Plans to sell a certain, some might say controversial, building in the city of Braunau-am-Inn, north-west Austria, have set the city up in arms – figuratively speaking that is. And it’s not the £2 million (€2.2 million, $3.3 million) plus price tag that’s to blame either.
The property at Salzburger Vorstadt 15 (previously number 219) has a somewhat chequered history. Having served as a petrol station, public house, lending library, school, bank, technical institute, and for the last two decades as a home to Lebenshilfe (Life Help), a charitable organisation supporting those with learning difficulties and other disabilities, its real, and unfortunately rather dubious, claim to fame is that on the 20th of April 1889 Adolf Hitler was born there. Into exactly which room the spawn of the Devil entered the world remains unclear, but most sources point to one, without specifying which, on the first floor or another, quite specifically the third from the left, on the top floor.
Save for the initials of Hitler’s private secretary and Head of the Party Chancellery Martin Bormann remaining on the doors, the only reminder of the 2,000 square foot building’s Hitlerian past is a granite memorial stone to the victims of Nazism. Quarried from the former Mauthausen concentration camp site and laid on the footpath – the property’s owners having refused permission to attach a plaque to the wall for fear of neo-Nazi or anti-Nazi reprisals – it’s simply inscribed:
‘For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again Fascism. Millions of dead remind us.’
Concerns over deep pocketed ‘far-right’ extremists buying the edifice and converting it into some sort of fascist shrine, as it effectively was during the Third Reich era, are unfounded. Despite this, the cogs of officialdom are already turning in a direction favouring purchasing it from the public purse. Owing, though, to the reluctance [read: out and out refusal] on the part of local bureaucrats to convert Salzburger Vorstadt 15 into a museum (the option favoured by many historians) state funding may be short in coming. Perhaps public lavatories are the way forward instead.
Actually, that’s really not such a bad idea . . . .
