National Socialism
Criticism of the use of the Hitler house as a police station
The birthplace of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in Braunau am Inn. The planned use of Hitler’s birthplace as a police station met with sharp criticism after a newspaper document was found. photo
© Matthias Röder/dpa
During research, the documentary filmmaker Günter Schwaiger came across a document with Hitler’s wishes for the use of the house where he was born. The entry of the police inspection is now in question.
The planned use of Hitler’s birthplace as a police station met with sharp criticism after a newspaper document was found. The dictator wanted “administrative use” of the building in Braunau am Inn in Austria, said documentary filmmaker Günter Schwaiger on Monday in Vienna. In principle, the current plans correspond to the wishes of the dictator. “That’s exactly what Hitler wanted,” said Schwaiger, citing the newspaper article of May 10, 1939.
The lines in the newspaper “Neue Warte am Inn”, in which Hitler allegedly wanted to see offices of the district administration placed at the location, were found during research on Schwaiger’s documentary film “Who’s afraid of Braunau?” found by historian Florian Kotanko. It is an “irony of history” that the will of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) is now being fulfilled in a certain way, according to Kotanko.
Surely not Hitler’s statement?
The historian Oliver Rathkolb, member of the commission dealing with Hitler’s birthplace, told the “Kronen Zeitung”: “Because it is only a newspaper report, it is not proven that this alleged statement by Hitler really existed.” A comparison would be completely wrong anyway, since the police today act on a democratic and constitutional basis. When asked, the Ministry of the Interior referred to a statement from July: Austria is not alone, it said. “For example, a former apartment of Adolf Hitler on Munich’s Prinzregentenplatz has been home to various Bavarian police departments since 1949.”
The conversion of Hitler’s birthplace has been stalled for years. The redesign is intended to prevent the area on the border with Bavaria from becoming a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. Hitler spent the first months of his life in the building. After expropriation, the Hitlerhaus has been owned by the Republic of Austria since the beginning of 2017.
In his documentary film, which will be released in 30 Austrian cinemas on September 1st, Schwaiger lets numerous citizens of the city have their say. Among other things, they report on the derogatory reactions when they mention their hometown in conversations with others. Denigrating the municipality as a “Nazi town” is convenient because it seems to relieve the rest of Austria, Schwaiger said. “The real fear is that we’re dealing with our own family history,” says the filmmaker. The majority of people in Austria descend from perpetrators, followers and tolerators of the Nazi regime. “The silence is still there today.”