The work on the reconstruction of Hitler's birthplace has begun, its use raises controversy

Braunau am Inn – The reconstruction of the birthplace of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler began today in the Upper Austrian city of Braunau am Inn. The house is set to become a police station or a branch of the police academy, and in the future, training on human rights for police officers will be held there. These plans have sparked controversy. The construction is expected to serve its new purpose in the first quarter of 2026.

The Austrian government rented the house from its owner for decades in an effort to stop far-right tourism. Until 2011, it housed a branch of the Lebenshilfe organization, which helps people with mental disabilities, but since then the house has been vacant. In 2016, the government passed a law allowing it to confiscate the house in exchange for compensation, and the property is now state-owned.

The APA agency reports that the start of the reconstruction has been postponed multiple times, and expected costs have quadrupled. An expert committee's report from 2016 recommended that the building be used for social-charitable or administrative purposes. Despite the experts' recommendations, the town hall decided that a memorial stone with the inscription "For peace, freedom, and democracy - never again fascism - millions of dead warn." would remain unchanged in front of the house.

Plans for the building to be used by the police have faced criticism from the beginning. APA reports that the initiative Diskurs Hitlerhaus (Discourse Hitler House) together with the organization Friends of the Jerusalem Holocaust Victims Memorial Yad Vashem proposed that the house host a permanent exhibition called The Righteous. This traveling exhibition commemorates those who helped Jews during the Holocaust. Initiative spokesperson Eveline Doll told Deutsche Welle that converting Hitler’s birthplace into a police station has "catastrophic symbolic significance." She reminded that "the police played a dubious role during the Nazi period."

The debate continued this summer in connection with the documentary film Wer hat Angst vor Braunau? (Who is Afraid of Braunau?) by director Günter Schwaiger. Schwaiger pointed to a newspaper report from 1939 stating that Hitler wished for offices of the district leadership to be in his birthplace, meaning that it should be used for administrative purposes. Schwaiger concluded that the Ministry of the Interior is fulfilling Hitler's wishes with its plans regarding the use of the building. "The reconstruction into a police station sends an absolutely wrong signal," the director is quoted by the German portal Focus.de. According to him, it is a "slap in the face of the victims."

Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Vienna Jewish community and a member of the expert committee, said that this is a police station of a "democratic state, whose task is among other things to prevent the resurgence of Nazism." He admitted that he could imagine different uses for the house.

Austria was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1938, and the official interpretation of the Anschluss since 1945 has favored the claim that the Alpine Republic was the first victim of German expansion. However, since the 1990s, Austria has begun to speak of its complicity in Nazi crimes.