Austria: House where Hitler was born to house charity agency 

Austria’s government has found a befitting solution to the issue of Hitler’s birth home – a workshop for disabled people.

Rather than tearing down the property, as originally decided, Austrian government officials have resolved to transform the home where Adolf Hitler was born into a base for a charity.

Thursday’s decision comes a day after lawmakers overwhelmingly approved an Interior Ministry bill to dispossess the owner, who had refused to sell the empty building in Braunau am Inn, a town on Austria’s border with Germany.

Provincial governor Josef Puehringer says destroying the structure would have fueled accusations of “tearing down a piece of burdensome history.”

Instead, officials want to remodel the property’s facade to eliminate its draw as a shrine for admirers of the Nazi dictator, who was born in the house in 1889.

Puehringer says the house will be offered to an agency running a workshop for disabled people.

There is currently no on-site mention of Hitler’s name, only a big rock with the caption, “For peace, freedom and democracy, never again fascism, millions of dead are a warning.”

A house in nearby Leonding, where Hitler lived as a teenager, is now used to store coffins for the town cemetery. There, the tombstone marking the grave of Hitler’s parents, another pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis, was removed last year at the request of a descendant.

A school that Hitler attended in Fischlham, also near Braunau, displays a plaque condemning his crimes against humanity.

The underground bunker in Berlin where Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, was demolished and the site left vacant until the East German government built an apartment complex around it in the late 1980s.

The apartments overlook the German capital’s monument to victims of the Holocaust.

By: AP and World Israel News Staff

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