BRAUNAU AM INN, Austria--The building where Adolf Hitler was born, near the Austrian border with Germany, officially began a new life as a police station on Wednesday, a conversion Austria's government hopes will prevent it serving as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.
After years of debate about the large, traditional terraced house in the town of Braunau am Inn, which was in private ownership and had housed a charity for people with disabilities, Austria made a compulsory purchase in 2017 and announced in 2019 it would be remodelled and turned into a police station.
Even before the conversion, the only sign of its historical significance was a rock on the pavement from the Mauthausen concentration camp with the inscription "Never again fascism" that does not mention Hitler. The rock remains in place. The only sign added to the white facade reads "Police".
"The aim was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique," the head of the Austrian interior ministry's history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a tour of the building.
That mystique was encouraged by the Nazis' cult of personality around Hitler, under whose rule the "Fuehrer birth house" was an art museum. Hitler only lived there for a few weeks in 1889 before his family moved out, Mlczoch said.
"Today's police, our Austrian federal police, is the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand ... for democracy and the rule of law," Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told an opening ceremony.
Passers-by often stop to take pictures, but their views on Hitler are usually not known. Local officials said there are now only "isolated incidents" involving visitors, fewer than before. While they did not elaborate, the Hitler salute and other Nazi symbols are banned in Austria.
Asked about the public response to the project, Mayor Johannes Waidbacher told Reuters: "I think on the whole the people of Braunau have accepted it and can live with it."
Waidbacher was on a commission that recommended the building be used either for a charitable or official administrative purpose. In the end, having a charity based there would have made it too accessible to the public, he said.
"I think it isn't a bad approach but whether it works as we all hope and expect, we'll have to wait and see," he said.
