Austria has formally opened a new police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born, in the small town of Braunau am Inn on the country's border with Germany. The opening, which took place on Wednesday, marks the end of a years-long debate over what to do with the unassuming three-storey building where the Nazi dictator entered the world on 20 April 1889. After a 20 million euro refurbishment — completed three years behind schedule — the 17th-century structure is almost unrecognisable, its roughcast yellow walls whitewashed over by the Austrian architecture firm Marte. A police sign now hangs above the entrance.

The building had been in private hands for decades, owned by the same family since 1912, before Austria passed a special law in 2016 to expropriate it, compensating the last owner, Gerlinde Pommer, with around 810,000 euros following a Supreme Court ruling. The Interior Ministry has managed the property since then. Before the state stepped in, the site had become a quiet magnet for neo-Nazi visitors, some of whom posed for photographs with outstretched arms or left behind banned symbols. Local shopkeepers reportedly capitalised on the notoriety, selling mugs, wine bottles and beer steins bearing Hitler's image. A memorial stone outside the building — sourced from the granite quarry of the former Mauthausen concentration camp — bears the inscription "For Peace, Freedom and Democracy. Never Again Fascism. Millions of Dead Warn." It has been defaced with paint on multiple occasions.

Historians on an expert commission advised against both demolishing the building and converting it into a museum or historical monument, arguing that either option risked either erasing history or amplifying the site's dark allure. Instead, they recommended a civic or administrative use. An initial proposal to house a police station gave one commission member, historian Oliver Rathkolb, pause — he noted that Austrian police had quickly fallen into line when Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938 — but he later concluded that a modern police presence could serve as a statement of democratic values. The Austrian government has said the station will "clearly show" that no commemoration of Nazism is acceptable and will "neutralise" the site.

Not everyone is convinced. Robert Eiter, a spokesman for the Mauthausen Committee Austria, an association linked to survivors of the Nazi concentration camp, dismissed the logic as "absurd," arguing that humanity would never forget where Hitler was born and that the renovation would not deter a single neo-Nazi from making the journey to Braunau. The debate unfolds against a broader reckoning with Austria's wartime past: after Hitler's Germany annexed Austria in 1938, 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed and another 130,000 forced into exile — a history that Austria has at times been criticised for insufficiently confronting. Local police officers and the district command will now be stationed permanently in the building, marking a deliberate, if contested, attempt to reclaim a site long freighted with troubling symbolism.