Hitler’s house symbol of Austria’s problems in confronting its Nazi past

The history of the birth house of hitler as a symbol that Austria has not confronted its Nazi past is the focus of a documentary in which the Austrian filmmaker Günter Schwaiger denounces that the final use that will be given to the building after years of debate, a police station, fulfills the dictator’s wish.

With “Who’s afraid of Hitler’s people?”the director, who has lived in Spain for years, argues that Austrian politicians and society as a whole have not yet assumed their role as perpetrators, collaborators and sympathizers of the Nazi regime. “This house is for me a symbol of our history of perpetrators”says the filmmaker.

“In the 1980s and 1990s Austria began to acknowledge its involvement in crimes nazis, but that was only done in relation to the victims. (…) What has not been done up to now is to confront our past as executioners, as sympathizers, and how that affects us in the present”the filmmaker told EFE in Vienna.

Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn on April 20, 1889 in a house where he lived for a short time. In fact, the family left the town when the future dictator was three years old.

From 1972 until the end of 2016, when it was expropriated, the State rented it to prevent it from becoming a place that extolled Hitler and attracted neo-Nazis.

Until 2011 it housed a shop-workshop for an organization for the disabled who had to leave the place because the owner refused to adapt the building to their needs.

The house has been empty since that year, and for a long time it was discussed whether to use the building for charitable-social or administrative use.

In 2019, the Ministry of the Interior announced that it would host a police station, a decision that was widely contested in Austria and by the residents of Braunau, and that the documentary denounces that it does nothing more than fulfill what Hitler wanted for the building.

During filming, the director located an article published in a local newspaper in May 1939 mentioning that Hitler had put the house at the disposal of the local Nazi authorities in Braunau and that he wanted it to be given administrative use. .

Both the director of the film and the historian Florian Kotanko, an expert in the history of the house, maintain that turning the building into a police station is fulfilling that wish.

“Unfortunately, I have to say, that is exactly what Adolf Hitler wanted.”indicated Schwaiger to questions from EFE during the presentation to the media of his documentary.

For this reason, he trusts that the Government will recognize the error and rectify it so that “future generations cannot reproach anything”.

“It is the key to not repeat history if we are finally aware that those responsible for conflicts must also resolve them and not decide to pass them on to the next generation,” points.

That the use of the house as a police station amounts to fulfilling Hitler’s wishes has been described as “absurd” by Oliver Rathkolb, a historian who was on the commission that debated what to do with it.

In statements to the Austrian media, Rathkolb maintains, first, that this article is not a historical document nor can it be ensured that it expressed Hitler’s desire, and also that the local Nazi administration of 1939 cannot be identified with a current dependency of the Ministry of the Interior. .

Kontanko, who, like Schwaiger, clarifies that he does not equate the Nazi authorities of the time with the current police, argues that in 1939 no one would have dared to put into Hitler’s mouth a wish that did not correspond to reality.

The film began shooting in 2017 under a more optimistic perspective: the possibility of the house being used again by an NGO for disabled people.

“I wanted to show with the film that the country is finally moving forward and that there is a more open approach to the review (of the Nazi past),” recalled the filmmaker at a press conference.

The announcement of the use by the Police modified the axis of the film since this decision means, for Schwaiger, continuing with the policy that has been applied for almost 80 years, and that he describes as “Keep the population protected from their own history”.

The transformation of the building into a police station, where human rights courses for officers are planned, should have been completed last year, but work has not yet started.

The film, which is being presented today at a festival in the town of Freistadt, will be screened on the 29th in front of Hitler’s house, and will hit Austrian cinemas on September 1.

Source: EFE