Vienna (AFP)
The home of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, in northern Austria, will be turned into a police station, said Tuesday the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, after years of litigation with the family who owned it.
The Austrian government wanted to prevent the house where Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 from becoming a place of pilgrimage. But a legal battle only ended this year on the amount of financial compensation due to the family Pommer who had owned it for nearly a century.
The Interior Ministry said it would now seek architectural projects for the transformation of the house into a police station.
"The future use by the police must show clearly that this building will never be a place of commemoration of Nazism," Interior Minister Wolfgang Peschorn said in a statement.
The architectural competition will be launched on a European scale in November, with a representative of the city among the jury members. The decision will be made in early 2020.
Austria's highest court granted 810,000 euros in compensation this year to the Pommer family, who rented the 800-square meter building from the Ministry of the Interior since the 1970s.
The building was used as a center for disabled people.
But in 2011 the family owner refused to finance renovations, and refused to sell the house. It had remained empty.
Although Adolf Hitler spent little time in this house, she continues to attract admirers of Nazism from around the world. Antifascists hold a rally in front of the house every year on Hitler's birthday.
© 2019 AFP