The Austrian government has converted Adolf Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau am Inn into a police station to discourage neo-Nazi pilgrimages. The building was purchased in 2017 and renovated at a cost of about 20 million euros.
Officials hope the new function will help the local community confront its history and reduce the building’s association with Hitler. The transformation was marked by a ceremony attended by local authorities and police.
The building in which Adolf Hitler was born near the Austrian border with Germany has been converted into a police station.
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The Austrian government opened the new police station in the town of Braunau am Inn on Wednesday in the hope that the change will prevent neo-Nazis from visiting the building as a place of pilgrimage.
The government bought the terraced house in 2017, and the plans to remodel it were announced in 2019. The renovation cost about 20 million euros ($22.8m).
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Officers from the district and local police will be based in the building.
In a ceremony to mark the opening, Johannes Waidbacher, mayor of the town, said he hoped the transformation would show that the local community is “confronting its history, that it is assuming responsibility”.
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“I believe that the opening of the police station today brings clarity to the discussion, perhaps also a bit of calm for the people of Braunau,” Waidbacher said in a ceremony also attended by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner.
About 100 people watched an orchestra play in the house’s courtyard, including some 30 officers in uniform, though few locals made the trip, the AFP news agency reported.
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The head of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a tour of the building: “The aim was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique.”
That mystique was encouraged by the Nazis’ cult of personality around Hitler, under whose rule the “Fuehrer birth house” was an art museum.
Hitler was born there on April 20, 1889; his family moved out a few weeks later. Passers-by often stop to take pictures, but their views on Hitler are usually not known. Local officials said there are now only “isolated incidents” involving visitors, fewer than before.
However, critics have said changing the building’s function will not erase its history and association with the Nazi leader.
“The world won’t forget where the worst mass murderer in history was born. Wikipedia won’t change its entries,” said Robert Eiter of the Mauthausen Committee and the Network Against Racism and Right-Wing Extremism. He added that there will be no reduction in the number of neo-Nazis making “the pilgrimage to Braunau”.
When asked about the public response to the project, Mayor Waidbacher told the Reuters news agency, “I think on the whole the people of Braunau have accepted it and can live with it.”
Meanwhile, some residents are unhappy about the building’s new purpose. “I would have preferred if they had done something else, but it is what it is,” said Irene, 74, adding that she would have wanted the charity to stay there.
Waidbacher was on a commission that recommended the building be used for either a charitable or official administrative purpose. In the end, having a charity based there would have made it too accessible to the public, he said. Waidbacher had said an argument against the charity was that it would have been too accessible to the public.
There is a rock on the building’s pavement from the Mauthausen concentration camp with the inscription “Never again fascism”. The rock remains in place, and a sign that reads “Police” has recently been added.
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