Austria Will Seize Hitler House to Keep Out Neo-Nazis
Hitler Image by File
— Austrian lawmakers voted to dispossess the home where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was born.
The vote Wednesday night followed years of the German border town of Braunau and later the national government trying to purchase the home from its owners.
In October, the Austrian government initiated legal procedures to dispossess the home from its owners in an attempt to prevent the site from becoming a shrine to the neo-Nazi community. The Interior Ministry announced at the time that the home would be torn down.
The building at 15 Salzburger Vorstadt St. is listed as a historical landmark, however, though Hitler’s name does not appear on it.
Some town residents want the building to become a refugee center, while others want to create a museum dedicated to Austria’s liberation from the Nazis, the French news agency AFP reported. Razing the building would negate the country’s Nazi past, an expert commission has said.
Gerlinde Pommer’s family has owned the house where Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, for more than a century. The town has tried for decades to purchase the building.
The ministry had rented the home for decades and sublet it to charitable organizations. The house, which draws neo-Nazi visitors, especially on the anniversary of Hitler’s birth, has stood empty since 2011 after the owner refused to authorize needed renovations.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
