Austrian authorities on Wednesday opened a police station in the building where Adolf Hitler was born, amid a years-long effort to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.
The extensively renovated building in Braunau am Inn serves as the district police headquarters, the Salzburg24 news site reported.
Austrian officials said assigning the property to law enforcement was intended to strip it of its symbolic appeal to extremists, the news site reported.
After standing vacant since 2011, the 17th-century building was expropriated by the Austrian government following a dispute with its former owner. An expert commission recommended an administrative or social use, warning that turning it into a museum could attract extremists
regardless of the institution’s mission statement. Demolishing it would erase an important historical site, they also said.
The building’s exterior has been refurbished, but a memorial stone outside remains in place, bearing the inscription: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again Fascism. Millions of dead remind us.”
Hitler, who was born in Austria, championed the country’s annexation by Germany—a goal he realized with the 1938 Anschluss (Annexation).
