The similarity between the drab old three-storey apartment house in Amstetten where Josef Fritzl raped and imprisoned his daughter for 24 years, and the one 90 minutes' drive away where Adolf Hitler was born is a coincidence - but not a comfortable one.

Austria's politicians are battling to prevent damage to the country's reputation from the grotesque scandal of small-town incest and brutality. Yet one kidnap victim has already made the link between her ordeal and the nation's past.

Natasha Kampusch, who for eight years was held in a similar dungeon to the one where Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter, opened a Pandora's box when she linked both horror stories to the country's 'authoritarian education' and 'the suppression of women' under the Nazis.

Her implication was that Fritzl, at 73 a child of the Nazi era, belongs to a generation that thought it could get away with anything.

He was educated in a system where women were supposedly confined to 'children, church and kitchen' and were expected to offer sex too, of course, but nobody mentioned that.

©Unknown

Future Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, with wartime colleagues

The truth is that, for Austria, the Nazi era is a can of stinking worms that the country has fought for more than half a century to keep the lid on.

While Germany has largely overcome the darkest pages of its history by laying them bare, apologising and facing up to the past in order to build a new future, Austria never underwent this catharsis.

The result is that the whole of modern Austria is in denial about its recent past; its national identity has been founded on a tissue of lies and wishful thinking.

There is a disturbing parallel between the way respectable Austrians choose to bury the truth about the country's Nazi history and the manner in which the apparently respectable Fritzl covered up his monstrous behaviour in the cellar.

To understand the country's almost institutionalised schizophrenia, we have to go back to the days of the vast Hapsburg Austrian Empire which lasted from the Middle Ages until 1918 and was ruled from Vienna.

Dominated by German speakers, it was a multicultural hotch-potch. And when the Empire was dismembered after the First World War the 'German- speaking provinces' became a separate country called the Austrian Republic - primarily because France insisted they shouldn't be linked to a 'greater Germany' which could once again threaten world peace.

This rump republic collapsed in on itself, treasuring strict Catholic, conservative values, searching for something to make it a nation and often finding only anti-Semitism.

The 1938 Anschluss - when Hitler's troops simply marched in - was seen by many as an overdue correction. Tens of thousands lined the streets to cheer Hitler as the 'local boy made good'. Austrians were incorporated into the Reich as equals and joined the army in droves.

Ironically, it was the Second World War Allies who created the myth that Austria clings to even now, declaring in 1943 that Austria had been the first 'victim of Hitlerite aggression'. The statement was intended to bolster an Austrian resistance that didn't ever actually exist.

True, many Austrians had opposed Nazism and resented the loss of independence but at least as many shrugged their shoulders and thought Nazi rule inevitable.

The Von Trapp family story, made famous in The Sound of Music, was a mythologised exception rather than the rule.

After 1945 redefinition started all over again, as Austria revelled in the 'victim' status, pretending Nazism was something that happened to Austria rather than in it.

A wave of collective amnesia was hypocritically cloaked in Catholic morality, folksy loden coats and winter sportswear.

Not many today boast that Hitler was a fellow Austrian, born in the border town of Braunau-am-Inn, spent his youth in Vienna, and that the resentful bitterness of a great cosmopolitan city stripped of its empire rubbed off on him.

Best not mentioned in public, that. Best kept quiet, like Fritzl's other family in the basement.

I had my own creepy experience first hand of Austria's schizophrenia in the early 1980s when I joined a mostly-German skiing lesson in the Austrian Alps.

At the end of the day our flaxenhaired, wasp-waisted, Ray-Banwearing instructor told us we should raise one ski, hold our sticks in the air and shout a triple 'Ski-Heil!'

It meant "Long live skiing!" and we would be "silly to think it made us sound like old Nazis", he explained. The trouble was - I could see my German fellow-learners felt the same as we obediently chanted the totemic phrase for the third time - it was just a bit too close to 'Sieg Heil!'

In Germany it would have been unthinkable, but this was jolly old Gl¸hwein-drinking, yodelling Austria. They were victims. They could get away with anything: they just had!

The national schizophrenia was again laid bare in the 1980s when Kurt Waldheim, Austrian president and former United Nations Secretary General - a post unthinkable for a German - was revealed to have lied about his service in the wartime German Wehrmacht.

Simon Wiesenthal, the late Viennabased Nazi hunter, defended Waldheim against allegations of war crimes, but he had unarguably purged 'awkward' details of his army service.

He was not the only Austrian to have found it convenient to partition off part of his life.

Outside Hitler's birthplace in Braunau there is now a chunk of granite from Mauthausen concentration camp bearing the words 'Never Again'.

There might soon be something similar outside the bleak building in Amstetten.

Peter Millar is author of Tomorrow Belongs To Me, an oral history of Germany 1945 to 1990.