In Hitler’s birthplace, soul searching into a toxic past

The Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, just on the border with Germany, has a 15th-century church tower, cobbled streets and cluttered rows of charming, colorful houses, some in green, pink and blue.

It also carries a fraught historical burden. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 on the upper floors of the house at Salzburger Vorstadt 15.

On a recent afternoon, Annette Pommer, 32, a history teacher, stared through the window of the Sailer Cafe at the three-story 17th-century building across the street where Hitler spent the first few months of his life. She could hear the pounding of jackhammers; an excavator crawled over a pile of rocks at the back of the house as workers in hard hats swept the ground.

For years, Braunau residents say, few thought about the house, except when tourists asked for a photo, or the occasional neo-Nazi showed up on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday with a candle or a wreath.

But in 2017, the Austrian government, keenly sensitive to the house’s toxic symbolism and potential for abuse, expropriated the property and, after a period of debate, announced that the building would be renovated to turn it into a police station. The aim was to prevent the country from attracting modern supporters of Hitler and to break associations with its painful history. Construction started in October.

“It’s a missed opportunity,” Ms. Pommer said.

Like many in Braunau, she had wanted the building to become a museum or exhibition space to explore Austria’s role in the Nazi regime, a use that could provide an especially valuable lesson at a time when war is raging again in Europe, the anti-Semitism is increasing and by far the right-wing parties are on the move.

“It should be about how people become Hitler,” she said. ‘It is not a house of evil. It’s just a house where a child was born. But it is good to explain what has become of that child.’

When Alois Hitler, a customs officer, and Klara, his third wife, rented rooms in the house and had their son Adolf, the building was home to a tavern. Within a year the family moved to another part of the city, and after another two years left for Passau, Germany, another border town.

In 1938, the house was acquired for the Nazi Party by Martin Bormann, a high-ranking Nazi official, and the street was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. The building became a public library and gallery for recognized local artists – and turned into a kind of pilgrimage site.

After the war, the house was returned to the family that previously owned it, and was rented out as a library, then as a school and later as a bank. In 1972, the government took over the lease to prevent the house from being exploited for any glorification of Nazi ideology. In 1977 the house was occupied by an organization for people with disabilities.

That group moved in 2011 and passed parliament in 2017 an action to seize the property and pay 812,000 euros ($882,000) in damages.

But the empty house led to a period of renewed research into how it should be used: a home for refugees? A place to celebrate the Austrians who protected the Jewish people and opposed Hitler? A center for studying peace and war?

A government-appointed committee for the historically correct treatment of Adolf Hitler’s birthplace recommended against demolition because “Austria cannot deny the history of the site,” the report said. But the committee came to the conclusion that the building could not become a museum, arguing that it would then remain associated with Hitler. It called for a “profound architectural redesign that would deprive the building of its recognition value and therefore its symbolic power.”

Ultimately, the government decided to establish a police station in the building, including a regional police command.

The renovated structure – with two new buildings at the rear, a human rights training office and a reconstructed front – will cost 20 million euros ($21.75 million) and be ready for the police to move in in 2026.

Florian Kotanko, a retired teacher and local historiansaid that many here would prefer that the building still house the organization for people with disabilities, as that was in direct contradiction to what Hitler, who persecuted people with disabilities, would have wanted.

“It’s an unwanted heritage,” Mr. Kotanko said, standing at the back of the house, where a temporary wooden fence separated it from a neighboring discount supermarket. “But we have to deal with it.”

He thinks the police department’s decision could have an adverse effect. Rather than putting off Hitler fans, he said, they might see it as a matter of pride to get arrested and spend time indoors.

Hitler wrote about his birthplace at the opening of ‘Mein Kampf’, but there is little evidence of his presence in the city.

Some residents said they were indifferent about the house. After all, there are other concerns, such as jobs, in a city where an aluminum factory and an umbrella factory are among the largest employers.

“Leave it empty,” said Sylvia Berghammer, 53, who works at Zagler’s bakery down the street. “It’s not good for our children to argue.”

“It’s the past,” said Ammar Alkhatib, 15, a student with a backpack who stood in the doorway across from the house.

But more people expressed their dismay at the arrival of police and agreed with Ms Pommer that the house should be used to mark and explore history.

In 1989, the town’s mayor placed a granite stone in front of the house that came from a quarry at the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp, 80 miles away. There is an inscription on it: “For peace, freedom and democracy. No more fascism. Millions of deaths are a warning.”

When the fate of the house was debated, Interior Ministry officials suggested moving that stone. Townspeople protested, and because it rests on municipal, not federal, land, it remains.

Yet some say that’s not enough.

Sitting in the fading afternoon light in a nearby hotel, Eveline Doll, 56, a former journalist who grew up in the city, said that for a long time after the war there was a feeling among Austrians that they had been victims of Nazi Germany. When she was a girl, she told visitors that the house had nothing to do with her.

But since the 1980s, she said, there has been a growing realization that Austria was not the innocent, idyllic place of his self-image. While some Austrians resisted, many followed Hitler and helped commit his crimes. She wishes the house could be at the center of the national conversation about historical truth and stand for a message of tolerance.

“You have to never forget the beginning – that’s what matters – and be aware of when things become problematic, which is the case today,” she said.

Günter Schwaiger, an Austrian filmmaker who is a movie about the city and the house, said in an interview that the Nazis should not only be commemorated in places such as concentration camps.

“Closing the doors of the house and changing the facade only means continuing the policy of suppressing the truth,” he said. “This house – as a symbol of a normal place in a normal town – represents the fact that the Nazis did not come from outside or ‘another planet’. They came from among us.”