Hitler’s home improvement
QUESTION
Is Hitler’s childhood home still standing? HIS family moved several times during Adolf Hitler’s early childhood before settling in Linz, Austria’s third largest city, when he was five.
Adolf was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, an Austrian town on the German border, where his father, Alois, was a customs official.
The building, Salzburger Vorstadt 15, had a bar and several rental flats, one of which was occupied for three years by Alois, his third wife Klara, their son Adolf, and Alois’s older children, Alois Jr and Angela, by his second wife.
Following the Nazis’ rise to power, it became a shrine to the Fuhrer. Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann bought the house, where an art gallery and public library celebrating Hitler’s life were established.
When U.S. troops liberated Braunau in May 1945, a German platoon tried to blow up the house, but the Americans defended it. The building was returned to its original owners and later became a bank and then a school.
Fears that the house could become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis led the Austrian government to take over the lease in 1972, turning it into a centre for people with special needs.
Last year, the Austrian government compulsorily purchased the building from its long-term owner for €800,000 to convert it into a police station.
In 1892, the Hitlers moved to the picturesque town of Passau in Bavaria. Until May 1, 1893, they lived in an apartment in Theresienstrasse, which still exists.
They then moved to a house on Kapuzinerstrasse, which has mostly been demolished and rebuilt.
This house was close to the River Inn and Hitler mentioned playing cowboys and Indians on its banks. It is said he narrowly escaped death after falling into the river. He was rescued by a passing church organist.
In 1894, Alois was relocated to Linz on the Danube. Hitler spent most of his youth in the area, until 1907, when he left for Vienna.
Alois bought a small farmhouse called the Rauscher Gut near Fischlham, which has since been modernised. The family then settled in Leonding, an unassuming village on the outskirts of Linz.
The small dwelling Alois bought is next to the cemetery and, today, is used for its administration. Hitler’s parents are buried in the cemetery.
Hitler regarded Linz as his childhood home and envisioned grand architectural schemes for it, including a massive Fuhrer museum to house his collection of looted art.
His aim was to make it the cultural centre of the Third Reich and to eclipse Vienna, a city he hated. One of the final photos of Hitler in 1945 shows him in the Berlin bunker looking at a model of his scheme for his home town.
David Petterson, London N11.
QUESTION Would white always win in a chess match between two identical super computers with the same information about that game?
IF BOTH computers really played the optimal strategy, the outcome would be the same every time: either white can force a win, black can force a win or neither can.
The possibilities in a chess game increase exponentially. Imagine each board state as a tree: each branch is a different move that can be made, which branches down further per move.
The Shannon number is an estimation for chess complexity of a staggering ten to the power of 120 game states.
Chess super- computers are expert at winning by constantly eliminating weak moves following each turn. There is disagreement on whether the growth of computing power will allow for chess to be solved by such ‘brute force’, but with the current state of computing, it can’t be done.
Jan Mazur, Birmingham.
QUESTION How will the International Space Station be disposed of when it comes to the end of its useful life?
THe International Space Station (ISS) will be crashed into a remote part of the Pacific known as the spacecraft cemetery. Originally, this was planned to happen in 2015 but, with constant repair and modification, it is hoped the ISS will continue to operate until 2028.
The spacecraft cemetery, which is also known as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area and Point Nemo, is in the southern Pacific Ocean, 3,000 miles east of New Zealand and 2,000 miles north of Antarctica. It is two-and-a-half miles deep.
Since 1971, more than 270 spacecraft have been crashed into this area. Russia’s dumped spacecraft far outnumber those from other space agencies, with more than 190 compared with 60 from the U.S. and eight from europe.
The spacecraft cemetery’s most famous resident is Mir, the 142-ton Russian space station, which was the size of a football pitch.
Also deposited there are rockets’ secondary payloads, spy satellites, fuel tanks and cargo ships that carried supplies to astronauts in orbit.
Planning for ISS’s descent is underway, but is by no means complete.
In January 2017, Nasa released a draft plan, but critical factors, such as the amount of propellant required and the survivability of the systems and sensors required to take it out of orbit in a controlled manner, remain unknown.
It is estimated that 16 per cent of the ISS would likely survive the burn and stresses of re- entry into the earth’s atmosphere, with between 25 and 85 tons falling into the ocean.
There are also concerns of who is going to pay for it. Nasa estimates a controlled re-entry of the ISS will take up to two years and cost £750 million.
K. E. Edwards, Ipswich, Suffolk.
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