This week, the Austrian government began carrying out a plan to turn the house where Adolf Hitler was born into a police station. To understand the reasoning behind the move, we used ChatGPT.
On Monday, the building where Hitler was born in 1889 was fenced off and measurement work began to renovate it into a police station, a district police headquarters and a branch of the Austrian Academy of Police where police officers will be trained in human rights. The building is expected to open in 2026.
The project, approved in 2019, aims to prevent a phenomenon of "pilgrimage" by supporters of Nazi ideologies to the building, located in the town of Braunau am Inn, near the border with Germany. The government had previously tried to prevent it from becoming a focal point frequented by neo-Nazis by hiring it in 1972 for use by the Interior Ministry. However, it later became a nursing home, and when it was evacuated and closed in 2011 it remained empty. The government wanted to buy it in order to continue using the site in ways that would prevent Hitler supporters from visiting it, but the building's owners refused to sell it until 2017 when the country's highest court ruled that the government had the right to expropriate the building if the owner refused to sell it.
Outside the building will remain the memorial stone placed next to it, inscribed with the inscription: "For freedom, democracy and freedom. Never again fascism. Millions of dead remind us."
Although the government merely wants to prevent any possibility of 'Nazi tourism' in the building, its project has received quite a bit of criticism. Historian Florian Kotenko argues that there is a "complete lack of historical context" in the project, and that a simple attempt to remove the building's "recognition factor" by renovation is futile. Instead, he supports an alternative proposal to display an exhibition on the stories of people who saved Jews during World War II.
It should be noted that even in Munich, where Hitler stayed in the apartment of his partner Eva Braun, the government did not demolish the building, but built a police station next to it, and the apartment overlooking it from the other side of the Prinzregentenplatz junction was received by none other than the first ever Chabad emissary in Germany, Rabbi Israel Diskin.
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