A German teenager went downstairs to the family freezer in search of a pizza on yesterday and found instead the frozen bodies of three babies wrapped in plastic bags.

Police in the west German town of Olpe have now arrested his mother in what appears to be the latest incident in a wave of infanticide.

The mother named only as Monika H, 44, already has three grown up children aged between 18 and 24. The three babies seem to have been born during roughly the same period as their living brothers and sisters. The oldest would now have been 23 and the youngest 17.

Pathologists were today defrosting the bodies in order to conduct post mortem examinations and discover the cause of death.

According to police investigators Monika H - now under psychiatric care - was able to disguise her pregnancies under large shapeless clothing, and gave birth in the bath.

The forensic examination has to determine whether the babies were born alive before deciding on charges against the woman.

When the teenager discovered the bodies his relatives - said to be well off and living in a large half-timbered house - held a family conference. They then went together, with the distraught mother, to the police. The police seem to be ruling out any other cause of death.

“The crime has basically been solved,” said Chief Inspector Matthias Giese. “We are concentrating for the moment on questioning neighbours and relatives to complete the picture.”

Germany has been hit by what amounts to an infanticide epidemic. In the last fortnight alone, a dead baby boy has been found hidden under rubble in a roadworks in Saxony, another baby turned up in a rubbish recycling centre, and yet another in an attic.

Again and again, babies are stored in deep-freezes. Last year a 39-year-old Bavarian mother was put on trial for strangling her baby daughter and putting her in the icebox.

The woman explained that she was afraid that a new child - she had boys aged 10 and 4 - would threaten her relationship.” He threatened to throw me out if I concealed another pregnancy,” she told the court.

One dead infant was found dumped in a car park litter bin. Others have been dropped, wrapped in plastic shopping bags, into lakes.

Until recently infanticide - the figures are vague, but run to well over a hundred officially recognised cases a year - was presented as an east German problem, the by-product of poor social services, rural poverty and unemployment.

One notorious case saw a woman in Frankfurt an der Oder, close to the Polish border, burying nine dead babies in flowerpots in her garden. Psychologists say that such mothers apparently feel compelled to keep the dead babies near at hand, despite their shame at what they have done.

It has become clear over the past year, however, that the killing of children cannot be seen merely as a regional phemomenen. Last winter a 31 year old mother in the north German region of Schleswig Holstein drugged and suffocated her five children aged between three and nine.

After she went to the police to confess, detectives found the bodies of the boys sprawled on the living room carpet among scattered toys and rusks.

The rise in baby-killing has spawned new interest in the so-called “Baby-Klappe” - hatches built into the sides of hospitals that allow mothers who have recently given birth to deposit their unwanted child in a safe, warm place and head off a possible case of manslaughter or murder. The child can be reclaimed after a week or two and the whole process is anonymous.

A poster campaign has been extolling the merits of the scheme with slogans like: ”Before babies land in the rubbish bin...”

Senior clergymen and some charities oppose the scheme because they say it encourages irresponsible motherhood.

The motivation for baby killing appears to be rooted in a sense of being overwhelmed by responsibility, and the terror of change within a male-female relationship.

“Some women have a greater fear of losing their partners than of losing their child,” says the criminologist Professor Helmut Kury. “They take desperate measures to save a relationship.”

Times Recommends

• Avatar takings hit $600m in ten days
• Orwell birthplace saved from being animal farm
• Bomb disposal squad is Times’s Team of the Year