Austria’s government agreed to expropriate the house in which Adolf Hitler was born to prevent neo-Nazis from using it as a pilgrimage site.
Parliament is expected to decide what to do with the building later this year, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman. The ministry has been renting the house in the town of Braunau am Inn, a three-hour drive west of Vienna, since 1972.
The fact that Hitler is so closely associated with the site “makes it unlike any other place in right-extremist culture,” a government-appointed commission wrote this year. The former German chancellor and leader of the Nazi Party was born there in 1889.
Negotiations to buy the house from the owner broke down earlier this year, forcing the government to exercise its right of eminent domain, according to legislation that was put before parliament. While Austrian heritage-preservation rules prevent the state from razing the 17th century structure, its constitution also outlaws any form of Nazi expression.
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“Since it can’t be torn down, we’ll probably find some application with educational value, like a museum,” Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner told journalists in Vienna after the government’s weekly meeting.
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