Austria Turning Hitler's Home Into Holocaust Museum

Austrian building will be called a 'house of responsibility'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 1, 2014 1:42 PM CDT
Hitler's Home to Become 'House of Responsibility'
Exterior view of Adolf Hitler's birth house in Braunau am Inn, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012.    (AP Photo / Kerstin Joensson)

Plans are in the works to open a Holocaust museum in what may seem a surprising location: Hitler's boyhood home in Austria. Local officials in Braunau am Inn, near the German border, have decided to turn it into the House of Responsibility, a center designed to educate the public about Hitler's crimes against humanity, reports the Local. The Austrian Ministry of the Interior will have to approve the plan before it's a go. For years after the war, the building was a school, a bank, a library, and a workshop for the mentally disabled.

Since 1972, it's been owned by a retiree who rented it out to the Interior Ministry (officials made sure to keep Hitler-worshiping tenants out of the building). Some wanted to put an anti-Nazi memorial there, but it's been empty for two years while the owner leases it to the government for about $5,200 a month. Now that's all slated to change: "It is about time we got rid of this eyesore and this shame," a resident tells the Daily Mail. "Making it into a place of memory for the victims of Nazism is a good idea." (In addition to his crimes against humanity, Hitler was also reportedly a tax cheat.)

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