The birthplace of Adolf Hitler in Austria, intended to become a police station, will be modified at least by the architects, said Tuesday the government whose goal is to "neutralize" this building with a cumbersome past. It is by its knowingly “apparently minimalist” approach that the Austrian architectural firm Marte won the European call for tenders launched to transform the building, explained the president of the jury, Robert Wimmer, in a press conference.
The Austrian government has fought a long legal battle to secure ownership of this house in the north of the country, with the aim of preventing the place where Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 from becoming a place of pilgrimage neo-Nazi. The building of 800 square meters located in the center of Braunau-am-Inn, on the German border, will notably be raised by a new roof, and undergo an enlargement.
"The best thing to do"
"Entrusting this building to the police is the best thing to do to neutralize it," said government project manager Hermann Feiner. Several hypotheses had been considered for the future of the building, including its demolition or a radical transformation of its architecture. The works will cost five million euros funded by the state. They will end in early 2023. "A new chapter, looking to the future, will be opened concerning the birthplace of a dictator and a mass murderer," said the Austrian Minister for Human Rights. 'Interior Karl Nehammer.
At the end of a long procedure, Austria had definitively become the owner of this house in 2019, after having been a tenant for more than forty years. An expropriation had to be brought against the owner. Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, has long had a complex relationship with its past. After the Second World War, his successive governments presented it as "the first victim of Nazism", denying the complicity of many Austrians in the crimes of the Third Reich. A critical eye began to be exercised in the mid-1980s.
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