(ProsperNews.net) – The birthplace of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler will be converted into a police station. Police will occupy the building in Braunau am Inn, on the Austrian-German border, from early 2026 following years of debate about what to do with the site. The country’s Interior Ministry has rented the building since 1972, and new plans include installing a human rights training center for law enforcement officers.
The building has had several occupants in the past few decades but has stood empty since 2011, when a charity center for adults with learning disabilities vacated. A sign reading, “For freedom, democracy, and liberty. Never again fascism. Millions of dead remind us,” is to remain posted outside.
Austrian film director Günter Schwaiger, who has made a documentary about the building, condemned the government’s decision, saying it is what Hitler would have wanted. To enforce his argument, Schwaiger cites a newspaper article from 1939 in which the Nazi dictator expressed a wish for the house, and specifically stated that he wanted it to become an office for district authorities.
Calling on the government to rethink, Schwaiger told reporters that a police station is precisely the kind of house of authority that Hitler had in mind. Historian Florian Kotanko agrees with Mr. Schwaiger and said the government’s intention to “demystify” the building and prevent visits from neo-Nazis was “impossible to accomplish.” Instead, he argued, the site should be used to construct a museum and memorial dedicated to those who saved Jews from Hitler’s genocide.
The Nazi leader was born in Braunau am Inn on April 20, 1889. He lived in the building in question for only a short time, spending most of his early life in the city of Linz. He moved to Germany in 1913 at the age of 24 and became its dictator in 1933. His Nazi regime sparked the Second World War when it invaded Poland in 1939.
Work started on the $20 million police station construction project on October 2.
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