LETTER FROM VIENNA
The construction barriers were installed on Monday October 2 in front of the large building with walls covered in yellow paint eaten away by humidity. Located in the center of Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town of 17,000 inhabitants on the German border, this imposing, decaying building is infamous for being the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in 1889.
If the work progresses at the planned pace, the house where he lived for the first three years of his life – his father was a customs officer – should be transformed by 2026 into… a police station. This was the decision of the Austrian government in 2019, after years of procrastination over the future of this place of pilgrimage popular with neo-Nazis.
“The cult and mythology around the person of Adolf Hitler by right-wing extremists – who sometimes go specially to Braunau to visit his birthplace – must cease permanently”, pleaded the Ministry of the Interior (right) by confirming, in May, the launch of the project. The work has been postponed several times, due to the endless debates on the future of this cumbersome heritage.
Hitler salutes
The building – which will be completely renovated by the Austrian architectural firm Marte.Marte Architekten – will also house “a human rights training center” for law enforcement. Beyond the symbolic aspect of its new destination, it is the continuous presence of police officers which is supposed to chill those who pay homage to the person responsible for the extermination of 6 million Jews. In January 2021, the house hosted a gathering of anti-vax protesters, some of whom made Hitler salutes. Seventy-eight years after the end of the Second World War, the region remains a stronghold of the Austrian far right.
Belonging to the same family since 1912, except for the war years when it was used by the Nazi Party as an exhibition center, the house had been rented since 1972 by the State, for “prevent annoying use”, and housed a center for disabled children. Long accused of wanting to bury the past rather than confront it, the town hall had a commemorative stone erected in 1989 – to mark the hundredth anniversary of Hitler’s birth – in front of the building. Recalling the “millions of dead”, she proclaims: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. »
After 2011, the house remained empty due to conflicts with the owner, who received exorbitant rent from the State, while opposing all the reconversion projects put forward by the authorities. The heiress was only expropriated in 2016, after the adoption by Parliament of a law allowing the circumvention of property rights. The government at the time wanted to raze the building, before backpedaling in the face of criticism.
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