Adolf Hitler's birthplace in the Austrian city of Braunau am Inn.
Vienna – The house in Braunau am Inn, Austria, where the dictator Adolf Hitler was born, will be used for training police officers in the field of human rights. It was reported by the BBC News server, according to which it is the latest twist in the long-running dispute over what to do with the building.
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Some Austrians call the plan controversial, and would like to see Hitler's birthplace demolished. The expert commission originally decided on its demolition. According to critics, however, this would be a denial of Austria's past, and therefore, according to them, it would be better to use the building, for example, as the headquarters of a charitable organization.
Construction work on the reconstruction of the house should begin in the fall. According to the latest plan, they should be completed by 2025 and the police force should move in by the following year, Austrian broadcaster ORF reported. Deutsche Welle reported in January that the cost of rebuilding the house had quadrupled to 20 million euros (roughly 473 million crowns) as of 2019.
Hitler was born in 1889 in a rented room on the top floor and spent only the first few months of his life there. During Nazi rule, the house was transformed into Hitler's shrine as the city attracted crowds of tourists. But when the Nazis began to lose control in 1944, the house was boarded up.
The Austrian government rented the house for decades from its former owner, Gerlinde Pommer, in an attempt to stop far-right tourism. The house housed facilities for the disabled for several decades. But it had to leave the building in 2011, because Pommerová blocked the plans for the reconstruction of the hospital. In 2016, the government passed a law that allowed it to seize the house in exchange for compensation of more than 800,000 euros (18.9 million CZK).
Austria was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1938 and the official interpretation of the Anschluss from 1945 preferred the claim that the Alpine Republic was the first victim of German expansion. However, since the 1990s, Austria has started to talk about its complicity in Nazi crimes.
