2023-09-13 14:38:27
An association has proposed this Wednesday that Hitler’s birthplace host an exhibition about the Austrians who protected Jews from Nazi persecution, even risking their lives, as an alternative to the Government’s controversial decision to install a police station in the building. .
The idea is that the exhibition ‘The Just. Courage is a matter of choice’, which has been presented in different museums for ten years, now has its permanent headquarters in the house in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn where Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 and where he briefly resided .
An exhibition instead of a police station
The ‘Austrian Friends of Yad Vashem’ association, organizer of the exhibition that it now offers free to the city, argues that this contributes to solving the controversy that has existed for decades about what to do with that building. Yad Vashem is the official institution created by Israel to remember the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.
The proposal mentions Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved hundreds of Jews from ending up in concentration camps, and is one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’, the title Yad Vashem grants to non-Jews who protected them from the Nazi persecution. More than 110 Austrians have been considered ‘Righteous Among Nations’, and the exhibition tells of their lives and actions.
Facade of the building, in a file image.
AFP
For decades there has been discussion about what to do with the house where Hitler was born to prevent it from being a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis or where he is honored.
The house, located in a region bordering German Bavaria, has been empty since 2011, when an organization for people with disabilities had to close its shop-workshop due to the then owner’s refusal to remove architectural barriers.
According to a documentary
Hitler wanted the building to be used for administrative purposes.
In 2016 it was expropriated by the State and for a long time it was discussed whether to use the building for charitable-social or administrative use, until in 2019 the Ministry of the Interior announced that it would be renovated to install a police station, a use that, according to a survey , supported by only 6% of Austrians.
The controversy has been reactivated with the recent release of a documentary that states that Hitler’s wish was that the building be given an administrative use.
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Hosting this exhibition “does not turn the house into a memorial,” argues ‘Austrian Friends of Yad Vashem’, since the building was not the scene of Nazi crimes. “Instead, it contrasts the founder of industrial mass murder with those people who successfully confronted it,” Georg Schuster, president of the association, states in the proposal, presented today at a press conference.
The Ministry of the Interior has reacted with the counter-offer that the exhibition be presented on a traveling basis at Police stations, although it does not mention whether this plan includes Hitler’s house, where it is also planned to give courses on human rights to the agents.
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