Hitler's birthplace begins new life as a police station

By Francois Murphy and Christine Uyanik

BRAUNAU AM INN, Austria, July 22 (Reuters) - The building where Adolf Hitler was born, near the Austrian border with Germany, officially began a new life as a police station on Wednesday, a conversion Austria's government hopes will prevent it serving as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

After years of debate about the large, traditional terraced house in the town of Braunau am Inn, which was in private ownership and had housed a charity for people with disabilities, Austria made a compulsory purchase in 2017 and announced in 2019 it would be remodelled and turned into a police station.

Even before the conversion, the only sign of its historical significance was a rock on the pavement from the Mauthausen concentration camp with the inscription "Never again fascism" that does not mention Hitler. The rock remains in place. The only sign added to the white facade reads "Police".

"The aim was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique," the head of the Austrian interior ministry's history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a tour of the building.

CULT OF PERSONALITY

That mystique was encouraged by the Nazis' cult of personality around Hitler, under whose rule the "Fuehrer birth house" was an art museum. Hitler only lived there for a few weeks in 1889 before his family moved out, Mlczoch said.

"Today's police, our Austrian federal police, is the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand ... for democracy and the rule of law," Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told an opening ceremony.

Passers-by often stop to take pictures, but their views on Hitler are usually not known. Local officials said there are now only "isolated incidents" involving visitors, fewer than before.

While they did not elaborate, the Hitler salute and other Nazi symbols are banned in Austria.

Asked about the public response to the project, Mayor Johannes Waidbacher told Reuters: "I think on the whole the people of Braunau have accepted it and can live with it."

Waidbacher was on a commission that recommended the building be used either for a charitable or official administrative purpose. In the end, having a charity based there would have made it too accessible to the public, he said.

"I think it isn't a bad approach but whether it works as we all hope and expect, we'll have to wait and see," he said.

NEVER AGAIN, OR LET'S FORGET?

There has been some opposition, including from the Mauthausen Committee, Austria's main Holocaust survivors' group, which has argued both that a police station is inappropriate and that more should be done to draw attention to Hitler's crimes.

"Every year at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial there's a ceremony to say: never again. And in Braunau they're saying: let's forget as soon as possible," said Robert Eiter of the Mauthausen Committee and the Network Against Racism and Right-Wing Extremism.

For decades, Austria argued it was the first victim of National Socialism, having been annexed by Hitler's Germany in 1938. It now says Austrians were also perpetrators but rarely elaborates beyond that.

"The world won't forget where the worst mass murderer in history was born. Wikipedia won't change its entries," Eiter said, adding there will be no reduction in the number of neo-Nazis making "the pilgrimage to Braunau".

Some local residents questioned the conversion.

"I would have preferred if they had done something else but it is what it is," said Irene, 74, adding that she would have wanted the charity to stay there.

Most, however, were supportive.

"It's great and a good idea," said Thomas Spreitz, an estate agent. "Every now and then there are (neo-Nazi) groups there, and now that's history."

(Editing by William Maclean)