ADOLF Hitler’s birthplace has controversially been turned into a multi-million pound police station complete with its own human rights training centre.
Converting the house where the evil Fuhrer was hatched has ruffled some feathers in the idyllic Austrian border town of Branau am Inn.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Sibylle Treiblmaier, outside the soon-to-be cop shop.
Residents have balked at its £17.5million conversion cost, but the government has argued it is moving to “neutralise” the property and save it from becoming a shrine for far-right extremists.
Treiblmaier, a 53-year-old office assistant, argues that it could have “been used better or differently”.
The project is slated for completion by the “second quarter of 2026”, the interior ministry said.
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Austria – which was annexed by Hitler’s Germany in 1938 – has long faced accusations it hasn’t fully owned up to its role in the Holocaust.
The far-right Freedom Party of Austria, founded by former Nazis, topped the polls in 2024 for the first time ever — though it failed to form a government.
Last year, two streets in Braunau am Inn once honouring Nazis were renamed after years of protests.
The house where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, and lived for a short period of his early life, is right in the town centre on a narrow shop-lined street.
During the Nazi era, the house – which dates back to the 17th century – gained mythical status as the “Fuhrer’s birthplace” after it was imbued with propaganda.
A memorial stone that now sits outside reads: “For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism.”
After the dictator’s 1945 suicide, the Pommer family took over the deed.
Since 1972, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior began leasing the house to protect it from misuse by Neo-Nazis.
It has taken on different lives as a city library, a school, and later a disability workshop centre.
The house stood derelict from 2011 to 2016, but became state property a year later, with the owner reportedly receiving a handsome £700,000 sum.
Author Ludwig Laher, a member of the Mauthausen Committee Austria that represents Holocaust victims, blasted the costly conversion.
“A police station is problematic, as the police… are obliged, in every political system, to protect what the state wants,” he said.
According to Laher, a previous idea to turn it into a place where people could discuss peace had received a lot of support.
Jasmin Stadler, a 34-year-old shop owner and Braunau native, also slammed the eye-watering money paid.
She added it would have been interesting to put Hitler’s birth in the house in a “historic context”.
But others showed support for the redesign.
Wolfgang Leitner, a 57-year-old electrical engineer, said turning it into a police station could help “bring, hopefully, a bit of calm”
“It makes sense to use the building and give it to the police, to the public authorities,” he said.
It comes as a bonkers 41-year-old neo-Nazi got nicked for hoarding drugs, weapons and Hitler-themed wine in Pinsdorf, an hour south of the Hitler home.
Throughout Austria, debate on how to address the country’s Holocaust history has repeatedly flared.
Some 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed and 130,000 forced into exile during Nazi rule.
Birthplaces of Tyranny
- Benito Mussolini (born 1883) – Predappio, Italy
- Joseph Stalin (born 1878) – Stalin Birthplace Museum, Gori, Georgia
- Mao Zedong (born 1893) – Shaoshan, Hunan, China
- Kim Il-sung (born 1912) – Pyongyang, North Korea
- Francisco Franco (born 1892) – Ferrol, Spain
- Augusto Pinochet (born 1915) – Valparaíso, Chile
- Saddam Hussein (born 1937) – Al-Awja, Iraq
- Pol Pot (born 1925) – Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom Province, Cambodia
