VIENNA: Austria’s Interior Ministry announced that the house in Austria where Adolf Hitler was born would be converted into the human rights training centre for police officers.
According to CNN, the building in Braunau would accommodate the facility along with the police station, for which the Austrian government disclosed a programme in 2019.
The ministry said that the decision was made based on the interdisciplinary expert commission’s recommendations, which deprive the property of its “mythical appeal to extremist circles.”
Historian Oliver Rathkolb, a professor at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, said, “We have to face our past and give this historically burdened place a life-affirming perspective.”
Adolf Hitler was born in an apartment in the building on April 20, 1889 and lived there until his family left for Germany when he was three.
The building belonged to Gerlinde Pommer, whose family owned the building before Hitler’s birth for decades until the Interior Ministry began renting the site from her in 1972.
It was sublet to various charities. The three-storey building has been empty since 2011, when the tenant, the disability centre, vacated the premises.
The government said that the property would be demolished. It then forcibly acquired it from Pommer, with the interior ministry invoking “special legal authorization” to expropriate the property.
Legal wrangling over a seizure and compensation followed, during which time plans to tear the house down were shelved.
After securing the site, the Austrian government remained concerned it might attract neo-Nazis sympathetic to Adolf Hitler’s ideology. When announcing the decision to transform it into the police station in 2019, Wolfgang Peschorn, Austria’s then-Interior Minister, said: “The future use of the house by the police would be an unmistakable signal that this building would never serve to commemorate National Socialism.”
