Renovation work has begun on Hitler’s birthplace in the Austrian town of Braunau in the north of Austria, so that in the future it will house a police station and a branch of the security academy, which will offer police officers training on human rights. This Monday, the local agency APA reports.
According to the controversial official plan, which has been criticized because it could supposedly coincide with a specific wish of the German dictator, the work is expected to be completed in early 2026, the year in which the building is expected to be used again after it has been empty since 2011.
Previously, Lebenshilfe, which helps people with intellectual disabilities, was based there.
The house has belonged to the state since 2016 and the debate over its use has been heated ever since.
Among other things, the “Discourse Hitler House” initiative, together with the friends of Yad Vashem (Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial and Research Center), proposed permanently hosting the traveling exhibition “The Righteous” about non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews persecution by the Nazis.
However, it was decided to convert the house into a police station, a work for which five million euros were initially to be invested but which is now estimated to be around twenty million due to the multiple postponements that will be required.
In a report from 2016, a commission of experts on the handling of Hitler’s birthplace suggested that it be put to charitable-social or official-administrative use with the intention of ending the house’s tourist attraction for neo-Nazis, and ultimately decided to do so. the second option.
However, this decision was criticized again with Günter Schwaiger’s latest film “Who’s Afraid of Braunau?”, which was released in cinemas this summer.
Schwaiger found a newspaper report from 1939 that showed Hitler’s wish that his birthplace, which he had left at the age of three, should become the headquarters of the district headquarters, i.e. serve administrative purposes.
From this, according to the director, it can be concluded that the construction of a police station in the dictator’s birthplace will make his wishes come true.