Austria has opened a police station in Hitler’s birthplace, the Hitler birthplace in Braunau am Inn, after years of argument over what should happen to the building. The former inn, a 17th-century property in Salzburger Vorstadt, was where Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889.
The site has long been a problem for Austrian authorities, who wanted to stop it becoming a destination for neo-Nazi tourism. Hitler lived there only for a short time before his family moved to another address in Braunau, and they left the town when he was three years old. He later returned briefly in 1938, after annexing Austria to Nazi Germany on his way to Vienna.
For years, the interior ministry rented the building from its former owner, Gerlinde Pommer, paying what it described as generous rent in an effort to keep the house out of extremist hands. The property was also used for many years by a local charity as a day centre and workshop for people with special needs, but that ended in 2011 after Pommer blocked renovations. She also refused to sell the house to the government, and the building sat empty while both sides fought over its future.
Austria’s parliament later passed a law in 2016 allowing the state to seize the property. The government paid Pommer €812,000, or £690,000, and she challenged the amount in court but lost. At the time, then-interior minister Wolfgang Sobotka said the building should be torn down and replaced, echoing an earlier remark from a Russian MP who said he wanted to buy the house and blow it up. That idea drew heavy criticism from people who said demolition would amount to avoiding Austria’s Nazi past.
