eight years in a basement as a “sex slave”. Ms. Kampusch told the BBC’s Newsnight that what had happened in Amstetten was somehow linked with the legacy of National Socialism; but she at least acknowledged at the same time the absolute particularity of the Fritzl case.

The coincidence of these two basement horrors within 18 months of each other has clearly convinced people across the world that — well, that it isn’t a coincidence. This has naturally sent the Austrian political establishment into paroxysms of national self-exculpation.

The country’s President Heinz Fischer declared that “There is nothing fundamentally Austrian in this case. Monstrosities, of which human beings are capable, manifest themselves everywhere” — an entirely reasonable comment, which of course has only added to the suspicion that this is an entire country with something to hide.

Even this, however, would be better than an imitation of what the politicians of Britain have done, following bizarre crimes of similar inexplicability. As a result of the murders by Dr. Harold Shipman, the government has in effect demanded that every doctor in the country must demonstrate that he (or indeed, she) is not likely to execute all their elderly patients. Even the briefest locum appointment must now be referred to the Criminal Records Bureau, notorious for the ponderousness of its paperwork.

The truth is that these post-hoc procedures, usually entrusted to sprawling multiregional bureaucracies, are invented so that the politicians can tell the public that they have acted to “ensure that something like this can never happen again”. But, of course, it can — only next time with the paperwork in order and all boxes ticked.

Austria, in fact, is already a highly regulated country. Social welfare workers had visited the Fritzl home on 21 separate occasions. The underground bunker — which had in fact been specifically designed by Fritzl for the purpose of imprisoning his daughter — was constructed in full accordance with all building regulations; fire safety inspectors had approved the incinerator which had been used to dispose of one of the children.

Even the most efficient bureaucracy can not detect what is going on in a man’s mind, or what his motives are. No, the only way that Josef Fritzl’s crimes could have been discovered earlier would have been through the detection of neighbors. Those neighbors are, by all accounts, now miserably asking themselves what they could have done — showing a sensitivity that perhaps might have been emulated (if only for appearance’s sake) by their country’s leaders.

It is easy now for those at a safe distance to blame those neighbors for not trying to work out why Josef Fritzl seemed to buy many more groceries than his visible family would need; or for not questioning why he warned lodgers never to try to go into the basement; or for not wondering where his missing daughter was, all those years. I don’t blame them; when the truth is so bizarre, so depraved, so inexplicable, it is only human not to understand.