Hitler’s birthplace begins new life as a police station

The building where Adolf Hitler was born, near the Austrian border with Germany, officially began a new life as a police station on Wednesday, a conversion Austria’s government hopes will prevent it serving as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

There has been some opposition, including from the Mauthausen Committee, Austria’s main Holocaust survivors’ group, which has argued both that a police station is inappropriate and that more should be done to draw attention to Hitler’s crimes.“The aim was to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a tour of the building.