Work to convert Adolf Hitler’s birthplace into a police station will begin in October, the Austrian government announced on Monday in a controversial case that has been under criticism for years.
“Work is scheduled to start on October 2,” an Interior Ministry spokesman told AFP.
“After the architectural renovation, a police station and a training center for human rights officers will be established in this building with a troubled past,” says a recent press release.
It was decided not to make it a place of remembrance, to prevent the place where Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 and where he spent his early years from becoming a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.
The aim is to “sustainably break the cult dedicated to him by extremist circles,” said an expert commission set up by the government in 2016.
A demolition was also ruled out, according to historians Austria had to “face its past”.
The government fought a long legal battle to secure ownership of this house in the center of Braunau-am-Inn (north) on the German border.
The 800 square meter building will be significantly upgraded with a new roof and an extension.
The schedule has been delayed and the cost of the works is now estimated at 20 million euros funded by the state, down from five originally.
The new residents are due to move in in 2026, according to the ministry, which is “sticking to its project” despite fresh criticism.
In fact, the director of a documentary that hits theaters at the end of August, Günter Schwaiger, has urged the authorities to refrain from converting it into a police station.
This would be tantamount to “fulfilling Hitler’s own wish” for administrative use of the premises, as put it in a local newspaper article published in May 1939, he said at a press conference in Vienna on Monday.
Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, has long had a complex relationship with its past.
After the Second World War, the Alpine country was portrayed as the “first victim of National Socialism” and the complicity of many Austrians in the crimes of the Third Reich was denied.
From the mid-1980s, people began to take a critical look.