The house where Nazi dictator Hitler was born to be converted into a human rights training centre

The Austrian Interior Ministry has announced that the house in Austria where Adolf Hitler was born will be transformed into a human rights training center for police officers.

Adolf Hitler was born in a building located in Braunau am Inn, Austria, approximately 284 km east of Vienna, on April 20, 1889. He lived there until his family left when he was three years old.

The building where Hitler was born will house the human rights training facility alongside a police station.

The Austrian government first revealed this plan in 2019.

The decision to repurpose the building was made based on the recommendations of an interdisciplinary expert commission aiming to eliminate its “mythical appeal to extremist circles,” as stated by the ministry.

“We have to confront our past and give this historically burdened place a perspective that affirms life,” said historian Oliver Rathkolb, a professor at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, during a press briefing.

The property was owned by Gerlinde Pommer, whose family had owned it prior to Hitler’s birth, until the Interior Ministry began renting the site in 1972.

It was subsequently rented to various charities. However, the three-story house has reportedly remained vacant since 2011 when the previous tenant, a disability center, vacated the premises.

Initially, there were calls for the demolition of the building, but the government eventually acquired it from Pommer through “special legal authorization” due to concerns that it could attract neo-Nazis and individuals sympathetic to Hitler’s ideology.

“It will be an office for the largest human rights organization in Austria – the police – and it will also be a center for training in this fundamentally important topic,” stated Hermann Feiner, the former head of construction and real estate projects at the Ministry of the Interior.

The conversion is estimated to cost €20 million ($21.5 million) and is scheduled to be completed by 2025.

Adolf Hitler, after rising to power in Berlin during the 1930s, implemented a plan to create his envisioned “master race” by exterminating Jews, Slavs, Roma people, homosexuals, and political opponents, forcibly sending them to concentration camps where they endured torture and death. Under Hitler’s regime, the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of approximately 11 million people.