Hitler’s birthplace in Austria opens as police station in bid to deter neo-Nazis

The building where Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, has opened as a police station following years of debate over its future.

The Nazi leader was born in an apartment inside the building in 1889 and spent the first few weeks of his life there, before his family moved to another address.

Now, the building is home to a police unit specialized in tackling drug trafficking. Located on the border with the German state of Bavaria, district police commander Stefan Haslberger says Braunau am Inn is on a key drug smuggling route, according to Austrian newspaper Der Standard.

At the opening ceremony on Wednesday, Austria’s interior minister Gerhard Karner said the new police station stands in stark contrast to the building’s associations.

“Today’s police, our Austrian federal police, is the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place,” he said. “This house will now become a place of democracy, rule of law, security, freedom and human dignity.”

The redevelopment, which is estimated to have cost €20 million (roughly $32 million), involved adding an underground parking garage and a training room, alongside holding cells, offices, break rooms and other facilities, according to Der Standard. The building’s facade has been repainted white and now bears a sign saying “Police.”

The opening marks the end of years of public discussions over how best to deter neo-Nazis from visiting the site and treating it as a shrine. As part of these efforts, debris from the construction was disposed of at a secret location to prevent it from becoming Nazi memorabilia.

Even before the redevelopment, the only feature that linked the building to Hitler was a stone on the street outside, which comes from the Mauthausen concentration camp and bears the inscription: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions of dead serve as a warning.”

The building was previously privately owned and had housed a charity for people with disabilities until the Austrian government acquired it through a compulsory purchase in 2017.

It took two government-mandated commissions to determine how the state ought to proceed with handling the building. In 2016, the first commission recommended that the government urge the previous owner to make necessary renovations to the building so that it could be used for a public service.

The second commission concluded that the building should not be demolished because it would be a denial of Austria’s past, and nor should it become a museum, as this could further attract neo-Nazi visitors.

The decision to turn Hitler’s birthplace into a police station was announced in 2019, and was not without opposition. CEO and chair of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative, Avi Benolo, previously told National Post that he feels the building is “not even worthy of that recognition, not even worthy of talking about.”

If it were up to him, he would “erase that building from existence, just like Hitler should be erased and everything he stood for,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Mauthausen Committee, Austria’s main ⁠Holocaust survivors’ group, has argued both that a police station is inappropriate and that more should be done to draw attention to Hitler’s crimes.

“Every year at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial there’s a ceremony to say: never again. ​And in Braunau they’re saying: let’s forget as soon as possible,” Robert Eiter of the Mauthausen Committee ​and the Network Against ⁠Racism and Right-Wing Extremism told Reuters.

“The world won’t forget where the worst mass murderer in history was born. Wikipedia won’t change its entries,” Eiter said, adding ⁠there will ​be no reduction in the number of neo-Nazis making “the pilgrimage to Braunau.”

Elsewhere, Hitler’s private apartment on Munich’s Prinzregentenplatz also now serves as a police station, while his official residence in Berlin’s Reichskanzlei and his holiday home in the Bavarian Alps, Berghof, were destroyed by bombing during the Second World War.