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Adolf Hitler’s birthplace has been turned into a £17m police station after it became a centre for “Nazi tourism”.
The station in the Austrian village of Braunau am Inn opened on Wednesday after years of renovation.
Authorities believe that the officers will deter extremists from gathering at the site and be a symbol of protecting democracy.
Oliver Rathkolb was a member of the commission, which ultimately rejected plans to demolish the house or turn it into a museum.
Instead it recommended using it for “social-charitable” or “administrative” purposes by installing tax authorities or the police in the house.
The most important thing was “to break the myth of Hitler’s birthplace”, Mr Rathkolb told the German magazine Der Spiegel.
Hitler was born in the three-storey building in 1889, which was in private ownership after his death.
Hitler’s parents were tenants in the house, which has stood vacant since 2011 after serving as a library, a school and a workshop for people with disabilities.
The house, a former 17th-century inn, then became a shrine for neo-Nazis, with extremists posing for selfies, giving stiff-arm salutes.
Some local businesses even began selling Hitler souvenirs such as tankards, mugs and beer with the Führer’s face on it. On online maps, the site was listed as “Hitler’s birthplace”.
Giving the Nazi salute and displaying swastikas and other symbols of the regime is illegal in Austria, under laws banning the public promotion of National Socialism. Performing the gesture can be punished with heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison.
A memorial stone from the granite quarry of the Mauthausen concentration camp was installed in front of the house. An inscription on it read: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions of dead remind us of it.”
However, the memorial was defaced with paint multiple times and Nazi symbols continued to be left behind at the location.
After a legal battle, the house was bought from the owner using a special law in 2016. She was given compensation of about £682,000. Before that the interior ministry paid the owner a generous rent to prevent it becoming a site of pilgrimage for extremists.
The house was managed by the ministry, which initially planned to demolish the building after buying it.
The commission said that it would be denying history, which led to the renovation costing some €20m (£17m), which changed the façade of the building.
Hitler only lived at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 for a few weeks. His parents moved to another address in Braunau before leaving the town when he was three years old.
After annexing Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938, Hitler returned to Braunau for a symbolic visit on his way to Vienna, the capital.
A survey in 2023 found that only 6 per cent of people supported turning the building into a police station. One reason was the Austrian police’s role in enforcing Nazi rule in Austria.
Eveline Doll, who is from Braunau and is the spokesman for a local campaign group called Diskurs Hitlerhaus, said: “A unique historical opportunity was missed to use the birth house of history’s greatest mass murderer in a sustainable and historically responsible way.”
“Braunau was not responsible for Hitler’s crimes,” she told Deutsche Welle.
She added: “But around the world, Braunau will always be associated with the fact that history’s greatest mass murderer was born here.”
