The house in Austria where Adolf Hitler was born will be used for a human rights training center for police officers, Austria’s Interior Ministry announced on Wednesday.
The building in the northwestern town of Braunau am Inn will accommodate the facility along with a police station, for which the Austrian government disclosed plans in 2019.
According to the ministry, the decision was made based on the recommendations of an interdisciplinary expert commission concerned with depriving the property of its “mythical appeal to extremist circles."
Hitler was born in an apartment in the building on April 20, 1889, and lived there until his family left when he was three years old.
The building belonged to Gerlinde Pommer, whose family owned the house before Hitler’s birth, for decades until the Interior Ministry began renting the site in 1972.
It was sublet to various charities. However, the three-story house has been empty since 2011, when the tenant, a disability center, vacated the premises.
After securing the site, the Austrian government remained concerned that it might attract neo-Nazis and others sympathetic to Hitler’s ideology.
When announcing the decision to transform it into a police station in 2019, Austria’s then-Interior Minister, Wolfgang Peschorn, noted that “the future use of the house by the police will be an unmistakable signal that this building will never serve to commemorate National Socialism.”
The conversion – which will cost an estimated €20 million ($21.5 million) – is expected to be completed in 2025, with the police moving in the following year.
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