What to do with Hitler's birthplace in Braunau?

It is at 15 Salzburger Vorstadt Street. It is a discreet Biedermeier-style house, made of stone and painted a pleasant cream color. The ground floor windows have iron bars. Next to it, a bus stop draws attention and, in front, a waist-high granite memorial stone. “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism, millions of dead warn,” reads the chiseled inscription. It is the house where Adolf Hitler was born.

For that reason alone, it is a special house, and the town in which it is located, Braunau am Inn, is too. Even 78 years after Hitler’s suicide in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin, there are still discussions about the fate of the dictator’s birthplace.

The Austrian state, owner of the disturbing building, is debating what to do with it. Since they want to get rid of the neo-Nazi pilgrimage site, they plan to turn it into a police station. But the idea meets with some resistance.

“A completely wrong signal”

“Turning it into a police station is a completely wrong signal,” says filmmaker Günter Schwaiger, “a slap in the face to the victims.” The 58-year-old filmmaker has made an acclaimed documentary about Hitler’s birthplace titled “Who’s Afraid of Braunau?”

“Braunau is not a brown city,” Schwaiger tells DW, alluding to the color by which the Nazis are known. “Quite the opposite!” He continues. The fact that Hitler was born here forces people to confront the past more than anywhere else. “You don’t have to be afraid of Braunau and much less of the people,” says the filmmaker.

For its part, the “Hitler House Speech Citizen Initiative” takes up arms against the plans of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior. “The symbolic effect would be catastrophic,” its spokesperson, Eveline Doll, tells DW, since “the Police played a questionable role in the Nazi era.” “In addition, there are many good ideas and suggestions on how to use this house intelligently and responsibly in terms of contemporary history.”

In search of a “historically correct solution”

The search for an “appropriate” use goes back a long time. After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, the Nazi party NSDAP acquired the birthplace of its “Führer” and created a cultural center. After the war, it returned to its former owners. The State became the tenant, and since then it served sometimes as a library, sometimes as a school, and finally as a workshop for the disabled. Since 2022, Hitler’s birthplace has been empty. In 2016, Austria expropriated it to prevent neo-Nazis from taking over it.

But what to do with the building? The State has appointed a “Commission on the Historically Correct Treatment of Adolf Hitler’s Birthplace.” In its final report, the Commission, which included historians and politicians, declared: “The myth of Fuehrer and the cult of Fuehrer “They were and are part of the central narrative about Hitler.”

Thus, it is important to “break the symbolism of the place”, whether through “social-charitable or official-administrative use”. The Commission advised against “educational projects and contemporary history exhibitions.”

The debate continues

“We have always tried to ensure that this house does not become a place of pilgrimage for the Nazis,” explains Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Community of Vienna and also a member of the Commission. Deutsch highlights in conversation with DW that “a police station of a democratic state of law is planned here, whose task is, among other things, to act against National Socialist recreation.”

In March 2023, the “Bürgerinitiative Diskurs Hitlerhaus” surveyed 1,000 Austrians at the Linz Market Institute. More than half (52 percent) were in favor of creating an “institution that thematically deals with National Socialism, remembrance, anti-fascism, tolerance and peace,” 23 percent were in favor of demolition, while only 6 percent were in favor of the Police settling in the place.

Eveline Doll, spokesperson for the citizen initiative, has an ace up her sleeve. Her idea is for the Viennese association “Austrian Friends of Yad Vashem” to permanently display the exhibition “The Righteous” in Hitler’s birthplace. Courage is a matter of choice.”

The 400-square-meter exhibition commemorates brave non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. “This idea is a basis for debate,” says the association’s spokesman, Georg Schuster, with some caution. “If it doesn’t work, nothing happens.”

At the moment, nothing opposes the conversion, of 20 million euros, into a police station. A training room is also planned, where police officers will receive training on human rights. Work begins in early October, but the debate over Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau is likely to continue.

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