In Braunau am Inn …

Mein Jail?

A marker outside the building where Hitler was born in 1889. The stone reads, “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never more Fascism, miIlions of dead warn.”

A certain yellow, three-story 17th-century house in this Austrian town has been the site of a bank, a library, a school, a brewery, a restaurant, and, one day in 1889, Adolf Hitler’s birth. During World War II, it was also a shrine to the Nazi leader, and that’s precisely what government officials in Austria are hoping it will never be again, even in the abstract. Which is why they’re turning the problematic structure into a police station.

“The police are due to move in next year in what officials admit is an attempt to discourage people from visiting,” reported The Times of London. The building’s re-purposing, which will involve a $7.4 million renovation, “followed years of debate…. The aim is to make the house blend in with neighbouring buildings and ‘neutralise’ the entire area, said an interior ministry official.”