The house in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn where Adolf Hitler was born has officially opened as a police station, with the government in Vienna hoping the transformation will stop the building from serving as a destination for neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.

The conversion marks the end of a lengthy and often contentious debate over what to do with the large terraced house, which sits near Austria's border with Germany. After years in private ownership — most recently housing a charity for people with disabilities — the Austrian government made a compulsory purchase of the property in 2017 and announced two years later that it would be converted into a police station.

Stripping the Building of Its Mystique

The goal of the redesign, carried out by Austrian architecture firm Marte, was deliberate and symbolic. The building's distinctive roughcast yellow exterior has been whitewashed, and the only addition to the white facade is a sign reading "Police".

"The aim was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique," said Stephan Mlczoch, head of the Austrian interior ministry's history department, speaking to journalists during a tour of the building.

That mystique has deep roots. Under Nazi rule, the property was designated an art museum and celebrated as the "Fuehrer birth house" — a deliberate product of the cult of personality built around Hitler. In reality, Hitler only lived in the house for a few weeks after his birth in 1889 before his family moved away.

At an opening ceremony, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner framed the conversion in pointed terms. "Today's police, our Austrian federal police, is the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law," he said.

A Cautious Welcome From Locals

The only external acknowledgement of the site's dark history remains a stone from the Mauthausen concentration camp that has sat on the pavement outside for years. Its inscription reads: "For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Warn." It does not name Hitler, and it has been left in place.

Braunau am Inn's mayor, Johannes Waidbacher, who sat on a commission that recommended the building be used for either a charitable or official administrative purpose, said the police station option had been chosen partly because a charity would have made the site too accessible to the public.

"I think on the whole, the people of Braunau have accepted it and can live with it," he said, though he acknowledged the outcome was not universally welcomed. "I think it isn't a bad approach but whether it works as we all hope and expect, we'll have to wait and see."

Local officials noted that incidents involving visitors to the site — passers-by frequently stop to photograph the building — have reduced to only "isolated incidents", fewer than before the conversion. The Hitler salute and other Nazi symbols are banned under Austrian law.

Critics Say More Confrontation, Not Less, Is Needed

Not everyone has welcomed the approach. Austria's main Holocaust survivors' organisation, the Mauthausen Committee, has argued that converting the birthplace into a police station is inappropriate and that Austria is doing too little to confront Hitler's crimes directly.

"Every year at the Mauthausen concentration camp memorial there's a ceremony to say: never again. And in Braunau they're saying: let's forget as soon as possible," said Robert Eiter of the Mauthausen Committee and the Network Against Racism and Right-Wing Extremism.

Eiter also cast doubt on whether the conversion would achieve its intended effect. "The world won't forget where the worst mass murderer in history was born. Wikipedia won't change its entries," he said, predicting the number of neo-Nazis making what he called "the pilgrimage to Braunau" would not diminish.

The debate over the building reflects a broader tension in Austria's reckoning with its past. For decades the country maintained it was the first victim of National Socialism, having been annexed by Hitler's Germany in 1938. Austria now formally acknowledges that its citizens were also perpetrators — though critics say it rarely goes further than that admission.