VIENNA — The house where Adolf Hitler was born will be torn down and replaced with a new building that has no association with the Nazi dictator, Austria’s government announced Monday as it moved to eliminate the property’s pull as a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.
The plan still has to be formalized in legislation and voted on in the parliament. The Interior Ministry said demolition was recommended by a government-appointed commission.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said that “a thorough architectural remodeling is necessary to permanently prevent the recognition and the symbolism of the building.”
Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck said that means that except for its foundations, nothing will be left of the house in the western town of Braunau.
The government this year started formal legal procedures to dispossess the home’s owner after she had repeatedly refused to sell the building or to allow renovations that would reduce its symbolic effect as Hitler’s birthplace.