AUSTRIA OPENS POLICE STATION IN HITLER'S BIRTHPLACE

Austria opened a police station on Wednesday in the house where Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, near the Austrian-German border. The Austrian government purchased the 17th-century building in 2016 and completed a substantial refurbishment costing approximately 20 million euros. Officers from district and local police will now be based in the terraced house on Salzburger Vorstadt 15. The transformation was designed to prevent the building from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage and to strip it of symbolic significance.

Hitler was born in the house on 20 April 1889 and lived there only a few weeks before his family moved elsewhere in Braunau, eventually leaving the town when he was three years old. For decades, Austria's interior ministry rented the property from its owner, Gerlinde Pommer, at a generous rate to prevent its use for far-right tourism. When Pommer refused to sell the building to the government, Austria's parliament passed legislation in 2016 allowing compulsory purchase. The government paid her 812,000 euros in compensation; Pommer later took the government to court claiming the sum was inadequate, but her case failed. The renovation process began after a 2019 announcement that the building would become a police station, following an EU-wide competition for architectural designs.

Stephan Mlczoch, head of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior's history department, stated the aim was to "prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique." Mayor Johannes Waidbacher said he hoped the transformation would demonstrate that the local community was "confronting its history, and assuming responsibility." About 100 people attended the opening ceremony, including Interior Minister Gerhard Karner and roughly 30 uniformed officers. Some commentators have expressed reservations about the decision, stating the police station sends the wrong signal and that a centre confronting Austria's Nazi past would have been preferable.