Austria formally inaugurated a police station on Wednesday inside the building where Adolf Hitler was born, concluding a decades-long effort to strip the site of its symbolic pull for neo-Nazis. The 17th-century house in Braunau am Inn, near the German border, has been rendered almost unrecognisable after a €20 million renovation that replaced its yellow façade with a sober white exterior and added a police emblem above the entrance. A memorial stone from the Mauthausen concentration camp, inscribed “Never again fascism. Millions of dead remind us,” remains on the pavement. The station will house around 50 officers and a training centre, with district police commander Stefan Haslberger warning that anyone loitering suspiciously will be identified and checked.

Austrian officials describe the project as a deliberate act of historical responsibility. Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said the building would now become “a place of democracy, the rule of law, security, freedom and human dignity,” while Mayor Johannes Waidbacher stated that the town was “confronting its history” and hoped the move would bring “a little serenity” to residents. A government-appointed expert commission had rejected demolition as a denial of the past and advised against a memorial museum that might attract far-right visitors. Instead, it recommended an administrative use to “neutralise” the location. Debris from the construction was shredded and disposed of at an undisclosed site to prevent it from becoming Nazi memorabilia.

Survivor organisations and local historians, however, question whether a police station can truly sever the building’s association with Hitler. The Mauthausen Committee, Austria’s main Holocaust survivors’ group, argues that the conversion will not reduce the number of neo-Nazi pilgrims and that a law-enforcement presence is ill-suited given the police’s role in Nazi crimes. “Every year at the Mauthausen memorial there’s a ceremony to say: never again. And in Braunau they’re saying: let’s forget as soon as possible,” committee representative Robert Eiter told Reuters. Some residents and civic initiatives had proposed a centre for peace education or a permanent exhibition on the “Righteous Among the Nations,” but the interior ministry rejected those alternatives. Florian Kotanko of the Braunau Contemporary History Association noted that the town will always be linked to Hitler’s birth, and that the debate is far from over.

The inauguration unfolds against a backdrop of rising far-right sentiment in Austria, where the Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded by former Nazis, leads opinion polls with around 38 percent. For decades, Austria presented itself as the first victim of National Socialism, only later acknowledging its citizens’ complicity in the Holocaust, in which 65,000 Austrian Jews were murdered. The Braunau project mirrors earlier efforts to repurpose Nazi-linked sites, such as the conversion of Hitler’s Munich apartment into a police station. The new station is now operational, but the broader question of how Austria contends with its past remains unsettled, with historians and civic groups continuing to call for a more explicit confrontation with the site’s history.