The Austrian chapter of the International Mauthausen Committee has called for Adolf Hitler’s birthplace Braunau to rename two street names to commemorate the Nazis and to revoke honorary citizenship from a composer linked to the dictator.
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“It’s hard to believe: in Hitler’s hometown, one of his relatives is still an honorary citizen today,” Willi Mernyi, the organization’s president, said in a statement. This is the composer Josef Reiter (1862-1939), an “ardent National Socialist who is closely linked to the Führer”.
The club is also outraged that a street name commemorates him, just like another “fanatical Nazi agitator with hatred of Jews,” Franz Resl.
It is an “insult to the victims that must stop immediately,” she adds.
The Mauthausen Committee was a resistance network that emerged in the camp of the same name in 1944 and still maintains contact between survivors today by organizing memorial ceremonies.
Contacted by AFP, the community of Braunau, where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, did not immediately respond.
In 2016, the Austrian government bought Hitler’s birthplace in this northern town on the German border and in October began converting it into a police station by 2026 to prevent the site from becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.
Austria is regularly criticized for its memory work.
At the beginning of the year, a collective of authors applied to have five of the nine regional anthems whose authors or composers were Nazis rewritten, without success.
“Our anthem remains our anthem and we will not allow anyone to change it,” criticized the conservative state president of Lower Austria (East), Johanna Mikl-Leitner. The author, a member of the NSDAP, spoke out in particular in favor of Austria’s annexation to the Third Reich.
In 2022, the city of Linz decided to rename several streets with problematic names, including one in honor of Ferdinand Porsche, the car manufacturer’s founder, due to his Nazi past.
The Alpine country has long portrayed itself as a victim of National Socialism and denies the complicity of many Austrians.
It was only in the late 1980s that he began to question his responsibility for the Holocaust. In total, 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered and 130,000 were forced into exile.
The right-wing extremist party FPÖ, founded by former Nazis, was involved in three governments after the war and is currently well ahead in voting intentions ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections.