Austrian police station opens at Hitler’s birthplace in bid to rid site of Nazi link

Austria opened a police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born in the town of Braunau am Inn.

It comes after years of debate over what to do with the 17th-century former inn where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889.

The building has now been largely renovated and its facade replaced, but this has been a major headache for Austrian authorities who want to prevent the building from becoming a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

Hitler lived at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 for only a few weeks before his family moved to another address in Braunau. They left town altogether when he was three years old.

After Hitler annexed Austria to Nazi Germany, he returned briefly to Braunau on his way to Vienna in 1938.

Interior Minister Gerhard Karner and other local dignitaries attended the opening ceremony of the police station, where police musicians played tuba and other wind instruments.

Karner said Austria took “responsibility” for the “terrible legacy” of the past. Although deciding what to do with the building was not easy, Karner believed that the police station had turned a “new chapter” with the building.

“This house will now become the place of democracy, rule of law, security, freedom and human dignity,” he said.

Later, a Catholic police chaplain blessed two crosses to be hung in the new police station.

The interior ministry had rented the building for decades from its former owner, a local woman named Gerlinde Pommer. He paid her a generous rent to prevent the house from being used as a site for far-right tourism.