BRAUNAU AM INN, Austria: Austria opened a new police station in Adolf Hitler´s former house on Wednesday, in the hope of deterring today´s ascendant far-right extremists from making the pilgrimage to the Nazi dictator´s birthplace.
In a ceremony to mark the opening, Johannes Waidbacher, mayor of the small town of Braunau-am-Inn, said he hoped the transformation would show that the local community is “confronting its history, that it is assuming responsibility”.
The decision to turn the house into a police station follows a long and delicate debate over what to do with the site, in a country often criticised for not taking full responsibility for its role in the Holocaust.
“I believe that the opening of the police station today brings clarity to the discussion, perhaps also a bit of calm for the people of Braunau,” the mayor said, in a ceremony also attended by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner.
Few local residents were present, but 90-year-old Erna Seidl said she was “relieved” that at last “something” had been done and “very happy with the result”.
After a 20-million-euro ($23-million) refurbishment finished three years behind schedule, the unassuming building where one of history´s most notorious figures was born is all but unrecognisable.
The roughcast yellow walls of the 17th-century home near the German border, where the future Fuehrer was born on April 20, 1889, have been whitewashed over by the Austrian architecture firm Marte.
