Austria’s Cabinet approved on Tuesday legislation that will see the state seize ownership of the house where Hitler was born, although the government appeared divided on what to do with the building.
Austria’s Cabinet approved on Tuesday legislation that will see the state seize ownership of the house where Hitler was born, although the government appeared divided on what to do with the building. Interior minister Wolfgang Sobotka reiterated his call for the house in the town of Braunau am Inn in northern Austria to be torn down. But deputy chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner said that the building near the German border has heritage protection and so “cannot be demolished”.
He said it could be used “for educational purposes” such as a museum.
Mr Sobotka said though that the building was “not worthy” of such a status since it was bestowed by the Nazis after Hitler annexed his native country into the Third Reich in 1938. The legislation, still to be approved by Parliament, would see the owner, whose family has been in possession of the house for more than century, forcibly dispossessed after years of fruitless talks.
The aim of the government, which announced its intention to seize the house in April, is to stop the building become a shrine for neo-Nazis. A 12-person commission is currently examining the different options. Gerhard Baumgartner, head of the Austrian Resistance Documentation Centre, said that the building should be “completely depoliticised” to stop what he said was the building’s growing attraction among neo-Nazis. “We are seeing that a kind of European tourism. Last year there was a bus trip from Hungary visiting, this year different prominent far-right figures stopped on their way through,” Baumgartner told Oe1 public radio. “It should be turned into something that nobody wants to be photographed in front of... A supermarket, a Humana (second-hand clothes shop) or a fire station — a sensible usage.”
