The redesign of the house where Adolf Hitler was born will go ahead as planned, Austria’s interior ministry has said, after a documentary aired new claims about the late Nazi dictator’s wishes for it.
After years of legal wrangling, the government decided to turn the house in the northern town of Braunau, where Hitler was born in 1889, into a police station with a human rights training centre. Work will begin on 2 October.
In an attempt to prevent the building on the border with Germany becoming a neo-Nazi shrine, the government took control of the dilapidated building in 2016. The expropriation ended a bitter saga between the state and the former owner.
“Everything will go ahead as planned,” an interior ministry spokesperson said.
The Austrian director Günter Schwaiger, however, said the ministry’s plans for the house will “always be suspected” of being “in line with the dictator’s wishes”. He is expected to release a documentary about the building later this month. .
As evidence Schwaiger cited the discovery of a local newspaper article from 10 May 1939, which states that it was Hitler’s wish to have his birth house converted into offices for the district authorities.
Transforming the house into a police station would amount to the administrative use the dictator had envisaged, Schwaiger said at a press conference Monday, at which he called on the government to rethink its plans.
The cost of the controversial redesign of the 800-square metre corner house is estimated to be €20m (£17m). The work is scheduled to be completed by 2025 and the police station to be operational by 2026.
Hitler only spent a short time at the property, but it has continued to draw Nazi sympathisers from around the world.
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Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and although many Nazis from Hitler downwards were Austrians, historians say the country was slow to acknowledge its shared responsibility for the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazis before and during the second world war.
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