BRAUNAU INN: 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 said. 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 for atrocities committed during World War II.
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.
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.” Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Warn.” Workers were putting the finishing touches on the renovated facade.
Officers are scheduled to move in during “the second quarter of 2026,” the interior ministry said. But for author Ludwig Laher, a member of the committee that represents Holocaust victims, “a police station is problematic, as the police… are obliged, in every political system, to protect what the state wants ”.
