Police station opens at Hitler's birthplace in bid to rid site of Nazi link

Police were stationed outside the refurbished building as it opened on Wednesday

Austria has opened a police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born, in the town of Braunau am Inn.

It follows years of controversy about what to do with the 17th-Century former inn, where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889.

The building has now been substantially refurbished and its facade changed, but it has been a huge headache for Austrian authorities, who want to prevent it from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage.

Hitler only lived in Salzburger Vorstadt 15 for a few weeks, before his family moved to another address in Braunau. They left the town for good when he was three years old.

Hitler returned briefly to Braunau in 1938, on his way to Vienna, after he annexed Austria to Nazi Germany.

For decades, the interior ministry rented the building from its former owner, a local woman called Gerlinde Pommer. It paid her a generous rent, in an attempt to prevent the house being used as a site for extreme right-wing tourism.

The old yellow-plastered house has since been substantially refurbished so the facade looks very different

The building was used for many years by a local charity as a day centre and workshop for people with special needs. But it was forced to move out in 2011, when Pommer blocked renovations.

She also repeatedly refused to sell the property to the government.

The house remained empty for several years, while the authorities and Pommer argued over terms.

In 2016, Austria's parliament passed a law allowing the government to seize the house from Mrs Pommer. It paid her compensation of €812,000 (£690,000). She later took the government to court, saying the sum was too low, but lost her case.

A memorial stone outside the building reads For Peace, Freedom and Democracy - Never Again Fascism - Millions of Dead Warn

The interior minister at the time, Wolfgang Sobotka, said the building should be torn down and a new one erected in its place. It was an echo of an earlier offer by a Russian MP who said he wanted to buy the house and blow it up.

But there was a storm of criticism, with many saying that destroying the house would be tantamount to denying Austria's Nazi past.

In 2019, the government announced plans to turn it into a police station, and initiated a EU-wide competition for architects to submit designs.

Millions of euros were spent refurbishing the old yellow building, which now looks very different from before.

Not everyone is happy with the decision to open a police station there, saying it sends the wrong si