The house where Adolf Hitler was born in Austria, intended to become a police station as well as a human rights training centre, will be minimally modified by the architects, explained the government, whose aim is to “neutralize » this building with a cumbersome past. It is through its consciously “minimalist in appearance” approach that the Austrian architectural firm Marte. Marte won the European call for tenders launched to transform the building, explained the president of the jury, Robert Wimmer and relayed by TF1 Info.
The Austrian government fought a long legal battle to secure ownership of this house in the north of the country, with the aim of preventing the place where Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 from becoming a place of pilgrimage. neo-nazi.
The 800 square meter building located in the center of Braunau-am-Inn, on the German border, will notably be enhanced by a new roof, and undergo an extension. “Giving this building to the police is the best thing you can do to neutralize it,” said government project manager Hermann Feiner.
Several hypotheses had been considered for the future of the building, including its demolition or a radical transformation of its architecture. The work will cost 20 million euros funded by the state. “A new, forward-looking chapter will be opened regarding the birthplace of a dictator and mass murderer,” said Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer.
After a long procedure, Austria definitively became the owner of this house in 2019, after having been a tenant for more than 40 years. An expropriation had to be initiated against the owner. Austria, annexed by Germany in 1938, has long had a complex relationship with its past. After World War II, her successive governments presented her as “the first victim of Nazism”, denying the complicity of many Austrians in the crimes of the Third Reich. A critical eye began to be exercised in the mid-1980s.
