The Fate of Hitler's Birthplace

What exactly is going to happen to Adolf Hitler’s Austrian birthplace? This week, there’s been some confusion as to the future fate of the house in Braunau Am Inn where Hitler was born in 1889. On Monday, Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka announced in the press that the house would be razed so that nothing but the cellar remained. The house would go, a committee of enquiry had decided, because it had become a site of pro-Nazi pilgrimage. Tuesday, however, Sobotka contradicted this report. Instead, the building would not be demolished but undergo a “profound architectural transformation” so that its “recognition value” was zero.

An abrupt media backlash may have caused this about-turn. Many commentators saw the demolition plan as a capitulation to the power of Neo-Nazi pilgrims. As Mely Kiyak writes in Germany’s Die Zeit: