Four Germans Charged After Visiting Hitler’s Birthplace. The Visit to Braunau Will Come With Consequences.
Officials in the picturesque town of Braunau am Inn have taken great pains to play down its connection to its most famous former resident but that didn’t stop four German citizens from making a pilgrimage to Salzburger Vorstadt 15.
On an upper floor of the house at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 on the 20th of April, 1889, Adolf Hitler was born.
The four were observed at the once-elegant house, laying white roses in his memory, and stopping to photograph one another while making the Hitlergruß, or Nazi salute.
Braunau changed hands between Germany and Austria multiple times, depending on the winners and losers in various conflicts. It is known for its late Gothic parish church dedicated to St. Stephan, a landmark with its 285’ (87 m) high spire, one of the tallest in Austria and is an industrial city known for having the largest aluminum plant in the country.
As the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, it has a uniquely political and fraught burden.
In 2023, the Austrian federal government announced a €20 million ($21.3 million) to convert the dilapidated 8,600-suqare-foot (800-square-meter) building into a police station that would provide human rights training to police officers, hoping that the heavy police presence would keep away wannabe National Socialists.
The decision on the building’s future was greeted with a decidedly mixed public reaction.
In a recent survey, a majority of Austrians said they were against turning the building into a police station, regardless of what it would be used for. Instead, 53% said it should be turned into an center dedicated to dealing with topics relating to National Socialism, anti-fascism, tolerance, and peace, while just over 20% said it should be torn down. Only 6% favored its use by authorities for a police station.
Hitler only lived in the house for several months and was born on the top floor his parents rented there. However, during the NSDAP period, it became a pilgrimage site and brought a lot of tourism to the town. After the war, it was boarded up.
But back to the visitors from across the border in Bavaria.
Patrol officers took notice of the group and brought them to an actual police station for questioning. One of the women said she had not meant the Hitlergruß seriously, but a spokesman for the police department in Braunau said that they found a chat with the others on her mobile phone in which they shared NSDAP-themed messages and pictures.
The four – who Austrian police said ranged in age from 24 to 31 – were charged with violating the NS-Verbotsgesetz. Two of the four were sisters, accompanied by their partners, and police said they made the trip to Braunau specifically to place the white roses at the late dictator’s former place of residence.
The NS-Verbotsgesetz is an Austrian constitutional law that originally was voted into law on May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day. It banned the National Socialist party and its subsidiaries and required former party members to register with local authorities. Individuals were also subject to criminal sanctions and banned from employment in positions of power.
The law has since been used to combat neo-Nazism with a focus on Holocaust denial and the deliberate belittlement of any NSDAP atrocities.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
