Hitler’s birthplace to be turned into police station
Austria plans to turn the house where Adolf Hitler was born into a police station, the interior ministry has announced.
The house in Braunau am Inn, a town near the German border, will be redesigned following an EU-wide architectural competition.
Interior minister Wolfgang Peschorn said the “future use of the house by the police should send an unmistakable signal that this building will never again act as a reminder of Nazism”.
The move ends years of uncertainty over the building, which the government feared could become symbolic for Nazi sympathisers.
“How to deal with Adolf Hitler’s birthplace,” said Mr Peschorn, “has been a challenge for the Second Republic for over 70 years, especially with relation to the history of the Third Reich in Austria.”
The Austrian government had leased the house from the 1970s to avoid it becoming a shrine for Nazi enthusiasts or right-wing tourists, as it once was during the Second World War when owned by Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann.
For years the rented property was used to help disabled people, one of the groups persecuted by Hitler’s Nazi regime, which led a campaign of military conquest and racist extermination across Europe that cost tens of millions of lives.
Following a bout of disputes with the owner Gerlinde Pommer, who refused to sell or do renovations, Austria passed a law to let the state own the house.
“We will make sure that this building will never fall into the wrong hands to become a site of pilgrimage for those stuck in the past,” said then interior minister, Wolfgang Sobotka, in 2017.
Hitler was born on the top floor of the house in 1889.
The Nazi leader spent the first three years of his life in Braunau am Inn before his family moved to Passau, Germany.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
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