People in Adolf Hitler’s hometown in Austria have conflicting feelings about turning the house where he was born into a police station.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Sibylle Treiblmaier remarked outside the house in Braunau am Inn, which is on the border with Germany.
The 53-year-old office assistant told our reporter that it might keep far-right extremists from meeting at the spot, but it might have “been used better or differently.”
AFP says that the government aims to “neutralize” the site and passed a bill in 2016 to take possession of the run-down building from its private owner.
Austria, which Hitler’s Germany took over in 1938, has been criticized numerous times in the past for not completely taking responsibility for the Holocaust.
The far-right Freedom Party, which was started by former Nazis, is ahead in the polls after winning the most votes in a national election for the first time in 2024. However, it was unable to form a government.
After years of complaints from activists, two streets in Braunau am Inn that honored Nazis were renamed last year.
“Problematic”
The house where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, and resided for a brief time as a child located in the middle of town on a narrow street with shops on both sides.
The stone in front says, “For Peace, Freedom, and Democracy.” Fascism will never happen again. “Millions of Dead Warn.”
When our reporter went there this week, workers were putting the last touches on the refurbished facade.
The interior ministry announced that officers are set to move in during “the second quarter of 2026.”
But Ludwig Laher, a member of the Mauthausen Committee Austria that speaks for Holocaust victims, says that “a police station is a problem because the police have to protect what the state wants in every political system.”
He told our reporter that a previous plan to turn the house into a location where people could talk about how to achieve peace had “received a lot of support.”
Jasmin Stadler, who is 34 years old and owns a store in Braunau, said it would have been interesting to put Hitler’s birth in the house in a “historic context” to explain more about the property.
She also criticized the 20 million euro ($24 million) expense of the restoration.
— “Bit of calm”—
But other people want the house to be redesigned. Many years ago, the interior ministry rented it out and it was a center for people with disabilities until it fell apart.
Wolfgang Leithner, a 57-year-old electrical engineer, said that turning it into a police station will “hopefully bring a bit of calm” and keep it from becoming a shrine for far-right extremists.
“It makes sense to use the building and give it to the police and other government agencies,” he said.
Our reporter asked the office of Braunau’s conservative mayor for a remark, but they said no.
There have been many heated discussions in Austria over how to deal with the country’s Holocaust past.
During Nazi authority, 130,000 Jews from Austria were forced to leave their homes and 65,000 were slaughtered.
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