Reuters —
The building Adolf Hitler was born in near the Austrian border with Germany officially begins 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 remodeled 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,” which 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.
