Soul-searching over Austria’s painful past
Town grapples with how to use building where Hilter born
BRAUNAU AM INN, Austria — This Austrian town, sitting at the border with Germany, has a 15thcentury church tower, cobblestone streets and cluttered rows of charming houses.
It also has a fraught burden. On the upper floors of the house at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 on April 20, 1889, Adolf Hitler was born.
One recent afternoon, Annette Pommer, 32, a history teacher, stared through the window of the Sailer cafe at the threestory, 17th-century building across the street where Hitler spent the first few months of his life.
For years, Braunau residents say, few gave the house a second thought, except when tourists asked for a photo, or the occasional neo-Nazi showed up on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday with a candle or wreath.
But in 2017, the Austrian government, acutely sensitive to the house’s poisonous symbolism and potential for abuse, expropriated the property, and after debate, announced the building would become a police station. The goal was to stop it from attracting modern supporters of Hitler and to sever associations with its painful history. Construction began in October.
Like many in Braunau, Pommer had wanted the building to become a museum or exhibition space to explore Austria’s part in the Nazi regime, a use that could provide an especially valuable lesson at a time when war again rages in Europe, antisemitism is rising and far-right parties are stirring.
“It should be about how
people become Hitler,” she said. “It’s not a house of evil. It’s just a house where a child was born. But it’s right to explain what became of that child.”
When Alois Hitler, a customs clerk, and Klara, his third wife, rented rooms in the house and had their son, Adolf, the building was home to a tavern. Within a year, the family moved elsewhere in town, and after another two years, left for Passau, Germany.
In 1938, the house was acquired for the Nazi party by Martin Bormann, a high-ranking Nazi official, and the street was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. The building became a public library and gallery for approved local artists.
Postwar, the house was returned to the family that had previously owned it, and it was rented out as a library, then a school and later a bank. In 1972, the government assumed the
lease to prevent the house from being exploited for any glorification of Nazi ideology. In 1977, the house was occupied by an organization for people with disabilities. The group left in 2011, and in 2017, parliament seized the property, paying $882,000 in compensation.
But the empty house prompted renewed soulsearching about how it should be used: A home for refugees? A place to celebrate Austrians who protected Jewish people and resisted Hitler? A center for studying peace and war?
A government-appointed
Commission on the Historically Correct Treatment of Adolf Hitler’s Birthplace recommended against demolition because “Austria should not be allowed to deny the history of the site,” it said. But the group concluded that the property couldn’t become a museum, arguing that it would then continue to be associated with Hitler. It called for a “profound architectural redesign that would deprive the building of its recognition value and thus its symbolic power.”
In the end, the government decided to put a police station in the building. The renovated structure — with two new buildings at the back, a human rights training office and a reconstructed front — will cost $21.75 million and be ready for the police by 2026.
In 1989, the town’s mayor set a granite stone in front of the house that came from a quarry at the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp, 80 miles away. It bears an inscription: “For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Are a Warning.”
When the fate of the house was being debated, officials in the Interior Ministry suggested moving that stone. Townspeople protested, and because it rests on municipal, not federal, land, it is staying.
Still, some say that’s not enough.
Sitting in a nearby hotel, Eveline Doll, 56, a former here, said that for a long time after the war, there was a feeling among Austrians that they had been victims of Nazi Germany. When she was a girl, she told visitors that the house had nothing to do with her.
But since the 1980s, she said, there has been a widening realization that Austria was not the innocent, idyllic place of its selfimage. Some Austrians did resist, but many followed Hitler and helped perpetrate his crimes. She wishes the house could be central to the national conversation about the historical truth and could stand for a message of tolerance.
“You should never forget the beginning — that’s the thing — and be aware of when things are getting problematic, and they are nowadays,” Doll said.
Günter Schwaiger, an Austrian filmmaker, said that the Nazis should not be remembered only at concentration camps.
“To close the doors of the house and to change the facade means only to continue the politics of repression of the truth,” Schwaiger said.
“This house — as a symbol for a normal place in a normal little city — stands for the fact that Nazis didn’t come from outside or from ‘another planet.’ They came from our midst.”