Birth House Adolf Hitler

Branau am Inn is a small town on the border of Austria and Germany separated by the river Inn. The city is best known for being the birthplace of former German dictator Adolf Hitler. The preservation (or not) of his birthplace has been controversial for many years.

Where one says it should be preserved because of its historical importance, the other indicates that it can become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

History house:
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, on the second floor of the Salzburger Vorstadt 15 building. He lived the first period of his life in the seventeenth-century 'Bürgerhaus'. The family would only live here for 2 years before moving to the Austrian city of Linz. The Pommer family bought the property in 1912 and started a café on the ground floor.

In the 1930s, far-right activists already found their way to Hitler's birthplace and often met there. At the annexation of Austria, in 1938, Hitler crossed the bridge at the river Inn near Braunau. The church bells rang, thousands of people lined the road, but Hitler didn't stop. The building was bought in the same year by Martin Bormann and he turned it into a National Socialist 'cultural centre'. His initials, "MB", are still on the facade.

After the war
After the war it took years before the "Pommer" family got the property back. The 'Bürgerhaus' was set up as a day center for the disabled, but the Pommer family came into conflict with the government because they refused to make the building suitable for the disabled. A long legal battle began, because the government wanted to prevent Braunau am Inn from becoming a place of pilgrimage for the extreme right.

A memorial stone (from the former Mauthausen concentration camp) was placed in front of the building and an expropriation procedure was initiated. Initially, the idea was to establish a center on this site that would warn of the dangers of totalitarianism and recall the horrors of the Second World War. There were calls for demolition or even for it to be "neglection" by natural elements.

Future
After years of legal battle, the Pommer family appears to have had a substantial compensation for the property. In 2022 it was finally decided that the building will be used as a police station.

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Source

• Text: Cheapskatetravel
• Photos: Thomas Ledl (1, 2, 3), Cheapskatetravel (4, 5)