Work to transform Adolf Hitler’s birthplace into a police station will begin on October 2, a spokesman for the Austrian Interior Ministry told Agence France-Presse on Monday.
According to a statement recently sent to the press, “a police station and a training center for human rights agents” will be installed in the building “with a heavy past”, after carrying out an “architectural reform”.
Austria decided not to transform the building into a place of memory to prevent the place where Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, and where he lived in his early years, from becoming a place of neo-Nazi pilgrimage.
The objective, according to a commission of experts created by the Austrian government in 2016, is “to sustainably break the cult devoted to it by extremist circles”, but historians have also decided to exclude the possibility of demolition because they consider that Austria “has to face his past.”
The work will have an estimated cost of 20 million euros, 15 million more than initially estimated, and it is expected that the new occupants of the building will move to the site in 2026.
The decision, however, is controversial and the director of a documentary on the subject, due to be released later this month, called for the idea to be dropped as it “fulfils Hitler’s own desire” for administrative use of the facilities. . , formulated in a newspaper article of May 1939.
Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, has a complex relationship with its past.
After World War II, the country was presented as “the first victim of Nazism” and the complicity of many Austrians in the crimes of the Third Reich was denied, but this is a version that has been critically reassessed since the mid-1990s. 1980.
Source: TSF
