Austria to place police precinct in Hitler’s birthplace

It will “send an unmistakable signal that this building will forever be removed from the commemoration of national socialism,” said the interior minister.

By World Israel News Staff and AP

Austrian authorities say the house where Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 will become a police precinct, ending years of uncertainty over the building that’s become a pilgrimage site for people who glorify the Nazi dictator.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Peschorn said late Tuesday that the “the future use of the house by the police should send an unmistakable signal that this building will forever be removed from the commemoration of national socialism.”

Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.

The house in Braunau am Inn, near the German border, will be redesigned following an international architectural competition.

It was expropriated from the previous owner in 2017.

“For decades, the government rented it from its former owner in an attempt to stop far-right tourism,” reported BBC.

“It was once a day-care center for disabled people, but this ended when owner Gerlinde Pommer objected to plans to make it more wheelchair-friendly and then refused all government offers to buy it or carry out renovations,” the British public broadcaster added.

Pommer’s family had owned the yellow, three-story structure, reported U.S. National Public Radio (NPR).

A stone memorial to Holocaust victims sits in front of the building, NPR noted.

“For peace, freedom and democracy,” the inscription reads. “Never again fascism. Millions dead are a warning.”