Austria will open a police station in the building where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, aiming to end decades of public debate on how to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage destination for far-right extremists.
The €20 million ($22.9 million) transformation follows nationalization of the building in Braunau am Inn, north of Salzburg on Austria’s border with Germany. Interior Minister Gerhard Karner is set to officially open the new station on Wednesday.
A government-mandated commission of experts rejected proposals for a museum on the site due to the risk that a place of memory could be misrepresented by visitors. Plans to demolish were also blocked as the 17th century building is part of the town’s historical center and under heritage protection — and the commission feared it would symbolize denial of the site’s history.
The use of Salzburger Vorstadt 15 as a police station will ensure “restricted public access and the presence of state authority,” the commission of 13 experts said in its 2016 report. “Furthermore, a government institution would also ensure a high degree of stability and public trust.”
What people wanted
Yet some have questioned the decision. Only 6% of 1,000 respondents supported an administrative use of the site in a 2023 survey commissioned by a group pushing for further discussions on the building’s future. More than half supported the creation of an institution dedicated to remembrance, anti-fascism and tolerance, while a quarter suggested demolition.
During Nazi rule the building became a site of devotion to the dictator, as the Braunau Gallery in the Führer’s Birth House. After being returned to its original owners as part of restitution in 1952, the house was rented back by the government. It’s been used over the years as a school and as a center for social care center; Austria’s government expropriated the building in 2016 after years of it standing unused.
Stefan Marte, the architect from Feldkirch in Austria’s Vorarlberg region who’s leading the transformation into a police station, said the rebuild sought to return the building to its 17th century roots, as opposed to just stripping off the 1938 alterations.
Myths and theories abound
Dealing with the legacy of Nazism has been become a controversial topic in Austria, which for decades propagated the “victim myth” based on Germany’s annexation in March 1938. Since then, public memory has shifted to include the role of Austrians among senior Nazi leadership.
In 2023, the youth organization of the far-right Freedom Party, Austria’s most popular political group, used images of the historical balcony in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace as part of a video showing “readiness to act” against perceived common foes such as mass immigration and gender ideology. The balcony — part of the House of Austrian History — has been closed in part to deter association with Hitler’s speech there proclaiming Germany’s “Anschluss” of its neighbor.
Museum director Monika Sommer has sought public discourse, including inviting artists to present designs for a memorial, that would help give the balcony new symbolism.
Elsewhere in Vienna, a statue of Karl Lueger, the city’s mayor from 1897 to 1910, was this year tilted 3.5 degrees to the right in a renovation that aimed to contextualize his legacy, which included major infrastructure developments as well as fiercely antisemitic views. Lueger’s name in 2012 was removed from a stretch of Vienna’s historical Ringstrasse.
