Austria turns Hitler’s home into a police station

Turning the house where Adolf Hitler was born into a police station has raised mixed emotions in his Austrian hometown. “It’s a double-edged sword,” said Sibylle Treiblmaier, outside the house in the town of Braunau am Inn on the border with Germany. While it might discourage far-right extremists from gathering at the site, it could have “been used better or differently”, the 53-year-old office assistant told AFP.

The government wants to “neutralise” the site and passed a law in 2016 to take control of the dilapidated building from its private owner. Austria — which was annexed by Hitler’s Germany in 1938 — has repeatedly been criticised in the past for not fully acknowledging its responsibility in the Holocaust. The far-right Freedom Party, founded by former Nazis, is ahead in the polls after getting the most votes in a national election for the first time in 2024, though it failed to form a government.

Last year, two streets in Braunau am Inn commemorating Nazis were renamed after years of complaints by activists. The house where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, and lived for a short period of his early life, is right in the centre of town on a narrow shop-lined street. A memorial stone in front reads: “For Peace, Freedom and Democracy.

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Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Warn.” When AFP visited this week, workers were putting the finishing touches to the renovated facade.

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