The building where Adolf Hitler was born in the town of Braunau am Inn near Austria’s border with Germany is now officially a police station, a conversion overseen by the Austrian government in the hope of deterring neo-Nazis from using it as a place of pilgrimage.
After years of consultation about the fate of the large, traditional terraced house, which prior to the refurbishment was privately owned and the headquarters of a disabilities charity, Austrian authorities purchased the building in 2017 and announced in 2019 it would be remodelled and turned into a police station.
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Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in a rented apartment in the building and spent the early weeks of his life there before his family moved out and eventually relocated to Passau in southern Germany.
Even before it was converted, there was little sign of the building’s past. There’s a rock on the pavement from Mauthausen — a notorious Nazi extermination camp — with the inscription “Never again fascism” carved into it, but there is no mention of Hitler by name.
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The rock remains in place. The only sign added to its newly painted white facade reads “Police.”
Speaking to media on a tour of the building, the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, said the aim of the conversion “was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” Reuters reports.
Under the Nazi regime, the “Führer birth house” was an art museum, Mlczoch added, which existed as part of the ruling fascist party’s effort to instill its cult of personality propaganda policy, designed to portray Hitler as an omniscient saviour figure.
“Today’s police, our Austrian federal police, is the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told an opening ceremony
Local officials told the outlet that there are now only “isolated incidents” involving visitors, and the number has reduced over time. It did not elaborate on what type of “incidents” have occurred.
Performing the Hitler salute or displaying symbols associated with the Nazi Party is illegal in Austria under the Prohibition Act and punishable by law.
Asked about the public response to the project, Mayor Johannes Waidbacher told Reuters: “I think on the whole the people of Braunau have accepted it and can live with it.”
“I think it isn’t a bad approach, but whether it works as we all hope and expect, we’ll have to wait and see,” he added.
Austria’s main Holocaust survivor group, the Mauthausen Committee, did raise opposition to the remodel, arguing that a police station is inappropriate and that more should be done to draw attention to Hitler’s crimes.
“Every year at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial there’s a ceremony to say: never again. And in Braunau they’re saying: let’s forget as soon as possible,” Robert Eiter, a spokesperson and member of the Mauthausen Committee and the Network Against Racism and Right-Wing Extremism, said, adding that nothing would deter neo-Nazis from visiting the site.
Hitler’s Nazi regime killed approximately six million Jews and other minority groups during the Holocaust, including gay people, Roma people and disabled people, as well as Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war.
His invasion of Poland in 1939 triggered the Second World War, in which at least 60 million people died. He died by suicide in April 1945, months before the end of the war.
— with files from Reuters and the Associated Press
