The constructing where Adolf Hitler was born within 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 within the hope of deterring neo-Nazis from using it as a spot of pilgrimage.
After years of consultation concerning the fate of the big, traditional terraced house, which prior to the refurbishment was privately owned and the headquarters of a disabilities charity, Austrian authorities purchased the constructing in 2017 and announced in 2019 it could be remodelled and became a police station.
FILE – This Sept. 27, 2012 picture shows an exterior view of Adolf Hitler’s birth house in Braunau am Inn.
AP Photo / Kerstin Joensson
Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in a rented apartment within the constructing 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 constructing’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 such thing as a mention of Hitler by name.
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The rock stays in place. The one sign added to its newly painted white facade reads “Police.”
Chatting with media on a tour of the constructing, the top of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, said the aim of the conversion “was to stop any association with Adolf Hitler, in order 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 a 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 precise opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told a gap ceremony, in accordance with Reuters.
Local officials told the outlet that there are actually only “isolated incidents” involving visitors, and the number has reduced over time. It didn’t elaborate on what sort of “incidents” have occurred.
Performing the Hitler salute or displaying symbols related to the Nazi Party is against the law in Austria under the Prohibition Act and punishable by law.
Asked concerning the public response to the project, Mayor Johannes Waidbacher told Reuters: “I believe on the entire the people of Braunau have accepted it and might live with it.”
“I believe it isn’t a foul approach, but whether it really works as all of us hope and expect, we’ll should wait and see,” he added.
Austria’s important Holocaust survivor group, the Mauthausen Committee, did raise opposition to the remodel, arguing that a police station is inappropriate and that more ought to be done to attract attention to Hitler’s crimes.
“Yearly on 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 positioning.
Hitler’s Nazi regime killed roughly six million Jews and other minority groups in the course of the Holocaust, including gay people, Roma people and disabled people, in addition to Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war.
His invasion of Poland in 1939 triggered the Second World War, during which at the least 60 million people died. He died by suicide in April 1945, months before the top of the war.
— with files from Reuters and the Associated Press
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