Police station opens at Hitler's birthplace in bid to rid site of Nazi link

Image source, Bethany Bell/BBC Image caption, Police were stationed outside the refurbished building as it opened on Wednesday

Austria has opened a police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born in the town of Braunau am Inn.

It follows years of controversy about what to do with the 17th-Century former inn, where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889.

The building has now been substantially refurbished and its facade changed, but it has been a huge headache for Austrian authorities, who want to prevent it from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage.

Hitler only lived in Salzburger Vorstadt 15 for a few weeks before his family moved to another address in Braunau. They left the town for good when he was three years old.

Hitler returned briefly to Braunau in 1938, on his way to Vienna, after he annexed Austria to Nazi Germany.

The opening ceremony for the police station, featuring police musicians playing a tuba and other brass instruments, was attended by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner and other local dignitaries.

Austria was taking "responsibility" for the "terrible legacy" of the past, said Karner. While deciding what to do with the building had not been easy, Karner believed the police station marked "a new chapter" for it.

"This house will now become a place of democracy, rule of law, security, freedom and human dignity," he said.

A Catholic police chaplain then blessed two crosses which will hang in the new police station.

For decades, the interior ministry had rented the building from its former owner, a local woman called Gerlinde Pommer. It paid her a generous rent, in an attempt to prevent the house being used as a site for extreme right-wing tourism.

Image source, Getty Images/ EPA Image caption, The old yellow-plastered house has since been substantially refurbished so the facade looks very different

The building was used for many years by a local charity as a day centre and workshop for people with special needs. But it was forced to move out in 2011, when Pommer blocked renovations.

She also repeatedly refused to sell the property to the government.

The house remained empty for several years, while the authorities and Pommer argued over terms.