Adolf Hitler’s birthplace will be turned into a police station and work will begin in October, the Austrian government announced on Monday.
“Work is scheduled to start on October 2,” a spokesman for the interior ministry told AFP.
“After the architectural renovation of the building, steeped in a strong past, a police station and a training center for human rights activists will be installed on the site,” read a recent statement.
It was decided not to be a place of memory, to prevent the place where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 and spent the first years of his life from becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site.
The goal “is to sustainably combat the cult that exists for him in extremist circles,” according to a committee of specialists set up by the government in 2016.
Demolition was ruled out because, according to historians, Austria “must face its past”.
The government has fought a long legal battle to become the owner of this house in the center of Braunau-am-Inn (north), on the German border.
The 800 square meter building will have a new floor and will be expanded.
The works have taken time and the cost of the works is now estimated at 20 million euros financed by the state, against the initially budgeted 5 million.
The new residents will settle in the place from 2026, according to the ministry.
The director of a documentary that will be released at the end of August, Günter Schwaiger, has asked the authorities to abandon this transformation into a police station.
This means “fulfilling Hitler’s own wish” in favor of the administrative use of the sites, as formulated in an article in the local newspaper published in May 1939, Schwaiger explained at a press conference this Monday in Vienna.
Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, has had complex relationships with its past ever since.
Source: DN
