The Austrian building where Adolf Hitler was born will become a police station as well as a human rights training center for law enforcement agencies. A conversion into a museum was ruled out for fear of the arrival of neo-Nazis.
The announcement ends the long hesitation regarding this historic building. The Austrian building, where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, will “house a police station as well as a human rights training center,” Austria’s interior ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. The establishment of the police in the places had already been announced in 2020.
In 2016, an expert commission was convened to make recommendations on the use of this building while the Austrian state examined the possibility of recovering its property. This was decided by a law published in January 2017.
The commission had recommended “encouraging non-profit or official-administrative use of the property”. She had also recommended that no use be made of it “that could in any way promote a later connection with Hitler or an identification with National Socialism”, for example via a museum. In particular, there was a fear that the location would attract and bring together neo-Nazis who wanted to pay homage to Hitler. The latter lived in this building in Braunau am Inn, near the border with Germany, for five years.
A demolition excluded
A demolition of the building was also ruled out. The Ministry of the Interior emphasized on Wednesday that this was “perceived as ignorance of Austria’s historical responsibility under National Socialism”. A demolition is also “legally impossible due to the obligations created for this place by the Expropriation Act, which obliges the federal government to continue using it in a meaningful way,” he added.
“We have to deal with our past and give this historical place a perspective on life,” said Oliver Rathkolb from the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, quoted from the Ministry of the Interior.
The building is intended in particular to train police officers in the defense of human rights. The total cost of the renovation, which was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is estimated at 20 million euros. It should be completed by 2026.